Power-gate: Entergy denies responsibility for Super Bowl outage, blames NFL

misstripleem | 1:49 AM on February 04, 2013

https://twitter.com/EntergyNOLA/status/298245640109039617

At all times, our distribution & transmission feeders were serving Superdome. We continue working w/ Superdome to address any issues.

— Entergy New Orleans (@EntergyNOLA) February 4, 2013

Hmmm. Here’s the joint statement from the NFL and power company Entergy about the Super Bowl power outage post on Facebook. The energy company denies responsibility.

Joint statement from Entergy and SMG regarding Super Bowl power loss: http://t.co/xpPfcWc7

— Entergy New Orleans (@EntergyNOLA) February 4, 2013

Shortly after the beginning of the second half of the Super Bowl in the Superdome, a piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality in the system. Once the issue was detected, the sensing equipment operated as designed and opened a breaker, causing power to be partially cut to the Superdome in order to isolate the issue.

Backup generators kicked in immediately as designed. Entergy and SMG subsequently coordinated start up procedures, ensuring that full power was safely restored to the Superdome.

The fault-sensing equipment activated where the Superdome equipment intersects with Entergy’s feed into the facility. There were no additional issues detected.

Entergy and SMG will continue to investigate the root cause of the abnormality.

Then there was this:

Bizarre. @Entergy's Press Release on the Superdome power outage consists of a tweet on letterhead. http://t.co/tCAAhRYC

— Eye on Politics (@EyeOnPolitics) February 4, 2013