Super Bowl Power Outage: NFL Knew Super Bowl Blackout Was a Possibility

One of the most surprising things to happen during Super Bowl XLVII had nothing at all to do with what has happening on the field, rather it had to do with a bizarre incident off it. Right after Beyonce’s halftime show and a minute or so into the third quarter, the lights went out in half the stadium and stayed out for over 30 minutes.

But while it seemed to be a surprise to everyone at home, the NFL was rolling it’s eyes and clenching it’s fists as this was something they had a feeling might happen.

A memo released on October 15th, nearly four months before the Super Bowl power outage, stated that tests on the Superdome revealed that electrical feeders pumping energy and power into the dome had “some decay and a chance for failure” during the 2012 season. So while we ended up getting  power outage during the Super Bowl, the memo suggests that this could have happened at any point during a New Orleans Saints home game this past season.

It was because of the concerns raised by the testing, that the Louisiana Stadium & Exposition District approved spending nearly $1 million to make emergency upgrades to the Superdome, with close to $600,000 being spent on upgrading the dome’s electrical feeder — the thing that ended up failing.

“As discussed in previous board meetings, this enhancement is necessary to maintain both the Superdome and the New Orleans Arena as top tier facilities, and to ensure that we do not experience any electrical issues during the Super Bowl,” says a LSED document dated Dec. 19.

While the NFL was flabbergasted by the power outage, Beyonce apparently had the foresight to bring her own power. Many people blamed Beyonce’s halftime show for literally sucking all the energy out of the Superdome, but numerous officials have denied this. In reality, Beyonce couldn’t have burned out the lights, as she brought her own generators as to avoid something embarrassing like the lights going out in the middle of a show.

Some feared that the Super Bowl Blackout would ruin New Orleans chances to host another Super Bowl, and that the power outage was the only thing people would remember about the game. But in the end, the power outage has given people an opportunity to laugh and the only people with egg on their face seems to be the NFL.

“People were leaving and the game was getting boring,” New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said. “So we had to do a little something to spice it up.”