Something else City Hall fails to do

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The light pole at Niagara and Garfield streets that fell in a windstorm in February 2019, injuring Donald Anderson.

Donald Anderson in February 2019 was walking through a windstorm to his job at a Riverside tavern when a city streetlight — “badly corroded” and past its “usable life,” according to expert testimony — fell and hit him on his head.

“Next thing I remember I woke up and I was covered in blood, people were all around me and I didn’t know what was going on,” Anderson testified in a deposition for a lawsuit he filed the following year.

Buffalo’s law department two weeks ago asked Buffalo’s Common Council to approve a $650,000 settlement to that lawsuit — restitution for the long-term effects of the head and spine injuries Anderson sustained. The Council is expected to approve the settlement next week.

Testimony and evidence solicited from past and current city employees, as well as expert witnesses, underscored the difficulties the cash-strapped city faces maintaining its 32,000 light poles.

Michael Hoffert, a former city engineer in charge of street lighting, testified the poles are supposed to be inspected annually but rarely were, because his division lacked the necessary resources and manpower. He said the division — part of the city’s Department of Public Works — comprised four people: himself, two inspectors and a part-time welder.

Hoffert’s successor in May 2023 testified the division was down to three people to cover the entire city.

“As a result, there are countless street light poles in the city that have never been inspected since they were installed,” Hoffert said in his affidavit. “The vast majority of these installations occurred over 30 years ago.”

Hoffert said there was “no record of the pole which fell and injured the Plaintiff ever having been inspected,” and that it was “badly corroded” and had “exceeded its usable life.”

Jermaine Skillon, Hoffert’s successor, affirmed Hofferts’ suspicion, testifying that he’d found no record in the division’s inspection and maintenance logs regarding the streetlight that fell on Anderson, located at the corner of Niagara and Garfield streets, two blocks north of Hertel Avenue.

That constituted “a negligent failure by the city of Buffalo,” Hoffert concluded.

The city’s attorneys, among other arguments, noted that the day of the incident — Feb. 24, 2019 — was marked by a ferocious windstorm with gusts reaching 70 miles per hour. The city presented the court with 10 reports from news outlets and other sources detailing the widespread damage caused by the wind that day, to support its position that extraordinary conditions contributed to the accident.

Another expert enlisted by Anderson’s lawyers dismissed that claim as lacking a “valid scientific basis.”

The base of the light pole that fell on Donald Anderson.

“A sound pole that had been properly installed would not have been blown down in the conditions claimed by the City,” Karl Henry, an engineer with a firm that does accident reconstruction and analysis, testified. “It is only because the pole was so structurally compromised by corrosion that it fell.”

Henry added that the city had “negligently altered light poles,” including the one that fell on Anderson, by attaching signs with screws, bolts and metal bands, allowing “moisture intrusion into the poles which can cause or accelerate corrosion.”

The city also argued it couldn’t be held liable because it wasn’t aware the light pole presented a danger.

Skillon and his crew members testified National Grid would alert the city if its workers encountered a structurally unsound light pole. But most often inspection, maintenance and replacement of light poles were prompted by residents’ calls to the city’s 311 complaint line, rather than a proactive inspection schedule.

The city clerk and a 311 complaint line manager testified that the city had no record of complaints about the pole in question.

Henry, the plaintiff’s expert witness, dismissed that as an excuse, too, saying “a brief, superficial visual inspection of the pole” would have revealed the need to replace it.

“The defects in the pole were so extensive that they would have taken years to develop and would have been plainly visible and apparent for a number of years prior to the pole’s failure,” he said in his affidavit.

Henry — like Hoffert, the former city engineer — concluded that the city was “negligent” for “failing to inspect the subject pole, failing to replace it after it had exceeded its intended useful life, and failing to replace it despite readily apparent, patent and corrosion damage which severely compromised its structural integrity resulting in its inevitable failure.”

Henry and Hoffert also noted that their analysis was hindered by the  city immediately destroying the light pole, despite Anderson’s injury and the possibility of litigation. Skillon, the city engineer, testified the pole was “cut up into pieces, loaded into a truck, and took back to a garage at Seneca Street, and placed in a scrap metal bin.”

A scrap processor under contract with the city collected the remains three days later, according to an invoice submitted to the court.

National Grid was named in the lawsuit, too, along with a number of city contractors that supply or maintain light poles. The contractors were eventually dropped from the case. A National Grid representative said in a deposition the maintenance of the polls was the city’s responsibility.

New York State Supreme Court Judge Gerald Greenan agreed, ruling last month “that maintenance of existing streetlights is a proprietary function of a municipality.”

The city’s lawyers initially indicated their intention to appeal Greenan’s ruling. Instead, they asked the Council to approve the $650,000 settlement.

Neither Anderson’s lawyers nor the city’s public works commissioner responded to requests for comment.

Anderson said in a deposition that he suffers from depression related to the traumatic brain injury he suffered, and the spinal injuries make it difficult for him to negotiate stairs, or to walk or stand for very long, even after corrective surgery. He described his everyday pain level as a 7 or 8 out of 10. He said he hasn’t worked since he was injured, apart from a 2-week stint as a cook at Sportsmen’s Tavern on Amherst Street.

“I couldn’t do the job,” he said. “I thought I could handle it more than I could and it just — it was too much.”

Geoff Kelly