Detroit Lights Up with LEDs
“The lights are coming back on in the city’s neighborhoods,” reports journalist Christine Ferretti in The Detroit News. According to the article, Detroit will have installed almost 40,000 LED streetlights by the end of July. This puts Detroit’s Public Lighting Authority about six months ahead of an ambitious timetable to install 65,000 streetlights that will relight all neighborhoods by the end of the year.
“It’s already changed things,” says Rudolph Bartett, Safety Director for Motor City Electric Co., one of three contractors for the project. “The streets, corridors and the thoroughfares, they are lit up… There’s not a spot we don’t go where people don’t compliment us.”
The quick progress has enabled the authority to advance its schedule for beginning work on Detroit’s major thoroughfares,which had been slated for next year, says lighting authority director Odis Jones.“We are charged with rebuilding a system that has failed for one reason or another for the last 40 years.”
Some of the infrastructure on Jefferson, one of these thoroughfares, has been in place since the early 1900s. About 80% of the lights have not been working for at least two decades.
In a move to discourage scrapping, crews are replacing existing copper wiring with aluminum.“That opportunity (for copper theft) won’t exist anymore when we are finished,” Jones said. “We wanted to be smart about the investment we made.”
The city’s three-year plan to improve its lighting system is expected to cost US$185 million. Read the full article: http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2015/06/15/detroit-lights/71222536/.
