The night the lights went out on the Super Bowl - chof 360 news

Anytime he mentions that he played in Super Bowl XLVII, former San Francisco 49ers tight end Delanie Walker knows what question is coming next. He inevitably gets asked, “Is that the one when the lights went out?”

“That’s always the first thing that comes up,” Walker told chof360 Sports with a laugh. “It’s never something that happened during the game. It’s always the blackout.”

Before kickoff, Super Bowl XLVII was billed as the Harbaugh Bowl, a sibling showdown between brothers Jim and John Harbaugh. Twelve years later, the Baltimore Ravens’ dramatic 34-31 victory is remembered most for something else entirely.

Not for Ray Lewis going out a champion in the final game of his Hall of Fame career. Not for Joe Flacco quieting his critics with a three-touchdown Super Bowl MVP performance. Not even for Beyonce reuniting Destiny’s Child during her high-energy halftime show. Overshadowing all of that was the moment when, without warning, the Superdome went dark.

“It was a one-score game and no one remembers that,” CBS lead play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz said during an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show last month. “All they remember is the night the lights went out in New Orleans.”

The partial power outage occurred shortly after the second-half kickoff with the Ravens already holding a commanding 28-6 lead and poised to deliver a knockout blow. Players retreated to their sidelines in confusion. Nantz and fellow CBS broadcaster Phil Simms had their mics go dead. Elevators abruptly stopped working with people trapped inside.

The delay lasted 34 minutes as stadium officials scrambled to assess what had gone wrong and worked furiously to fix it. Down on the dimly lit field, there was unease that the Superdome had been the target of a terrorist attack, impatience to restart the second half and unfounded conspiracy theories aplenty. Players found creative ways to stay loose. A few amused themselves playing an impromptu game of freeze tag.

The power failure jeopardized the Superdome’s reputation as America’s premier big-event venue and sparked an investigation over who was to blame for the incident. Twelve years later, the Super Bowl returns to New Orleans on Sunday as the Kansas City Chiefs vie for the modern NFL’s first three-peat against the Philadelphia Eagles.

For those who were in the Superdome that surreal Sunday in 2013, the memories are still fresh. Here are their stories from the night the lights went out on Super Bowl XLVII.

Warning signs

In the leadup to Super Bowl XLVII, the longtime czar of the Superdome couldn’t shake his lingering anxiety. A few unexpected power glitches had Doug Thornton concerned about how much strain the stadium’s infrastructure could withstand.

At first, it was a blown fuse here, a circuit overload there. Then, as Beyonce was rehearsing for her halftime performance a few days before the game, TV crews reported power fluctuations that affected their high-definition cameras.

“There were some things that we noticed in the days leading up to the game that gave us some pause, things that had never happened before,” said Thornton, who, as executive vice president of venue management giant ASM Global, has run the Superdome since 1997. “We were a little bit nervous about that because we didn’t know why they were happening.”

To Thornton, the mishaps were especially puzzling because the Superdome and the company that supplies power to the stadium had recently spent millions to prevent this sort of thing. Only months earlier, Entergy New Orleans had replaced the switchgears that manage the flow of power to the Superdome and protect against the threat of electrical overload. At roughly the same time, the Superdome replaced the two underground copper cables that feed power to the stadium from Entergy’s switchgear vault a quarter of a mile away.

The A feeder cable powered the west side of the Superdome. The B feeder cable powered the east side.

The first test of the upgraded equipment came six weeks before the Super Bowl when the Superdome hosted the New Orleans Bowl on December 22, 2012. There were no power issues that night, nor were there during a sold-out Saints-Panthers game on December 30 or during the Sugar Bowl three nights later.

When warning signs emerged during Super Bowl week, Thornton and NFL senior vice president of events Frank Supovitz huddled together and authorized a round of tests of the Superdome’s power infrastructure. The results of those tests were encouraging, but Thornton and Supovitz took no chances. They moved Beyonce’s halftime show to a separate power source.

“We made the decision relatively late to take them off house power and put them on a series of power generators,” Supovitz said.

Supovitz’s mantra while managing the Super Bowl for eight years was “assume nothing, double check everything.” Every year, he hired a facilitator to come up with high-stress challenges and crisis scenarios that Supovitz and his colleagues might face on game day. Then Supovitz would gather the stadium manager, local law enforcement leaders and other decision makers in a room and ask them to work together to figure out how they would respond if those situations were real.

