Dunedin's street lights failed to fire last night after a fault with an inner-city sensor.
Dunedin City Council roading maintenance engineer Peter Standring said the sensor was supposed to detect the onset of darkness and send a signal to power up the city's street lights.
It failed to do so, meaning street lights across the city remained off until the problem was noticed and fixed about 7.30pm, he said.
The fault left the city in an eerie half-light for about half an hour and prompted a brief flurry of phone calls to Delta and the Otago Daily Times.
Mr Standring said the sensor began working again after being given ''a bit of a woozle up'' by a Delta technician.
''They did a bit of twiddling and got it back into action again. There was nothing broken. It just had a bit of a hiccup.''
It was the first time in about five years the sensor had failed to work.
Southern District Command Centre deployment co-ordinator Senior Sergeant Brian Benn, of Dunedin, said there were no reported incidents arising from the outage.
