Raining street lamps in Wellington: When will officials learn?

OPINION:

First, it was Wellington’s fluoride failure, now it’s raining street lamps. Ratepayers continue to be let down by officials who fail to identify serious risks within the city’s infrastructure network and appropriately escalate these to their superiors.

It’s been revealed 17,000 street lamps need to be fixed after a plan by Wellington City Council to stop light from shining into people’s homes went spectacularly wrong.

The council developed an aluminium-alloy adaptor allowing a greater degree of tilt to control any glare when new, brighter LED lights were installed in 2017.

But it turns out nobody fully factored in Wellington’s notorious windy weather, and the adaptors have started to prematurely fail. This has caused the lights to droop or, in some cases, completely fall off.

So far, 17 lights, the heaviest weighing 11.2kg, have come crashing to the ground, risking serious injury or death.

What’s worse than this extraordinary series of events is that council officials knew there was a problem with the lights as early as 2018, thanks to reports from the general public.

At the time, the council brought this to the attention of the manufacturer, who undertook an investigation, assessed it wasn’t a widespread issue and replaced the adaptors for free as a gesture of goodwill.

A red flag was again raised in October 2020 by maintenance contractors, but it was still not thought to be widespread due to what the council says was “the isolated instances of failure”.

Wellington City Council chief infrastructure officer Siobhan Procter confirmed the first she heard of the problem was in February this year after the story hit the headlines.

She told the Herald neither her predecessor nor other members of the council’s senior leadership team were aware of the issue earlier.

Council transport and infrastructure manager Brad Singh and chief infrastructure officer Siobhan Proctor speak to media about the street lamps. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It’s baffling why officials further down the chain did not escalate this problem to a more senior level, primarily because the associated risk was someone being killed.

Proctor said it appeared operational staff had dealt with the situation as “one-off instances”.

Staff were provided with some assurance from a consulting engineer that the lamps didn’t pose a significant safety risk to the public, Proctor said. This was when the manufacturer undertook testing after the problem was first raised with the council.

“That may have played a part in the way that has been treated at an operational level, so that’s a gap in our processes that we’ve identified through an internal audit that we commissioned from the beginning of February,” Proctor said.

The gap in the way the council treated and escalated operational risks has now been addressed, she said.

The situation is not nearly as bad as Wellington’s fluoride failure - when water in the region wasn’t fluoridated properly for six years.

However, there are some disturbingly similar threads.

Wellington Water staff also didn’t think to tell senior leadership that fluoridation facilities at two water treatment plants had become so unreliable they decided to turn them off.

Wellington City Council transport and infrastructure manager Brad Singh with one of the problematic street lamp adaptors. Photo / Mark Mitchell

In this case, no one appeared to have thought about the risk associated with this decision given fluoridation can be such a controversial issue and has been lauded as the most effective public health measure for the prevention of dental decay.

The fluoride failure is also a reminder that while officials might be at fault, the general public tend to look to elected members for leadership during such times.

The press conference that Proctor fronted on the street lamps yesterday was held in Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau’s office. Whanau and councillors had been given their own briefing an hour beforehand.

But the mayor was not present at the press conference. Her office said she had a briefing to attend.

Whanau was quoted in a press release as saying the situation presented “a clear and unacceptable safety risk” and encouraged anyone who saw a drooping light to notify the council straight away.

That’s all well and good, but she should have been at the press conference too.

It’s not Procter’s name the general public will know or even remember, it’s Whanau’s. The mayor is the one Wellingtonians have elected to represent them and maintain a watchful healthy tension with council officials.