Outside experts to probe Super Bowl power outage

Superdome and Entergy officials say they will hire outside experts to investigate the cause of a 34-minute power failure that halted the Super Bowl Sunday evening. The announcement by the stadium’s management company, SMG, and Entergy New Orleans came two days after the outage halted play in the third quarter of the game between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. The companies’ joint written statement does not explain the decision, but Entergy spokesman Chanel Lagarde tells The Associated Press they have not been able to reach a final conclusion on the cause of the outage and want a third-party analysis. “We wanted to leave no stone unturned,” Lagarde says. “Both [we] and SMG thought it was important to get another party looking at this to make sure we were looking at everything that we need to examine.” While the cause of Sunday’s outage is still under investigation, records released Monday show that Superdome officials were worried in October about losing power during the Super Bowl. The full story can be found here.