There was nothing out of the ordinary to test Supovitz and his crew during the first half of Super Bowl XLVII. He and Thornton watched from high above the field inside the NFL’s command center as Beyonce strutted her way through a hits-laden performance and as Jacoby Jones opened the second half with a dazzling 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown.

By then, it was 28-6, Ravens.

“It felt like it was about to be a blowout,” Ravens wideout Torrey Smith told chof360 Sports.

Alongside Supovitz in the NFL command center was Armen Keteyian and his 60 Minutes Sports crew, who were doing a behind-the-scenes Super Bowl piece. They had shadowed Supovitz all week and filmed meetings, rehearsals, all of it. Now, they wanted one final sit-down interview with Supovitz, an event producer’s version of a victory lap.

One minute and 38 seconds into the third quarter, Supovitz was in the middle of that interview, his back to the field, his body facing Keteyian. Supovitz’s first inkling that something was wrong was the concerned expression on Keteyian’s face.

“Uh-oh,” Keteyian said.

It then dawned on Supovitz that half the lights in the Superdome had gone out.

‘What in the world is happening right now?’

At the same time that Supovitz turned away from Keteyan to assess what happened, Nantz and Simms were also, literally and figuratively, in the dark.

Simms was in the middle of praising San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking a sack rather than forcing a pass into coverage when CBS lost its feed to the broadcast booth. Viewers heard Simms say on the air at the time, “Good no-throw though by Colin Kaepernick. He is going to throw this down the middle to Vernon Davis. Watch. Boy, look at the safety. His anticip..."

And then, just like that, he and Nantz were gone.

Their monitors abruptly went black. So did the broadcast booth. Nantz and Simms even lost the ability to communicate with their producers.

“My cell phone was working,” Nantz told Patrick last month. “So I called Lance Barrow, our producer, in the truck. Now this was a dumb thing to do because I’m sure he was more in the center of the storm than I was. He didn’t pick up.

“I call Melissa [Miller], my chief of staff for a quarter of a century. I call her cell phone and say, ‘What in the world is happening right now?’”

The uncertainty, Nantz said, inspired dark thoughts. He wondered if America’s most iconic sporting event had been the target of a terrorist attack — and he was far from alone in considering that unsettling possibility.

Twelve years later, the 49ers’ Walker is quick to admit that when he heard a slight pop and half the lights abruptly turned off, “I looked around to see if I should run.”

“For that to happen in the Super Bowl, it was terrifying,” Walker said. “I really thought it was a terrorist attack and I know other people on the field did as well.”

If the semi-darkness was unnerving for folks in the stadium, the situation was also confusing for the 100 million-plus viewers watching from their couches. CBS aired several shots of a half-dark Superdome. Then, with no on-air talent in a position to speak to viewers and many cameras also not working, the network went to commercial.

For CBS, the savior was sideline reporter Steve Tasker. Using a hardwired microphone and hardwired headphones borrowed from an audio technician, Tasker radioed Barrow several minutes into the delay and said, “Lance, this is Steve Tasker. I can hear you now.”

“You can hear me?” Barrow asked.

When Tasker confirmed, Barrow told the former Buffalo Bills special teams dynamo he’d have to serve as an impromptu host and explain to viewers what was happening. Barrow briefly stepped away to communicate the plan to the rest of the crew. Seconds later, he returned to tell Tasker, “You’re taking us out of the commercial break in 5, 4, 3 …”

With little to no time to collect his thoughts, Tasker described the scene around the stadium, explained that the Superdome was lit well enough to see and clarified that there was no apparent danger. About the only mistake Tasker made was suggesting Nantz and Simms would be back “shortly.”

Over on the opposite sideline, Tasker’s fellow CBS sideline reporter Solomon Wilcots struggled to attain any substantive update on the cause of power failure or how long the delay would be. Wilcots estimates he asked 10 men in suits those questions. Not one gave him an answer that he could use.

“No one wanted to talk,” Wilcots told chof360 Sports. “No one wanted to go on record. Everyone was like, I don't know anything. I haven't heard anything.”

