Seattle City Light announced today that streetlight re-lamping is underway from Denny Way north to 65th Avenue. Seattle City Light announced today that streetlight re-lamping is underway from Denny Way north to 65th Avenue.
The work now underway will replace 21,000 streetlights in the third phase of a four-year project today to re-lamp all 84,000 streetlights in the city. Earlier work covered all streetlights south of Denny Way. Later this year, City Light will begin using LED streetlights in its replacement program, installing 5,000 LED lights along residential streets in 2010 and 40,000 during the next five years.
The program is designed to replace the streetlight lamps before the end of their expected lifespan, rather than waiting for them to burn out. This improves customer service by avoiding outages and lowers maintenance costs.
Results are already evident. Replacing the 42,000 lamps south of Denny Way has cut the number of reported streetlight outages and allowed City Light crews to catch up on a backlog of burned out lights in other areas. City Light is now responding to reported streetlight outages within 10 days. If the problem requires more than a lamp replacement, the utility is contacting customers who reported the outage to let them know about the repairs that will need to be done.