Blame Beyonce? Boomer Told Of 2 Power Outages During Halftime Rehearsals
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Watching the great Super Bowl XLVII power outage on television was strange enough.
Imagine being in the Superdome radio booth on Sunday night, trying to broadcast football's biggest game in the dark.
WFAN's own Boomer Esiason gave his unique take on the 34-minute delay in the third quarter of Baltimore's 34-31 win, and even offered up a possible cause for the yet-to-be-officially explained outage in New Orleans.
"Howie Deneroff, our executive producer over there at Dial Global, had the brilliant idea of calling in on hard land lines. When's the last time you used a hard-land-line telephone, right? So we had two of them in our booth. We called to the New York studios, we patched through to those studios, and Kevin (Harlan) and I were describing what was going in inside the Superdome via telephone over the radio waves," Esiason said Monday morning on his "Boomer & Carton" radio show.
He went on: "The interesting thing is, about five or six minutes prior to I guess the breaker going, where our radio booth was up on the seventh floor, we were almost at the ceiling of the dome, and Kevin says to me, 'Man, do you hear that buzzing?' And I took my headset off and there was this like electrical buzz sound coming from the ceiling. This was after halftime, it was after Beyonce.
"And by the way, Beyonce blew the electric in the Superdome twice, I'm told, during her rehearsals during the week."
Boomer on power outage
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Esiason clarified that he wasn't positive the outage was caused by Beyonce's act, which featured impressive lighting and video effects.
"So they should have known that this might happen?" asked co-host Craig Carton. "I mean, it was embarrassing."
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"I guess so. I'm not sure," Esiason responded. "But all I know we're up there and Kevin Harlan says to me, 'Do you hear that buzzing?' And it sounded like an electrical situation. It was not an alarm of any sort. It just sounded like a light getting ready to blow, that kind of thing. But it was loud and it was very prevalent to us because we were so close to the ceiling. And then literally about five or six minutes later, that's when the power went out.
"And then at that point, as a broadcaster, you start trying to speculate and you've got to be careful about what you're saying. But I will say, everyone in the stadium for the most part was extremely well-behaved."
On Monday, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said "there's no indication at all" that the outage could be traced back to the halftime show.
"That is not the case on anything we have at this point," Goodell said, according to CBSSports.com.
A Superdome power company official said Beyonce's act was fueled "100 percent" by generated power, "which means it was not our grid at all. In fact, during the halftime show, we had a drop in power."
Do you think Beyonce's electric act was to blame for the outage? Let us know in the comments...
