Damaged or half-broken street lamps dot the roads of Calcutta almost two weeks after Cyclone Amphan had raged across the city.

People out on roads fear these street lamps could crash any moment and cause an accident.

The chances of someone getting injured are high as more vehicles and people have been out on the roads from Monday after the government eased lockdown restrictions, many have said.

A street lamp on BB Chatterjee Road near Rathtala has been hanging at an angle of almost 45 degrees over the road since the cyclone struck on May 20, a resident of Kasba said.

Innumerable cables are tied to the lamp post. If it collapses, all of them are likely to snap and fall on the road and no one knows which ones are live conduits, the resident said.

She said she took BB Chatterjee Road every day to go to office and that she had seen the metal at the pole’s base had rusted and corroded.

“Almost half of the metal has cracked… it can collapse any moment. It is better if the authorities remove the pole at the earliest.”

A street lamp on SP Mukherjee Road near Mudiali is hanging the same way. At least a dozen cables are tied to it on either side.

The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) is the custodian of all street lamps in the city. More than 5,000 lamp posts had fallen in the cyclone, a civic official said.

The civic body is trying to remove all damaged lamp posts, the official said. “Our teams are working across the city. We are trying to remove them at the earliest.”

Chopped trees lying by the roadside pose a challenge to vehicles and pedestrians, according to many. At a few places, tree branches have blocked half the width of the road.

At the crossing of Gariahat Road and Mandeville Gardens, a chopped tree has been lying on the northern flank of Mandeville Gardens, towards the boundary of the Industrial Training Institute. The road is a two-way one but vehicles at present cannot move in opposite directions.

Vehicles have to wait on one side till the queue on the other gets cleared. “The queue of vehicles headed towards Ballygunge goes past the crossing of Gariahat Road and Mandeville Gardens,” the Kasba resident said.

Civic workers are clearing chopped-off branches lying by the roadside, a CMC official said. Many are still lying though, because of the “enormity of the devastation caused by the cyclone”, the official said.

Firhad Hakim, the chairman of the CMC’s board of administrators, had said more than 5,000 trees in the city had been felled by the cyclone. He later revised the count to 15,000.