Las Vegas has weathered several power outages in recent years. This writer had personal experience of one in July 1997, while working as part of a film crew at Caesars Palace. Apparently, someone drove a car into a transformer on the Strip in the wee hours and knocked out the Nevada Power supply to the hotel. We all woke up in the morning to no air conditioning, lights, or elevators to transport our filming equipment downstairs. In the stifling July heat, we struggled down to the casino in a vain search for coffee. There, we were greeted by the surreal sight of ladies in the previous night's evening gowns still playing the slots, which seemed to be about the only thing powered by the hotel's emergency generator.
Shortly after midnight on New Year's Eve 2005, revelers at four Las Vegas casinos found themselves temporarily plunged into darkness when the Rio, Palms, Barbary Coast, and Flamingo properties all fell victim to a power outage. The cause was later determined to be either metallic party streamers or a mylar balloon that hit overhead power cables during the festivities and tripped a breaker at the substation near Valley View Boulevard and Flamingo. All the affected properties had backup generators that restored power to most areas of the resorts, including water pumps, refrigerators, and, of course, slot machines, within seconds, although some partygoers found themselves stranded by inoperative elevators. From the reports that we read, most people just seemed relieved that the power failure was not the result of a terrorist attack and, on the whole, it was business as usual on and off the casino floors until crews fixed the problem at about 1:35 a.m. (In the course of researching this answer, we called the slot clubs at both the Palms and the Rio to find out what the implications were in terms of slot club points if an outage occurs while you're playing. Both properties assured us that no information is lost, even though it may appear that your machine goes "dead" for a few seconds while the emergency generators kick in.)
The only instance we're aware of in recent years that a casino encountered serious and disruptive power problems was in April 2004. Bellagio — at that time the most expensive hotel ever built — was brought to a standstill by the failure of a high-voltage cable in an electrical vault. About 3,000 guests awoke on Easter morning to muggy rooms and cold showers after an "unknown event" disrupted the hotel's primary power. The incident burned out thousands of feet of power lines at the resort. This necessitated the shutdown of the property's backup power so that the damaged power lines could be replaced, but not before management had paid off bettors and implemented a wholesale evacuation of the property. Bellagio remained closed for nearly four days while repairs were carried out. It was estimated that the closure cost the hotel approximately $3 million a day.
Perhaps the only person to get a laugh out of this unprecedented event was Gary Scott Thompson, the screenwriter of NBC’s "Las Vegas" series. With first-season teething problems and costs spiraling out of control, earlier in the year he'd found himself in need of a storyline that kept the entire cast trapped within the fictitious Montecito casino. Inspired by a New York blackout around that time, he came up with the idea of a massive power outage, but when the show aired it was apparently greeted with some derision by Vegas insiders, who claimed that such a thing could never happen. In one of those strange instances of fact imitating fiction, Bellagio proved that it could.
