City light pole falls, hits car with woman inside

Posted by: Abigail Wood

awood@klkntv.com

Imagine you’re waiting at a red light and a street pole suddenly comes crashing down on your car–that happened to a local woman Saturday afternoon on N 48th near Huntington.

"We drove up 48th street and saw a lamppost had fallen over," said Michael Avig, a Lincoln man.

Michael ran over to the car and found the woman uninjured, but shaken up. He says his concern is that other street fixtures may be in danger of toppling.

He took pictures of the scene and the post. In the photos we posted here, you can see the post is heavily rusted, but Lincoln Electric System says they can’t confirm that that was the cause. They say light poles fall over for a number of reasons, such as rust or a loose bolt aggravated by the wind.

"We do work to mitigate these issues before they happen," said Jeff Hlabac with LES. "It’s very rare that a pole does come down but it does happen on occasion. So we’re out there inspecting those poles and do our best to keep this from happening again."

LES does have an inspection program where they check wood poles every 10 years and metal poles like this every 6-7 years. There are 30,000 light poles in the city and they get to around 17,000 of those a year. They are still looking into the incident and say they won’t know how the pole slipped through inspection until they know why it fell.