Super Bowl Power Outage; Delay Caused By Faulty Electrical Device

In New Orleans, the power company for the Mercedes-Benz Superdome took heat on Feb. 8 because of the temporary blackout that occurred on Super Bowl Sunday. The cause of the outage was due to a faulty device installed in its switching gears, which is supposed to prevent failures of electric cables leading to the stadium.

Officials of Entergy New Orleans, part of the larger New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., said the device, called a relay, was installed to protect the Superdome from a cable failure between the company's incoming power line and lines that run into the stadium.

They further added that the device performed without a hitch during January's Sugar Bowl and other earlier events.

Sunday night's power outage dimmed the lights to almost half of the Superdome stadium for 34 minutes, which stopped play between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens.

Officials of the power company and from SMG, a company that manages the stadium for the state, both stated earlier this week that they believed the problem began in the switching gear, which is kept in a building known as "the vault" near the stadium. The Superdome has a direct line that feeds from a nearby Energy power substation. Once the line reaches the vault, it splits into two cables that then lead into the Superdome.

Fans who watched the game at home didn't seem the least bit disturbed. An estimated 108.4 million television viewers watched the Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49ers 34-3, which made it the third-most-watched program in television history. Both the 2010 and 2011 big game match-ups reached the 111 million mark.

In any case, Beyoncé's elaborate halftime show was not the cause for the blackout on game day, as some articles may suggest.