SAN DIEGO — San Diego resident Blair asked CBS 8 for help after a streetlight had fallen onto his neighbor's car. Blair says this has happened before in their community in Renaissance La Jolla and is afraid someone will get hurt. CBS 8 is Working for You to find out what's going on with these streetlights.
CBS 8 spoke with the owner of the car. He only wants to be called Tarik.
Tarik says had that streetlight hit a person, they wouldn't have survived. He says a neighbor called to let him know a streetlight had fallen onto his car.
“When I saw it on Facetime,” Tarik laughed and shook his head. “It really gave a whole different spin to my day."
Tarik showed CBS 8 the damage to the car. The roof was dented, and the rear windows were broken. The glass had fallen onto the cars backseat and all over the floor of the interior.
Tarik is grateful that it wasn’t worse. “That could have hit someone,” he said. “You would not even think about a pole coming down and hitting you."
Tarik says the street pole fell Thursday on a clear weather day where there wasn’t a storm or much wind, so he took a closer look a the base of the streetlight pole.
“When you look at the post,” Tarik said. “It's completely rotted and corroded all the way around.”
Tarik said he's seen this happen before.
"I've seen several of these light poles, the smaller ones, fall. I've seen at least two," Tarik said.
CBS 8 is Working for You and asked the City of San Diego why these light posts continue to fall.
“The City of San Diego inspects streetlights as we respond to reports of outages through Get It Done or other reporting methods," a spokesperson said. "We recently made repairs in the La Jolla/UTC area in January of 2023.”
CBS 8 read the full statement to Tarik who pointed to his car saying, "Yeah? They're doing a great job, as you can see. These people are paid to do this job. We live here. We pay taxes. All we ask is, make sure it's done the right way."
The spokesperson also told CBS 8 that "irrigation runoff, moisture and potentially dog urine" accelerated the deterioration of the light despite it appearing to be in good condition.
Those looking to be compensated for damage caused by city-owned streetlights can file a monetary claim through the city's Risk Management Department.
"It's going to happen again.” Tarik sighed hopelessly.
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