'We lost the A feed'

High above the field in the NFL command center, the top priority after the power went out was assessing whether the Superdome was under attack. Law enforcement officials needed little more than 90 seconds, according to Supovitz, to rule out the possibility of terrorism or any other safety issue.

The objective then became notifying a crowd of 70,000-plus that there was no reason to panic or evacuate. Someone scribbled a handwritten script and rushed it downstairs to public address announcer Alan Roach. Three minutes into the delay, Roach told fans there was a temporary power outage and advised them to remain at their seats.

“We wanted to make sure we had a safe environment and, if we did, we wanted people to stay while we fixed the problem,” Supovitz said. “It was high-stress in the sense that 115 million people watching on TV and 70,000 people right outside my window were all wondering what was happening. Social media had matured by that point, so you had the added complication of people spreading misinformation.”

At the same time that was going on, stadium officials decided to reduce the amount of power the Superdome was using by shutting down anything inessential on the stadium’s functioning side. Escalators and elevators abruptly turned off. So did concourse lights, air conditioning units and credit card machines.

To Thornton, it was telling that only the west side of the Superdome had initially gone dark, the side powered exclusively by the A feeder cable. That indicated to him that the issue wasn’t coming from within the stadium. He instinctively thought back to the newly replaced switchgears in Entergy’s vault and to the underground cables that supplied the Superdome’s power.

Thornton dispatched an engineer to confirm his suspicion that something had interrupted the power supply to the A feeder cable. Then he gave a command to manually transfer anything powered by the A feeder over to the B feeder, so that the entire Superdome would draw power from one source — a procedure known as a bus tie.

“Frank, we lost the A feed,” Thornton told Supovitz.

“What does that mean?” Supovitz replied.

“That means that we have to do the bus tie,” Thornton answered

“What does that mean?” Supovitz calmly asked again.

“That means about a 20-minute delay,” Thornton told him.

As the Superdome crew worked on the manual bus tie, Entergy officials were performing their own analysis of the power failure a quarter mile away in their switchgears vault. They were able to restore power to the A feeder cable 18 minutes into the outage. As a result, Thornton called off the bus tie procedure shortly before it was finished.

The Superdome then went through a system reboot. Scoreboards and video screens slowly came back on. So did the elevators, escalators and air conditioning units. The stadium’s metal-halide lights took the longest because they required time to strike.

Though CBS understandably pushed to restart the game as quickly as possible to avoid losing its audience, Supovitz resisted the temptation to rush. He calmly but firmly insisted on taking a few more minutes to double check the functionality of the coaches’ headsets, instant replay systems and game and play clocks.

“I wanted to avoid a second issue that could have caused another delay or impacted the outcome of the game,” Supovitz said. “By then, we’d already been dark for 24 minutes. What’s another 10 minutes to get this right?”

Even so, Supovitz knew the rest of the game would be a white-knuckle ride. The cause of the partial power outage was still a mystery to everyone in the NFL command center at that time. As a result, Thornton could give Supovitz no assurance that the stadium wouldn’t go dark again before the game ended.

So, what happened?

Since the 49ers locker room had lost power, the NFL did not allow the Ravens to leave the field during the 34-minute delay either. Players wandered around, trying to stay loose, focused and hydrated under surreal circumstances. Flacco scanned the crowd looking for his family. Smith and Jacoby Jones resorted to playing freeze tag.

“You get bored,” Smith admitted. “It was a lot of idle time after just sitting for a lot of time in the locker room during halftime.”

To the 49ers, the power outage came at the ideal time. It was a chance to steady themselves after a poor first half and the gut punch of Jones’ kickoff return. They also drew motivation from looking across the dimly lit field at how the Ravens were behaving.

“They already thought they had the game won,” Walker said. “They’re running around getting the crowd hyped, cheering, doing back flips, dancing.”

Fueled by the right arm of Kaepernick, the churning legs of Frank Gore and the sure hands of Vernon Davis and Michael Crabtree, the 49ers scored 17 unanswered third-quarter points to cut into the deficit. They were a two-point conversion from tying the game with 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter. Then they came within five yards of a go-ahead score on their final possession, only to have Baltimore’s defense deliver a heroic goal-line stand.

