caseyresearch.com / By Marin Katusa / February 5, 2013
It was the most important NFL game of the year, with over 100 million watching on television, consuming an estimated 1.2 billion chicken wings and 50 million cases of beer. The game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens drew the highest ratings ever for a Super Bowl Game.
But what people will remember the most is not the performance handed in by Joe Flacco, nor the sudden disappearance of Randy Moss on football’s biggest stage.
It was that the lights went out in the Superdome. For 35 minutes.
The reason? According to Entergy and SMG, the company that manages 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.”
To put it simply, something went wrong. Very wrong.
The reality is, when the infrastructure gets more and more complex and you are interconnecting old systems and new, things often don’t go the way you want them to.
This problem is not just in the Superdome, but everywhere in North America and Europe. More than half of America’s gas transmission and gathering systems were built more than 50 years ago.
