Wellingtonians are being urged to look upwards on their walks around town, as a bad batch of street lamps means the 15kg lights could fail and crash to the ground – possibly causing serious injury or death.

Former city councillor Chris Calvi-Freeman told NZME that over the past few weeks, he had noticed several missing lamps, which he told the council about, but when he looked closer, he saw the posts had wires hanging out of them and jagged metal.

“Then yesterday I noticed a heavy street lantern on the ground.”

He picked the lamp up and was stunned to find it weighed about 15kg, and was a metre long.

“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.”

He said he counted six missing lamps between Greta Point and Point Jerningham - and has urged the council to do something about it.

Wellington City Council spokesperson Richard MacLean confirmed a small number of the 17,000 LED lamps installed around Wellington in 2018 were part of a bad batch and suffering metal fatigue.

He said there was no way to check which lamps were part of the bad batch as they were installed all over the city.

A handful of lamps had fallen already – all within the last month.

MacLean said there is one way to tell if a lamp is nearing dangerous fatigue levels – they will droop before they drop.

Anyone who sees a lamp drooping should report it to the council.