Street lights across several areas in Salt Lake have tilted dangerously towards the roads of the township that put thousands of motorists as well as pedestrians at risk every day.
Most of these lamp-posts have clumps of wires wrapped around them and most of these wires hang low over the streets.
On Monday, The Telegraph drove around Sector I, II and III of the township and found several posts of LED street lights as well as trident lamps leaning over roads or jutting out into the carriageway.
An officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate’s traffic wing said that accidents could take place in case any of these lamp-posts fell on the path of oncoming vehicles or even on the vehicle. These lamp-posts could also cause serious injuries to pedestrians, he added.
“All the street light posts are made out of metal. In case they fall onto the path of a vehicle the driver will get almost no time to brake and an accident is near inevitable,” the officer said.
An engineer of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation’s lighting department said that cracks appear in a street pole because of the heavy cables hanging from the top.
“It is not unusual. The bunch of cables has a lot of weight. It is possible for a pole to break because of the weight of the cables,” said the engineer.
KMC officials had blamed the weight of cables as one of the reasons why huge number of electric poles that fell during Cyclone Amphan.
An official of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation’s street lighting department said that each lamp-post weighs around 70-85kg on average, minus the weight of the lighting systems.
A couple of street lights in CG Block near the Udayachal Tourist Lodge in Salt Lake are leaning dangerously over the Second Avenue — an artery that leads to the Karunamoyee crossing. Both of them had huge clusters of wires wrapped around them at the tops as well as at their bases.
In FD Block, lamp-posts that have tangles of wires as well as banners hung from them had tilted over to one side.
On Canal Side Road beside the Eastern Drainage Canal that connects Salt Lake with EM Bypass at the Chingrighata intersection, at least seven lamp-posts had leaned over.
Apart from having wires wrapped around them, several of these lamp-posts had rust on their bases and their bodies of the poles.
To add to the worries of the motorists as well as other road users, most of the street lights along this road have stopped working.
Pritesh Agarwal, a resident of IB Block, said that driving down Canal Side Road road as well as other streets of Salt Lake after dark have become a challenge because many poles jut out into the main carriageways and they are difficult to spot as most roads plunge into darkness after dusk.
“It is a very dangerous situation across the township. I have marked out roads where street lights are almost tipping over and avoid driving through them at any time, particularly at night,” said Agarwal, who runs a share trading company based out of Sector V.
This newspaper got in touch with Krishna Chakraborty, the mayor of the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation, and told her about the condition of the street lights and she assured to initiate action.
“We will send out our engineers immediately to map out the places and repair the poles on a war footing,” Chakraborty said. Roads across Salt Lake — a planned township — have street lights at every 25-30 feet intervals.