While Sunday night’s power outage won’t remove New Orleans from the list of potential Super Bowl cities, there are still plenty of questions regarding why and how a 34-minute blackout occurred.
According to the Associated Press, a memo dated October 15, 2012 revealed that tests on the Superdome’s electrical feeders revealed that the equipment had “some decay and a chance of failure.”
The testing was ordered after power was lost during a 2011 Monday night game at Candlestick Park between the 49ers and the Steelers.
Thus, while Superdome manager Doug Thornton told Jeff Duncan of the New Orleans Times-Picayune that the failure did not result from an overloading of the circuits, the memo demonstrates that there was a concern that ordinary loads could cause the power to crap out.
And crap out it did.
The good news for New Orleans? The temporary power outage will pale in comparison to next year’s looming blizzard in New Jersey.