A traffic signal post in front of the Lake Mall on Rashbehari Avenue broke and was hanging over the road on Monday morning for about an hour after the current collector rod of a tram hit the post.

The bogies of the tram had gone past the signal post when the current collector was
dislodged from the overhead electric cables supplying power to the tram, said an officer of Kolkata Police’s traffic department.

A current collector is a device at the back of a tram that goes up from the rear bogey and stays attached to the overhead cables. It draws electricity from the overhead
cables.

The driver failed to notice that the current collector had loosened from the overhead wires and was dangling.

“The current collector was dangling but the tram was moving ahead because of inertia. It hit the signal post, which then broke because of the impact. The signal post had also rusted, which is why it broke,” said the police officer.

The incident happened around 10.30am and the broken signal post was removed from there around an hour later, said the officer.

The police had first thought about temporarily restricting traffic along the stretch of Rashbehari Avenue near the mall.

However, Monday being a holiday the number of vehicles on the road was fewer and traffic restriction on the stretch was not required.

All vehicles were asked to take the left lane on the Rashbehari Avenue-SP Mukherjee Road crossing-bound flank since the broken post was hanging over the right lane of the flank.

The police did not lodge any complaint against the tram’s driver, said the traffic police officer.

“The signal post will be replaced soon. This was the secondary signal post. The primary signal post is still there and working,” said the officer.

Metro had earlier written about the crumbling condition of poles along Calcutta’s roads.

A thick bunch of cables are tied around most of the poles and the weight of the wires has tilted the poles in many places.

A bunch of cables was also tied around the traffic signal post in Lake Market that broke on Monday.

The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), the custodian of the electric poles along the city’s roads, recently decided not to allow any advertisements on the poles.

A KMC official said the civic body would not give any fresh permission to install advertisements on electric poles as these made the structures unsafe.

The traffic signal post that broke on Monday had a rectangular advertisement board attached to it.

A KMC official said the civic body is not the custodian of traffic signal posts and all advertisements stuck to traffic signal posts were installed with permission from the police only.

A traffic police officer said there was no instruction yet from Kolkata Police’s top brass to remove advertisements from the signal posts.