Watch out for falling street lights, Wellington tells residents

New Zealand’s capital is being plagued by potentially deadly street lights that have begun dropping without warning and smashing on the footpath below.

Wellington city council spokesperson Richard McLean said the council was aware of the problem. The lamp heads weighed up to 15kg (33lb), he said – about equivalent to a bulk sack of rice, full-grown border collie or a microwave oven. They were falling from heights of 4-6m.

If one fell on you, McLean said, “I think it’d be safe to say that you would either be seriously injured or killed”.

Reports of Wellington street lamps depositing their heads emerged on Friday morning when an ex-councillor discovered one smashed on the ground near his house and noted that six more on the street were missing their lamps. The metal attaching them to their posts appeared to have shorn away.

The council was investigating the problem, McLean said, and believed there had been a “bad batch” of lamps with degraded fixings.

“It appears to be a problem with metal fatigue or something, something going on with the fixings … that hold the light to the lamp[post],” he said. “We’ve only had probably a handful of actual incidents”.

The council believed at this stage that only about 100 of the city’s 17,000 lamp-posts were likely affected, but it did not know which ones, McLean said, and had not launched a city-wide assessment of all the lamp-posts.

“We’re aware of probably one or two or three that have actually hit the ground. But that doesn’t mean to say we’re not taking the whole thing seriously.”

As a precautionary measure, Maclean urged pedestrians to look out for any street lamps that appeared to be “drooping”, saying the lamps typically wilted before they dropped.

“If you see any sort of street lamps that are kind of starting to droop at a weird angle, give the council a call.”