Superdome officials noted that the electrical problem was caused when a piece of equipment that monitored electrical lode detected an abnormality and opened a breaker. Is this "superdomese" for "there was a short and the breaker tripped"?

I'm sure the controls for the lighting in the Super Dome are a bit more complicated than a simple breaker.

The lights they use also don't exactly fire up immediately when the power is restored, they can take several minutes to get to full light.

those sly folks at Entergy Power just snuck in a 34 minute commercial

the feed for a major building like the Superdome, or a hospital, or a factory, is likely a 20 Kv three-phase line that goes into a HV vault full of transformers. there may or may not be a secondary feed from a second power grid section, depending on how much engineering and operating money they have, and whether it's though vital enough to do. from there, big ol' feeders come out into the main building master power panel, probably 480 volt 3-phase, to be further broken down and routed around.

if there is backup power, there will be a generator vault, as well. the control unit for power switchover is no longer a series of automatic dump switches, but several relay racks of electronic monitoring stuff that is pawed over by a computer. computer decides the feed or the load is going wack, it will drop power sections, dump the main line, spin up the generators and transfer loads to a section or the whole building, or whatever it thinks is best.

we have 3.9 megawatts worth of this in our basement at work.

I suspect they either had a heat breakdown in insulation someplace, or the computer just swallowed its tongue and rolled over. either way, the booth announcers in the press box got a bathroom break.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: swschrad,