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Out of Darkness, Springing Into Action | |
(about 9 hours later) | |
NEW ORLEANS — When half the Superdome went dark Sunday, so did the N.F.L.’s control center, up near the top of the stadium, above the last row of seats. Among the two dozen gathered there was Doug Thornton, the building’s manager since 1997. | |
Thornton shepherded the Superdome through the ugly aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and through a $336 million renovation. Super Bowl XLVII was supposed to be his showcase, part of a continuing resurgence. | |
And then the lights went out. | |
It was among the oddest moments in Super Bowl history. Some players did Pilates stretches on the field. Others lay on their backs. Fans remained in their seats or refueled at the beer lines. AT&T said its customers consumed 78 gigabytes of data on the in-stadium network during halftime and the blackout, double the peak hour at last year’s Super Bowl. | |
Thornton remained calm. Cameras from Showtime’s “60 Minutes Sports” happened to be in the command center, filming a longer feature. They captured Thornton’s breaking the news of an impending delay to the N.F.L. | |
“I wasn’t quite sure what was going on,” Thornton said. | |
Immediately, the questions started. What happened? How could it be fixed? | |
It took two minutes to determine the issue was one of power, not of public safety. It took more than 30 minutes to resume play. The process involved league officials, stadium officials, representatives from the electric company and electrical consultants. | |
The investigation continued Monday without definitive answers. Workers buzzed around the Superdome, taking down purple signs and gossiping about the blackout. Official merchandise sold at a 50 percent discount. The doors to the building were locked, but a peek inside showed the lights in the corridors were on. | |
Locals seemed eager to move on. It seemed to please them to hear Commissioner Roger Goodell at his morning news conference dismiss the notion that the blackout would hurt the city’s future host bids. | |
City officials and prominent citizens tried to shift the narrative toward what had gone right. The game between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers drew an average audience of 108.4 million viewers, down slightly from a year ago, but still among the most viewed events ever. The last 17 minutes were the most watched, as the 49ers staged a thrilling comeback that ultimately ended in defeat. | |
The rest of the week did little to damage the reputation of New Orleans as a city built to host major events. | |
The political consultant James Carville, a Louisiana native, was at the Superdome when it went dark. He rushed back to his hotel to sift through news accounts and make phone calls. He said he thought officials had responded promptly, mitigating the potential harm. | |
“They identified the problem and fixed it,” Carville said. “Everybody was well behaved.” | |
Scott Givens watched the Super Bowl unfold in Moscow, on his laptop. His company, FiveCurrents, stages some of the world’s most complex events, including the opening ceremony at the London Olympics. He sympathized with stadium officials. | |
On opening night in London, Givens said, the ceremony was conducted using power sources that were not part of the normal grid. The city could have lost power, and the show would have continued. | |
“How you react is key,” Givens said. “Things will break, will go wrong. It’s not like a movie where you can shoot the scene over and over until you get it right. This was a major failure. The fact they got it up and running so fast was really extraordinary.” | |
By Monday night, stadium representatives had not declared an exact cause of the blackout. At a morning news conference, Thornton said it resulted from an “abnormality” with a sensor at a substation that “shunted” power to the Superdome. | |
Thornton and Goodell dismissed the idea that the halftime extravaganza that featured Beyoncé contributed to the power failure. The show, in all its pyrotechnic glory, ran off generated power. Thornton said during the show there was actually a drop in overall power consumption. | |
Asked if a stadium as old as the Superdome, which was built in 1975 and has hosted seven Super Bowls, is no longer equipped to host an event of this magnitude, Thornton noted the renovations. He pointed to the other events the city had hosted in the past 13 months, including the Bowl Championship Series title game and the men’s basketball Final Four last year. | |
A report in the local Times-Picayune detailing the minutes from recent meetings for the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District reveals a rush toward electrical improvements in the months before the game. Officials said they did not believe there was a connection between that late work and the blackout. | |
Stacy Head, who serves on the New Orleans City Council, said: “The week was an overwhelming success. The blackout was a disappointment. It was a fluke.” | |
Ken Belson contributed reporting. |
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