COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, February 12, 2024

QUESTION NO. 19

QUESTION: Councillor S. Moynihan

To ask the Chief Executive as the number of public lights still in need of repair, the expected waiting time for repair, factors leading to this and when it is expected for normal service to resume.

REPLY:

 -  Number of public lights still in need of repair is 851. 

 These are all the older type orange low pressure sodium (SOX) fittings. The replacement lamps for these fittings are no longer available. 

 - Expected waiting time for repair:

If the lamps were available, the turn around time between reporting of the outage to our maintenance contractor and the repair of the fitting is contractually 14 working days or less. As stated above, there are no lamps available on the open market.  

Under the current conditions referred to above, we are carrying out maintenance works 

By using old lamps harvested from estates in the county that are being upgraded to LED. For regulatory reasons, these estates must be programmed for upgrade in liaison with ESB Networks.  Due to resource issues within ESB Networks, the rollout of this upgrade programme has been seriously impeded. This has resulted in very few harvested lamps being made available for reuse in order to repair outages. 

And by replacing the old fitting with a new LED fitting in order to repair the outage. Due to the serious back log of outages and the shortage of harvested lamps, this is the only realistic option currently available to us. We are trying to work through the list of outages by prioritising the repair of the oldest reported outages first. We are also prioritising streets with more than one outage reported. We are currently upgrading approximately eight of these old light fittings per day, which is the limit of our current resources. We are discussing the possibility of increasing these resources with our maintenance contractor. 

Note that if we had replacement lamps available, we would be repairing 20 of these older lights per day.

 - Factors leading to this repair time: see above. 

 -  When is normal service expected to resume? This can only happen when we have a steady and significant supply of harvested lamps available to us. As stated above, this matter is entirely dependent on ESB Network resources, over which we have no control. However, we currently have scheduled monthly meetings with them to exert as much pressure as possible to remedy this situation.