Detroit has received a rough reputation as a dying city over the past couple decades. There are many reasons why this is, but city officials have made a massive effort to change this reputation around. One of the ways in which they sought to fix this problem is to simply fix the street lamps. Before attempting to fix the lighting in the city, Detroit had around 88,000 lights that didn't work. It would cost a small fortune to fix them all, but that is what needed to be done. In this time of darkness, Detroit officials turned to LED Lighting.

LED Lighting is both bright and energy efficient which makes it the perfect candidate to help revitalize the city of Detroit. In the effort to revamp Detroit's lighting grid, around 185 million dollars were spent. The LED lights were expected to have a life span of around ten years before they would need to start replacing the lights, but after just three or four years Detroit finds itself going dark once again. The city now finds itself needing to replace upwards of 20,000 lights.

Detroit has planned to revamp and restore all of the basic services including lighting. The extra cost of faulty LED lights would leave less money and in some cases, not enough money to restore other basic services. A lawsuit has been filed by the Lighting Authority of Detroit against the manufacturer of the lights. After inspection of the lights, workers found that many of the lights were either charred, burned, or cracked. The manufacturer themselves, have admitted that they received many reports of this specific model failing. This case is still pending and leaves Detroit in difficult situation.

This difficult time for Detroit could be used to their advantage. This is Detroit's chance to prove their resilience. Resilience is something that has been lacking over the past few decades that has left Detroit in the state that they are in. While officials seek to make things right with the manufacturer, Detroit is replacing lights a thousand at a time. Replacing 1,000 lights each week will have their recent problems fixed by the end of the year and hopefully, depending on the lawsuit, without much extra cost. The manufacturer is working with Detroit to fulfill warranty obligations and to make things right. Though this is a difficult setback, Detroit is handling it well and continues to work its way to becoming a great city once again.