A woman who witnessed a streetlamp toppling onto the road at Abinojii Mikanah near St. Anne’s Road on Labour Day says she’s convinced that if there had been a green light when it fell, the results could have been tragic.
Rebecca Skinner told Global Winnipeg she was in the passenger seat of a vehicle stopped at the intersection when the pole suddenly fell onto the westbound lane.
“I look up in the distance, and I can see this pole fall over — just fall over,” Skinner said.
“I told my husband, ‘We’re going to have some traffic problems because there’s a pole that’s gone across the road.’… The cars in front of us were stopped, and we couldn’t do anything.”
Skinner said the pole appeared to have broken off at the bottom, and she initially wondered if it was being removed by construction workers — but no one was there. With traffic at a standstill, she decided to inspect the pole.
“It was really surreal,” she said. “I had gone up to the base of it because I’m curious… and I could see that it had rusted right through, and it’s paper thin at the base. There was a little bit of water inside the centre, where the concrete is, and it hadn’t rained that day.”
Skinner, a retired nurse, said she’s “very concerned” about the rest of that stretch of Abinojii Mikanah, which has similar street lamps all along the road.
“I think this is very scary. We have a lot of traffic and somebody needs to come out and just see why this happened, and check the other ones.”
Peter Chura, a media relations officer with Manitoba Hydro — which owns the infrastructure — said crews are on it.
“We’re obviously very concerned that this happened,” he said. “We’re taking a very close look at it to see what the cause of that failure might have been.”
He acknowledged rust could be a factor.
“It’s a high salt, high corrosion, major thoroughfare. So that may be the answer,” he said.
Chura said the lamps along Abinojii Mikanah were last inspected in 2020, and are supposed to be inspected every four years. He said crews are looking at them again right now, and will be finished by the end of the week.
He said incidents like this don’t happen often, but when they do, the Crown corporation relies on the public to let them know.