NFL History | Mercedes-Benz Superdome, New Orleans — The Relay Fitted to Prevent an Outage Caused One

On Sunday 3 February 2013 the Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49ers 34-31 in Super Bowl XLVII at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Pro-Football-Reference's box score gives the crowd as 71,024. One minute and thirty-eight seconds into the third quarter, with Baltimore ahead 28-6 after Jacoby Jones had returned the second-half kickoff 108 yards, half the building's lights went out.

The equipment that switched them off had been put into service the previous December.

## What was fitted, and why

Utility Dive's timeline of 7 February 2013 records a memo dated 15 October 2012 warning that the Superdome's electrical system could fail, and the replacement of decaying feeder cables running to Entergy's lines. Sports Illustrated, returning to the episode in December 2015, put the building's share of that work at about $500,000 for cable and Entergy New Orleans's at $4.5 million for switchgear.

The switchgear carried relays. A protective relay opens a breaker when current crosses a threshold. CBS News described the one at issue as having been installed in switching gear to protect the Superdome against cable failure. Entergy's own account, published on 21 March 2013, says it was placed into service in December 2012 after inspection, testing and commissioning.

## Two accounts of why it opened

Entergy's release of 21 March 2013 gave the findings of an independent forensic analysis by Dr John A. Palmer of Palmer Engineering and Forensics, commissioned by the utility and by SMG, the Superdome's operator. Palmer found that the relay had operated contrary to its own published specification. The release described a design defect producing unstable behaviour around the device's set point, an inappropriate factory default setting, and inadequate communication between the manufacturer and the utility. Charles Rice, president and chief executive of Entergy New Orleans, said the device had been taken out of service and permanently decommissioned, and that no identical device remained on the company's system.

That release did not name the manufacturer. CBS News reported it as S&C Electric Company of Chicago, and reported the company's answer alongside it: that the equipment had done what its configured settings told it to do, and that had higher settings been applied it would not have disconnected the power.

Both accounts have the relay opening the breaker. They differ on the setting. Entergy's release places an inappropriate factory default with the manufacturer; the manufacturer, as reported by CBS News, places the applied settings with whoever configured them. Nothing consulted here records the two being reconciled.

## The stoppage

Utility Dive's timeline puts the lights out at 7:37 p.m. Central, power restored at 7:58 and play resumed at 8:10. The delay is generally reported as 34 minutes. Sports Illustrated's account says the A feed, one of the building's two supplies, shut down completely and took the west side with it, and that it was back after about eighteen minutes. The two clocks are close but not identical and are left as published.

In that account Doug Thornton, who ran the building for SMG, told an engineer to tie the two feeds together by hand, while Entergy's people in their vault about a quarter of a mile away held that they could restore the A feed instead. They did. Sports Illustrated then has the building rebooting and the metal-halide lamps needing time to restrike.

The halftime performance was Beyoncé's. Thornton said in the days afterwards that the show ran on its own generator, and that the Superdome was drawing less electricity that evening than at an ordinary Saints game.

## What the box score shows, and what it does not

Pro-Football-Reference gives the third quarter as Baltimore 7, San Francisco 17. Baltimore's seven were Jones's kickoff return, scored before the lights failed; San Francisco's seventeen came after them. The fourth quarter was Baltimore 6, San Francisco 8, and the game finished 34-31.

This entry does not connect the interruption to that swing. What it can say is narrower: the quarter was cut in two by a stoppage of about half an hour, and the scoring in it ran one way before the stop and the other way after.

## Afterwards

Entergy discarded the relay, and by the account given to Yahoo Sports in February 2025 the utility added remote power-quality metering to watch the supply in real time. The building itself was rebuilt around its concourses over four years, at a cost published between about $500 million, reported by CBS Sports in February 2024, and $560 million, reported by Fox 8 in August 2024 on the project's completion; Fox 8 describes it as funded by the state of Louisiana, the Louisiana Stadium and Exposition District and the New Orleans Saints. Under the name Caesars Superdome it held Super Bowl LIX on 9 February 2025.

## Coordinate

The pin is 29.951137, -90.081016, with a precision radius of 150 metres.

Two records were used and they were made by different methods. The United States Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns 29.951461, -90.078543 for 1500 Sugar Bowl Drive, interpolated along a street address range of 1500 to 1598 on the left side of the road. The City of New Orleans's site address point layer, published on data.nola.gov as dataset hfvu-md72, carries 1500 Sugar Bowl Drive as a point of type Building, capture method placed on map, status current, at 29.951137, -90.081016.

They differ by roughly 240 metres, and that gap is the ordinary offset between a mailing address and a footprint rather than a contradiction: the federal record puts the address on the road, the municipal record puts it on the building. The pin follows the building point, and the radius is set to cover the structure rather than a doorway. It deliberately does not stretch to the TIGER point, which is out on Sugar Bowl Drive.

## Cover image

The Joint Armed Forces Color Guard and drummers of the United States Air Force Band presenting the national colours before Super Bowl LIX at the Caesars Superdome, 9 February 2025. Photograph by United States Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Zachary Wheeler, VIRIN 250209-D-SH180-1013, DVIDS image 8869731, public domain.

It shows the bowl fully lit, with the ring board reading Caesars Superdome and the scoreboard carrying Kansas City and Philadelphia. It is this building, twelve years and a rebuild after the night described above, and it is not a photograph of Super Bowl XLVII.

Second image: the same colour guard on the field a moment apart, VIRIN 250209-D-SH180-1014, DVIDS image 8869737, same photographer and date, public domain. The ring board and the game clock are legible in it.