When is the city of El Centro going to fix, repair or whatever it chooses to do with the stoplight at Hamilton and Imperial? It has been broken for weeks now. You have a school right there. This is a very busy street and the traffic is a nightmare at 8 a.m. and at 4:30 p.m. Fix this before someone gets hurt or killed there. Nobody stops at those temporary stop signs. — Concerned Driver, El Centro
People do stop at those temporary stop signs or we’d be hearing about car accidents at that intersection hourly.
Still, we agree with you in spirit. The intersection of Hamilton and Imperial is among the busiest in the city, we’d wager. And this is a second time the light has been down for an extended period of time in one year.
That said, there is a chance the light is operating this morning. Carl Fowler says it will, for certain, be up and running by the end of the day.
Fowler, Public Works Department maintenance supervisor over streets, underground utilities and the motor pool, said a city electrician was to work on it late Wednesday or early today to install a meter box cabinet that was knocked off its concrete pedestal during a traffic accident.
He said those are not things that are easy to get quickly. There is usually a lead time of four to five weeks to get one, but the city was able to “borrow” a meter box from another signalization project, Fowler said.
Meter boxes are not something that usually get damaged, so they are more difficult to replace quickly. In 17 years with the city, he said he has only had to replace two of them, and both were this year.
The meter box is just like an industrial version of the electricity meter outside of a home, only this powers the stoplight.
Now that this particular stoplight has been felled twice during traffic accidents, we asked whether there were any plan to put up barriers or somehow protect the light structures.
Fowler said there isn’t any discussion planned that he knows of, but maybe this will initiate some. “Maybe driving habits are changing,” he said.
To comment on this story click here to be directed to Facebook.
