City of Morden staff, Morden Police and Manitoba Hydro attended a scene last week on Stephen St, when a street light standard fell onto a parked car.
In a statement, Morden Police Chief Brad Neduzak said the gusty winds that day pushed over the pole onto a vehicle. There were no injuries, just damage to the vehicle.
Bruce Owen, Media Relations Officer for Manitoba Hydro, submitted this statement to PembinaValleyOnline when asked to comment on why this happened, and if there are more poles that are weakened and need to be replaced.
"Public safety is our top priority. Immediately following last week’s incident, we re-inspected all standards in the downtown area of Morden on April 29. Standards were last inspected in Morden by a contractor in 2021, 2022 and 2023 and deemed medium and low priority. With our inspections last week of approximately 30 standards on Stephen Street and North Railway Street, we identified four that we will remove this week due to corrosion.
New standards will be reinstalled likely in early June once we receive the materials and conduct underground locates for buried electrical lines, telecommunications cables and natural gas lines.
We are also putting together a major project to replace all - approximately 30 - standards along Stephen Street and North Railway Street. The exact timing is unknown at this early stage. Some of these standards had been bumped and dented by vehicles over the years."