Alyssa Ash was driving her car in Little Italy shortly after 7 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 2, when she heard a loud crash. Ash and her passengers panicked, and when they looked up, the stoplight at the corner of India Street and Hawthorne Avenue had fallen to the ground.
No one hit the stoplight. Witnesses said it just fell over on its own. No one was injured, but the pole knocked off a car’s front bumper.
Police officers arrived at the scene.
As did San Diego transportation employees, who said the pole’s base was corroded from years of dogs peeing on it, likely causing it to topple.
Nate Brown, a witness at the scene and engineer with a local energy company, said the fall sounded like a gunshot. Brown and his friends were eating dinner at Mona Lisa Italian Foods when they heard the crash and rushed outside.
The base appeared severely corroded, Brown said. Since the pole was still connected to live power, Brown said it was a safety hazard.
Brown’s friend, Eliot Vargas, tried to sweep up some of the glass from the street, removed the light that fell off the pole, and set it aside.
Officers blocked off the street until city transportation employees could remove the stoplight and install a temporary pedestrian crossing.
After the pole fell, the wires controlling the stoplights and pedestrian crossing remained active, allowing them to flash red, yellow and green throughout the night until transportation employees could deactivate the wires.
The biggest concern with the removal process was the live wire, Mike Plewe, a traffic signal technician for the city of San Diego and the first to arrive at the scene, said.
Plewe arrived at the scene at approximately 8:15 p.m. and began assessing the damage. He began deactivating the wires in the stoplight and waiting for backup to help with the removal process.
Shortly after he deactivated the wires, at 10:20 p.m., two more city transportation employees arrived with a crane to begin the removal process. They finished removing the pole at 11:10 p.m. and began installing a temporary stoplight to manage pedestrian crossings on the one-way street.
City employees finished installing the temporary stoplight shortly before midnight, and the street reopened.
A timeline for the full repair of the stoplight has not been revealed yet, but because of the high traffic in the area, city transportation employees estimate it should be repaired sometime this month.