“It was a very stressful moment,” Smith said. “You want to believe in your defense, but the human side of you is like, ‘Oh my God’ I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have the worst possible scenario in the back of my mind.”

An unsuccessful fourth-and-goal fade pattern to Crabtree in the end zone is the one that still gnaws at Walker and other 49ers players. Jim Harbaugh walked onto the field begging for a defensive holding penalty afterward. Replays show he was probably right.

“It was defensive holding, illegal contact and pass interference,” Tasker said, “but no official in this galaxy is going to throw a flag in that situation.”

If the second half between the 49ers and Ravens was intense, the battle to assign blame for the power outage was even fiercer. Entergy didn’t even bother to wait until the game was over to send out a social media message absolving itself of blame and saying that the building was receiving power at the time of the outage.

A month later, an independent investigator released a 15-page report that, while packed with jargon and technical terms, does offer a clear explanation for what caused the Superdome lights to go out. The trigger was a relay device in the switchgears installed by Entergy before the Super Bowl, according to Dr. John A. Palmer, a University of Utah electrical engineering professor and the founder of Palmer Engineering & Forensics.

The relay is a safety mechanism designed to monitor electrical quantities like current or voltage, detect abnormalities and shut down the flow of power if the monitored value goes outside of the specified range. In this case, the factory default settings were too low. The relay “did what it was set to do,” said Supovitz, when it detected a spike in power consumption after the Superdome’s electrical systems turned on following Beyonce’s generator-powered halftime show. The problem was that the Superdome was capable of withstanding that much power and more.

Palmer’s investigation offers one more startling observation: Had Superdome officials gone through with the bus tie and powered the stadium off the B feeder cable alone, its relay had the same default factory settings as the other one. In other words, Palmer concluded, “there is a significant probability” that relay also would have tripped and the Superdome would have had no power at all.

It’s clear that some former Ravens players didn’t make it to the end of Palmer’s report — or didn’t agree with his conclusions.

In October 2013, Terrell Suggs told ESPN he believes that someone pulled the plug to prevent a “landslide” Ravens victory and that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell “had a hand in it.” Years later, Lewis made a similar case during a conversation with Peyton Manning, arguing that the game “was about to get ugly” before the power outage flipped momentum.

Said Lewis to Manning: “In a billion-dollar stadium, lights ain’t going out, Peyton, unless something’s at risk.”

Making sure it doesn’t happen again

One year after the power outage fiasco in New Orleans, the NFL was not about to risk a similar incident at Super Bowl XLVIII in New Jersey.

Supovitz recalls conducting a thorough test of the power system at MetLife Stadium to observe if anything taxed the stadium’s infrastructure. He said the NFL also installed backup generators and wired them into MetLife Stadium’s power system just in case.

Who’s the biggest winner from the Super Bowl power outage 12 years later? Allow Supovitz to make the case for manufacturers of LED stadium lights. The veteran event manager points out that most stadiums, including the Superdome, have gone away from metal-halide lights because they take too long to restrike and warm up.

“Nowadays everything is LED,” Supovitz said. “You can flip a switch and the lights go on. Or flip a switch and the lights go off. I would bet this particular incident has been a great sales tool for LED lights companies.”

LED lights are far from the only change the Superdome has made since the 2013 Super Bowl power outage. The Superdome underwent a $500 million facelift in preparation for Super Bowl LIX, including new transformer rooms and a modernized electrical infrastructure.

Entergy has worked with Superdome officials “to install upgrades and additional redundancy to the stadium’s electrical and lighting systems,” the power supplier said in a statement. Entergy has discarded the protection relay equipment that triggered the partial power outage. The company also has installed remote power quality metering for the Dome that allows engineers to monitor the power being supplied to the building in real time.

“We’ve been planning for this high-profile event for over a year, and we’re prepared,” the Entergy statement said. “We feel confident our systems will perform successfully during Super Bowl LIX and we have the manpower to respond safely and quickly to any potential outage events across the city of New Orleans, should the need arise.”

The NFL gave New Orleans a big vote of confidence when it chose to bring the Super Bowl back to the Superdome for the eighth time in the venue’s rich history.

The most memorable moment on Sunday will surely happen on the field. Twelve years ago, it was when the lights went out.