Athlete and Fan Safety: Three Keys to Sport Lighting Safety

Whenever schools adjourn for the summer of a break, it gives athletic supervisors and facility managers a chance to focus on taking care of their athletic light poles. To ensure your sports light poles are structurally sound and safe for students and spectators, you must implement a formal light pole maintenance program. This type of program sets you up to be proactive in maintaining your structures, rather than only responding to pole failures.

How to Keep Sports Lights Safe

1. Take Care of Urgent Issues

Your athletic fields experience a lot of activity, and your lighting poles have gotten a lot of use. That means there are likely some issues with your structures that need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Conduct Pole Inspections

To know the status of your structures and gather critical quality information, you’ll need to conduct comprehensive wood and steel pole inspections. This goes beyond determining if the lights turn on and off correctly and instead assess the structural integrity of the assets. Such inspections can include ground-based inspections that use visual and non-destructive methodologies, aerial inspections via lifting equipment, and drone inspections that capture images of hard-to-reach assets. With any of these asset management inspection services, professional inspectors can identify manufacturing defects, aging or fatigue-related issues, as well as corrosion and other damaging effects on aging lighting poles. You can then take this information and determine appropriate steps for remediation.

Make Quick Repairs

When you engage a professional inspection and field service team to assess your athletic field structures, they can often immediately make the lighting pole repairs you need. If your poles have weld defects, corrosion, or galvanizing issues, this can all be taken care of at the same time as your pole inspection.

After handling urgent repairs, you can shift your focus to long-term maintenance of your structures.

1. Strategically Procure Assets

When selecting and purchasing new lighting poles for your athletic field, you need to have confidence that your structures are built to last even before they’re in the ground. This is where a strategic quality assurance and procurement plan comes into play.

QA Before You Upgrade

By incorporating quality assurance into your light pole maintenance program, your inspection team can examine the quality of your structures during the fabrication process. The QA process also includes ensuring materials are in compliance with the appropriate codes, standards, and specifications.

This is especially important as more athletic facilities pursue LED lighting and other upgrades. If you only visually inspect your LED light functionality, you’ll likely miss out on structural risks with the new lights. Instead, be sure to evaluate whether the weight of the LED lights you purchase is compatible with your poles’ engineering design. Conducting a structural inspection before you upgrade is critical for ensuring long-term sustainability for your lighting poles.

1. Pursue Ongoing Maintenance

After you take care of immediate needs and procure new lighting pole assets for your athletic fields, you’ll need to establish a regular cadence for ongoing structure maintenance. 

Review, Test, Repeat

Continue conducting steel pole inspections of both your existing and new assets. With this proactive approach, you’ll gain control over the lifespan of the lighting poles; ongoing field and aerial inspections give you valuable insight for making lighting pole repairs and adjustments when needed, so you aren’t surprised with unexpected failures. 

Additionally, ongoing maintenance should include various types of reviews and testing, such as laboratory testing, armload testing, design review, and in-field construction review. These activities will prove helpful in tracking your assets’ conditions and mitigating potential risks down the road.

Protect Athletes and Spectators with Exo

Take advantage of the summer months to establish your athletic light pole maintenance program, so you can keep your student-athletes and spectators safe when it’s game time.

Exo can help get you on the right path with asset management inspection services, field service and repairs, and quality assurance guidance. Our team has worked with schools and organizations just like yours, and we’re ready to work with you.

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