Have you seen people walking around neighborhood streets wearing get-ups like this? That yellow pole, we’re told, is a GPS unit. We’re not technical but we believe that device he is holding in his hand is called a ‘helmet.’

Latest in utility fashion

City Light tells us they have teams working across Seattle conducting an inventory and survey of utility poles, including adding bar codes to each pole and evaluating their condition. As they teams are conducting their work during the day, guessing this won’t immediately help today’s announced initiative to speed the turnaround time on replacing burned out streetlights. But it will lay the groundwork for City Light to manage the neighborhood’s utility poles in a much smarter fashion.

The effort is part of City Light’s Inventory and Condition Assessment project. Here’s a release they sent out about the project late last year:

The Inventory and Condition Assessment project will collect data on an estimated 105,000 utility poles within the city and in eight communities outside the city limits served by City Light. Approximately 84,000 poles have streetlights. The other 21,000 support power lines, telephone lines, cable TV lines and other equipment. Each pole will be examined for its overall condition, given an individual identification number and marked with a unique bar code.

Project manager Dave Albergine said this will allow City Light to create a database of all the city’s utility poles and ”make future work on the poles more efficient and cost-effective, from repairing damaged poles to replacing them at the end of their projected life cycles.” At present, City Light replaces about 1,500 utility poles each year. Some are damaged or need to be relocated, while others have simply reached the end of their recommended lifetime.