arahel_jazz
Unbalanced and Committed
Silver Level
A friend of mine is a broadcast Engineer that the NFL contracts with to be the frequency coordinator for all wireless systems in the Superbowl (and other NFL big events). Yeah, he's the guy that can turn Beyonce's mic off...
Anyway, caught up with him this week when he got back, and he had an interesting story about the outage. It seems that during Beyonce's dress rehearsal on Friday night, the show blew one of the main 800-amp fuses to the building power grid. The staging crews spent all day Saturday getting generators and cabling set up for Beyonce's show to get her off of the stadium power grid.
The switch that failed after halftime was the equivalent of something like a household GFCI outlet, but this thing is the size of a semi truck. It sensed that a certain threshold was exceeded and tripped. My buddy's radio system was the only thing on UPS/generator power that lasted during the outage. The NFL officials "commandeered" his radios to be able to talk throughout the outage...