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This is quite an interesting article from back in 2008, a dispute between ESB (the Power Company) and an Irish County Council resulted in a utility pole / public lighting pole being left in place in the middle of a road entering a housing development ....

Quite an interesting article and it was only resolved after both agencies were publicly humiliated.

http://www.aanewsletter.ie/edition/1/article5.asp

[Linked Image from aanewsletter.ie]

ESB provides public lighting services on behalf of quite a few local authorities here. It seems the dispute arose when neither the ESB nor the Local Council could decide who was going to pay to move the pole!
How many cars ran into it?
Originally Posted by noderaser
How many cars ran into it?

One guy died on a motorcycle. I would hope it means a big lawsuit and even larger settlement but it is Great Britain.
I can't believe that this has come to this.
Look, all that needs to happen is, they dig the pole up, get a Hiab truck with line spreaders on it to carry the (live) lines.
Move the pole back a few metres, so that it is on the foot-path nearest and re-tie the wires to the insulators.

What is so hard about that?

IMO, that is taking the plans from the design engineer, far too seriously.

Then again, you have to ask the question, which was there first?, the pole or the road?

It wouldn't be the first time a roading contractor mucked up a roading/kerbing contract. bash
I have seen this before in Manitoba when the utility got behind in the constuction season due to windstorm repairs having priority for the pole crews.

Once they catch up on repairs they go back and resume jobs like this. Sometimes it could be up to a few weeks later depending on the storm damage.

The paving contractor will form around the pole and keep paving to keep their project on schedule and come back and patch the hole when the pole gets moved.
Originally Posted by mikesh
Originally Posted by noderaser
How many cars ran into it?

One guy died on a motorcycle. I would hope it means a big lawsuit and even larger settlement but it is Great Britain.


Nobody died, the article was just speaking hypothetically "If I hadn’t seen it I would not have believed it. I had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April 1st. It is an absolute disgrace. I hope that the ESB and Laois Co. Council do not find themselves having to explain their squabbles to the family of a dead motorcyclist killed by their combined neglect."

It's not Great Britain, it's in the Republic of Ireland, which is almost as litigious as California. (Confusing the two, is a little like when we talk about the US State of Ontario grin )

I'm surprised there wasn't a queue of people lining up to drive their cars into it just for the 'compo'.

It vanished rather quickly when it appeared in the media smile.. funny how that happens!
Company and Government departmental squabbles tend to go away when the press start pointing out stupid examples like this one.
A house blew up not far from me a few years ago due to a gas leak. The next week the city did some work at another house and nicked a gas line. The gas company said that they'd get to it "in the next week or two". They were there the next day after the homeowner called the newspaper and they wrote a story about the irresponsible gas company who didn't want to take any preventative action.
Which came first? The pole or the road?
As the original post says "pole being left in place" I guess the pole was there first and should have been moved before the road was built.
Then who has sufficient authority to tell the utility that existing poles have to be moved because a road is coming through. They are the ones that should have ordered the pole movement ahead of time. Apparently that wasn't the county council. If they didn't have that authority, they should have not proceeded until they could get whoever did to make it happen. Now they have a hole in the road which will make potholes for years.
Noticing one more pothole amongst the existing haystack is the least of our problems! Councils are renouned for mis-prioritising their responsibilities, given the amount of taxes they splash about on trivialities. If it had been a new 4" thick Axminster carpet for the CEO's office, it would have been moved pronto! mad
a classic example of the lemming society we all live in where the common attitude is: "nobody told me to use my own initiative...!"
I just left the "west coast," where the practice seems to be to place the poles so far off to the side that the 'puddle' of light falls nowhere near the intersection. Might make for nice map reading on the verge, though!
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