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Mayor Landrieu Says Super Bowl Outage Will Be Solved, Praises City Effort

An independent engineering firm will determine why the Superdome lost power during the Super Bowl. Mayor Mitch Landrieu is still calling the Big Game celebrations a “spectacular success” despite the 34-minute outage.

Mayor Landrieu was decidedly upbeat when he addressed how the city hosted the Super Bowl.

“The City of New Orleans hosted a spectacular Super Bowl week, and the City of New Orleans was the winner. The power outage was an unfortunate moment for us, and you can be sure that we’ll get to the bottom of it.”  

And he was even a bit light-hearted.

“But I agree with this also that we read on Twitter: ‘Who hasn’t blacked out in New Orleans before?’ I’ll let that hang out there for a minute.” 

He says the city’s contingency list of problems that could happen did include the Superdome losing power. But it was still a shock.

“My heart stopped. It wasn’t my mind. My heart stopped. Of course, because you always — you know, when you anticipate events — there are lots that you anticipate. The ones you worry about the most are major homeland security events. That’s what you really worry about. And of course that never happened. You worry about other events happening outside of the Dome that you can’t control. That didn’t happen. The one good thing about how we responded to the event in question was that there was no panic in the stadium. Everything held. You had 85-90,000 people in that stadium. Everything got back to normal in a very safe and peaceful way. And those contingencies worked. But of course it’s on the list of things that you worry about and have nightmares about. Sometimes they come true.”

Landrieu says the city will make a bid to host the 2018 Super Bowl, and doubts the outage will have an effect on the selection process. That Super Bowl would coincide with the city’s 300th anniversary.

Eileen is a news reporter and producer for WWNO. She researches, reports and produces the local daily news items. Eileen relocated to New Orleans in 2008 after working as a writer and producer with the Associated Press in Washington, D.C. for seven years.