The Purple Lights On Davenport Streets May Be A Mistake, But I Like Them!

If you've been out and about after dark in Davenport, Iowa you may have noticed that some of the streetlights don't look quite right. Scattered throughout the city, some of the lights are bright purple while others look like your typical streetlight. Even though the purple luminescence can make driving at night feel like a futuristic video game, the reason for the color change may actually be related to defective LEDs.

These defects are being seen in multiple areas across the US. According to WSPA,

Duke Energy has been upgrading many of their older and less efficient lights with LED lighting over the past few years. Several hundreds of these white, street lights across the Upstate are now malfunctioning causing the lights to gradually turn deep purple.

This malfunction is what we could be seeing right here in the Quad Cities, seeing as though many different utility companies are using these exact same types of LED lights and are seeing the same issue. Experts believe this is the result of one bad batch of lights being distributed across the country.

Personally, I kinda prefer the purple lights. What do you think?

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Here are normal lights

Just some standard lights you see at night on countless streets.

Here are the Purple Lights

Cool and futuristic if you ask me!

We saw these purple lights on Harrison Street. According to WSPA, these light malfunctions only take a few days to fix, so if the QC gets on it, then we won't be seeing these purple lights for long.

On a more serious note, the color purple was also used in the month of April in memory of Breasia Terrell, a 10-year-old Davenport girl, who went missing July 10, 2020. Friends, family, and community members were asked to hang purple lights in their homes but the purple street lights do not appear to be linked to that memorial. More information about that here.