Let the finger pointing begin

Last weekend during the super bowl there was a partial power outage.

Entergy the company that supplies power to the dome and SMG the company that manages the stadium for the state told the city council they would bring in an outside 3rd party firm to find the root cause of the problem.

That has not happened to date and some on the city council are asking why did you say it and then not do it.

Entergy workers traced the problem to a relay it installed in 2011. The upgrade work was done to provide a newer more advanced type of protection for the Superdome because of past problems at other stadiums. While this relay is owned and installed by Entergy they stopped short of taking blame for the power outage and were looking into whether the electrical relay at fault had a design flaw or a manufacturing defect.

Not long after the announcement, the manufacturer of the relay S&C Electric Co said the relay was not at fault but rather Entergy put the relays trip setting too low. If higher settings had been used the relay would not have tripped cutting the power.

Entergy responded to this by saying S&C and Entergy had run test on the two relays at the dome after the game and one worked as expected and the other did not.

When Entergy was asked by the city council if the problem was a design flaw or a defect in a part of the equipment they responded that had not been determined.

I guess we will never find out what really caused the problem.

But out with the old and in with the new. This weekend is the big Mardi Gras weekend. It is even hard for us to contemplate that this coming Tuesday is just another Tuesday everywhere else but here.
If you don’t think that Mardi Gras is a big deal think about one of the floats rolling in the Endymion parade tonight. It is 330ft long; holds 230 riders and cost $1.2 million dollars to build. It is so big they made a test run down the parade route a while back just to make sure it would fit down the city streets and get around narrow corners.
It is being pulled by a tractor with the ability to pull up to 190 tons.

Clearly this is Bush's fault!

if the relay has been in use since 2011 and it has not operated (tripped) then i would go with: 1: bad relay 2:additional load installed without updating relay settings 3: someone inadvertently changed relay settings. 4: transient fault. i'm betting on #2 first and #4 second.
330 ft. + tow vehicle and narrow corners?

Where were the backup generators. It doesn't take them 34 minutes to kick in. Should have had power back in around ten seconds.

Are they trying to get that float in the
Guinness book of records? The tractor sounds like it would be too heavy to drive on the streets. Oh well, let the fun begin!

LOL

I live closest to the Super B city of Indianapolis in which the politicians, & news media have been licking their chops, & jumping for joy at the outage. Hoping to knock New Orleans out of future consideration for a long time to come. One local fool reporter even said quote... We never had that problem in Indianapolis! Maybe someone should tell him we have only had 1 Super Bowl in history. But we did have a large gas related explosion at a State Fair Coliseum that killed around 100 people during a Ice Hockey game 50+ years ago. I forget the exact year. With politicians, & reporters; that"s the only thing that will get done is finger pointing. A lot of people all across this country have a stake in blaming the city for what happened! By the way I haven"t watched a Super Bowl in my life at 41 years old!

What's sad is ho much tax payer money will be spent worrying about, and trying to place blame for something that wasn't really that big of a deal to begin with, regardless of who's actual fault it was.... Heck why don't they just go ahead and trace the maker of each individual component of the relay and then take it another step and figure out who designed the material it was made from, and the supplier of the raw material. Heck let's blame the guy that drove the mine truck that hauled the ore the metal parts came from...and why not go ahead and blame the first man that discovered the metal it was made from.........Like I said alot of time and money spent on useless, stupid, crap.....

New Orleans has many problems but with about 37,000 hotel rooms we are well equipped to handle mega events.
We will be bidding on the 2018 super bowl because it is the cities Tricentennial.

It won't be too heavy. Probably a Chebby stump puller or a Toyota shuttle puller. HeHe
Loren, the Acg.

It was Bush's fault!

It is a tractor similar to the one that is used to tow a 747 at the airport.
The float is made up of 25ft segments that all four wheels turn so it looks like a train of baggage cars going around a curve.
While two test runs were made in the days leading up to the parade to make sure it could make some of the tight turns on the city street it failed to make one of them last night. They had to break it in half; go around the curve; then hook it back together during the parade route.
The theme of the float was a local amusement park that closed over 25 years ago. The float even emitted the scents of popcorn and cotton candy.

It's ALL his fault. I know that as fact. My abundant sister in law told me so. And she's NEVER wrong.

No telling how much money has been spent to find out who/what to blame. It's almost as rediculous as the millions upon millions spent to find out what exactly happened to the Titanic once it hit the iceberg. IT SANK! That's what happened. They knew that the same night it happened. With "starving" liberals all over New Orleans, wouldn't the people have been better served by spending the money on handing out new free external_linkphones and opening more pawn shops so they can hock all the stuff they stole from tourist's during Super Bowl week?

Pete;
I would go with #1
Not bad off the shelf but rather one that does not last the prejected life span.

It was said that greater loads had been put on it in the past because of the A/C units. During the super bowl the A/C would have been on but not running on high because of the time of year. A normal Saints game in late August should have put the relay threw a better draw test.
I realy do not understand a transient fault in this situation. I think of a transient fault as a tree limb or such against bare wire. This is all coated underground or inside wire after this relay.

The differance in this and the Titanic is this problem HAD to be found so it could be fixed.
The problem is that no one is ready to man up; raise their hand and say yes it was my fault.

Heck they could always blame it on China. Most likely installed junky parts from over there anyway.

Honestly, the tv stations made money over this power outage. They got to sell extra commercial time they wouldn't normally get. More $$$$$$ in their pockets!

Who cares? It's just a professional business the sucks money from the taxpayers and rewards a bunch of goons.

I sure wish they would hurry up and admit to what happened. Until then, I'm sticking with the theory I had at the time it happened. All the NO cops were inside the stadium doing their cop thing and watching the game at the same time, so the NO brothers (being politically corrrect here) were outside the stadium stealing all the copper wire they could get their hands on.

I haven't heard anyone complain about the outage that was at the game or a football fan watching
the game only the cronic complainers that don't like football anyway are complaining. Sort of sounds like abundant nnalert complaining about the shot grouping of an assault rifle what do they care?

i've only seen the dome from the interstate but i agree with you on #4 and disagree with you on #1. s&c are highly engineered and carefully made american products. being of 2011 install date it should be an electrostatic type relay with no moving parts or heat produced within the relay. these relays are accurate and reliable. i'm at #2 and/or #3 with the relay trip settings.
be interesting to see the float, is each segment individually steered?

Next Super Bowl to be held in Motel 6 parking lot. They leave the light on for you!

Each segment is a 25 ft trailer built just like a baggage car at the airport. All 4 wheels turn to keep tracking to a minimum but you can not manually steer each axle.