Bellagio Power Failure : estimated: $3 Million Loss / day

Some of you may already of heard about this or seen the movie Oceans 11 (Bellagio didn’t really get robbed). I just felt like I needed to share with you an interesting fact about the history of Bellagio Las Vegas. A short history lesson if you will. On the day of April 11, 2004, the casino experienced a very nasty electrical failure.

You can imagine if you were a guest during this Easter holiday, you were not going to be a happy camper. The already booked guests of 800 rooms (approx 1,500 inconvenienced guests) were slowly transferred to other properties. The Bellagio has approx. 3,000 rooms, one of the largest in Las Vegas. The power outage lasted up until April 15, 2004.

$3 Million x 5 = Approx $15 Million Dollar in losses!

The cause during the first few days were unknown up until near complete repair was the real culprit of the electrical power failure revealed. County officials said that the failure was caused by degradation of material used to connect the power cables that run alongside the resort.

Note: They had problems putting up the backup power because of bad planning in my opinion. They never realized it up until they had this “Bellagio Electrical Failure” problem, that a design flaw in the development of the $1.6 billion resort may be responsible for the problem with the backup power system.

Transmission cables for both primary and backup power run parallel to one another through the same duct work, which made it impossible to run the backup system while the primary power failure was being assessed and repaired.

It’s 4 Years after and it seems that everything is fine now. The Bellagio is still one of my favorite casinos.