(Spirit Lake)– 30 foot street light poles along Highways 9 & 71 and Sunner Avenue through Spirit Lake are about to be replaced. The City Council Tuesday evening voted to hire an engineering firm that will put together specifications for new poles. Mayor Bruce Keenan told the council the new poles will be made from an alloy that’s more capable of resisting corrosion from road salt…
“So now we’re looking at a stainless steel pole arrangement rather than a iron pole that regardless how many times you tip it it has an opportunity to fail. And so we tended to hope for a longer life for those poles and we didn’t get it. That’s about the best I can offer up to you.”
Keenan said the city did consider taking legal action against the manufacturer of the original poles but opted not to pursue that…
“We did hire an engineering firm to reverse engineer those poles to determine if there was a, how do I want to say this, if there was a problem that we could litigate to our satisfaction regarding the quality of the poles and it was determined for while there might have been a case for that and at the end of the day that we did not have a case, that those poles just deteriorated out of natural causes and was nothing to do with the specifications and or the materials that mother nature won and we lost.”
A time frame as to when the new poles might be going up wasn’t mentioned.
All of the poles from the Highway 71 intersection west to Indian Hills were removed several years ago out of concern they could fall.
