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Wellington’s drooping 15kg street lamps have struck again – though fortunately not a person nor the ground.
Two dangling street lamps have been photographed in the northern Wellington suburb of Johnsonville on Tuesday above a busy road and onramp to the State Highway 1 motorway.
Earlier in February it was revealed that the some of the Wellington City Council’s new LED street lamps, with an estimated 15kg weight, had a fault which resulted in the metal failing, then the lamp drooping and sometimes falling.
“They are great heavy things,” said former city councillor Chris Calvi-Freeman who came across a lamp on Evans Bay. “They will just kill you.”
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The council said it had been told about the drooping street lights in Moorefield Road and a team was going to the site.
Council transport and infrastructure manager Brad Singh said the fittings’ failures presented an unacceptable danger to the public, and council staff were trying to identify the lamps which needed to be fixed.
MONIQUE FORD/Stuff
One of the 15kg street lamps that earlier fell in Evans Bay in Wellington.
Council had identified that the faulty part was the spigot which formed part of the brackets attaching the lamps to the street lamp poles. They dated from 2017 when the council installed 17,000 new LED street lamps around the city.
The spigots were failing prematurely causing the lamp head to come loose and hang, Singh said.
But the root cause of failure was still being investigated by specialist engineers, and Singh said the council expected the results by the end of this week.
Council contractors were checking spigots every time they went up a pole, regardless of the reason they were doing so. If a spigot was one from the faulty batch, it was replaced immediately.
MONIQUE FORD/Stuff
Former Wellington City councillor Chris Calvi-Freeman with one of the street lamps that broke free of its pole and crashed to the ground at Evans Bay.
City Council spokesman Richard MacLean previously confirmed that a problem discovered in recent months that meant a “very small bad batch” of street lamps – installed when the city changed to about 17,000 more-efficient LED lamps – were suffering metal fatigue and failing, then crashing to the ground.
It was later clarified that the “very small batch” was actually about 1000 of the 17,000 LED lamps around Wellington.
“They are certainly heavy. You wouldn’t want them landing on your head,” MacLean previously said.
“It is certainly something that would cause serious injury or death.”
Council chief infrastructure officer Siobhan Procter earlier said the council had launched an internal review “to fully establish the facts and to make sure it doesn’t happen again”.
The council’s top priority was on finding faulty lamps and making them safe.
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