NEW ORLEANS (AP) - The manufacturer of the electrical device that is being blamed for the Super Bowl power outage is suggesting there was nothing wrong with the device itself -- it just wasn't used properly.
This morning, officials of Entergy New Orleans, the utility serving the Superdome, said the device -- called a relay -- had been installed specifically to prevent a power outage, but ended up causing the 34-minute outage that blacked out half of the Superdome during the third quarter of the Super Bowl.
It said the device had been installed in switching gear to protect the Superdome from a cable failure.
Not long after the announcement, the manufacturer of the relay device issued a statement saying that the outage occurred because the electric load went beyond the settings that had been put in place by the operators of the relay.
The company, S&C Electric of Chicago, said the power load "exceeded the trip setting" -- but that "if higher settings had been applied, the equipment would not have disconnected the power."
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