Dangling lamp spotted months into repair programme

Thursday, 12 October 2023

Another Wellington street lamp has been left dangling above a busy road on a calm night, showing the danger remains months into a $6m repair process.

The lamp above Main Rd Tawa was spotted on Thursday morning by Phil Lyth, who confirmed that it appeared to be a problem with the same connecting spigot that had led to other failures.

“It was hanging by about a metre of wire,” he said. Someone had put road cones out to stop a car parking underneath but the footpath – near but not directly beneath the dangling lamp – remained open.

The Wellington City Council confirmed it was first notified of the issue about 10am on Thursday. It appeared to be fixed by 11.15am.

The Post in February revealed a problem in 17,000 relatively-new LED street lamps around Wellington which meant a connecting spigot failed and they could dangle and crash to the ground. Each lamp weighs about 11kg — more than a two dozen slab of beer cans.

The council originally claimed just a handful of the lamps had the fault, making them prone to drooping then dropping.

It then revised this to about 1000 before a mea culpa in April that every single one of Wellington's 17,000 LED lamps was prone to falling and the council was liable for the cost because its staff were involved in the faulty design in the spigot, which allowed the lamps to be adjusted to stop glare into homes.

A review in May showed 16 street lamps crashed to the ground around Wellington between 2019 and 2023, including one that fell on to an empty parked car and three that fell onto footpaths.

However, the message did not make it to senior council management until a Post article in February.

“We found that the process to identify, assess, monitor and escalate faults has been siloed and ineffective,” the report said.

Staff interviewed for the review confirmed escalation of risks was by word of mouth and made only to immediate managers. This meant a message had to pass through three separate managers to get to the chief infrastructure office.

The council, with help of Waka Kotahi funding, set about removing the fault-prone spigots, focusing first on the highest-risk lamps in the windiest spots.

Council infrastructure and transport manager Brad Singh said the removal project was ahead of schedule with almost half of the faulty spigots around the city now removed. It remained within its $6m budget.

All but one of the 3368 higher-risk adaptors — heavier lamps in high wind areas — had now been removed. The remaining one was being done in the next few weeks. All higher-risk adaptors were scheduled to be removed by December.

Almost half of the remaining adaptors had also been removed and the project was ahead of its targeted completion date of December, 2024, Singh said.

MetService meteorologist Paul Ngamanu said it was not a gusty night. Nearby Porirua had 20kph winds while Mt Kaukau, often Wellington’s windiest spot, reached 50kph.