Wellington City Council is urgently fixing 3200 street lamps after a bad batch resulted in some lights crashing to the ground, with the potential to cause serious injury or death.

In an update on the saga this afternoon the council revealed 161 lights have been reported as drooping and 17 lamps have fallen to the ground in the past four years.

Mayor Tory Whanau said this presented “a clear and unacceptable safety risk”.

Former city councillor Chris Calvi-Freeman raised the issue earlier this year after he had noticed several missing lamps and upon closer inspection, he saw the posts had wires hanging out of them and jagged metal.

He was stunned when he then discovered a heavy street lantern on the ground.

“The chance of you being under it is pretty slim - they’re not falling like the morning dew - but if one hits you on the head you’d be stone dead, that’s it. They’re six metres up, it would kill you outright.”

Wellington City Council originally said the problem was affecting a “handful” of lamps, but it later emerged that fittings on about 1000 of the city’s LED 17,000 street lamps were faulty.

The council then urgently widened its investigation into the bad batch of lamps on February 10.

Since then, some councillors say they have been left in the dark as to what exactly the problem is, the scale of it, and how it’s going to be fixed.

The piece of concrete which fell from a Mapuia lamppost. Photo / Supplied

Today they have been briefed on the situation and the council has also made this information public.

In a statement, the council said the part of the light that is faulty is an aluminium-alloy adaptor. This is part of what keeps the LED lamps attached to poles around the city.

“The adaptors are not suited to Wellington’s strong winds, causing the lamps, which weigh up to 11.2kg, to either droop or, in worst cases, detach and fall to the ground,” the council said.

Whanau urged anyone who saw a drooping light to notify the council straight away and promised it would be fixed within two hours, weather permitting.

The heaviest lights, which weigh 11.2kg, are the ones being fixed as a priority. So far 600 lights have been fixed.

All of the adaptors will ultimately be removed- hopefully within 12 months, and the cost is estimated at around $6 million.

The jagged end of a lamp post after the streetlight fell off. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The problem dates back to 2018 when the council installed 17,000 new LED street lamps around the city.

When the issue hit the headlines in February this year, the council commissioned engineers to stress-test the lights.

The testing revealed the adaptors were unsuitable for Wellington’s windy conditions and contrary to an earlier assessment, all adaptors had the potential to fail.