Caesars Entertainment spokesman Rich Broome says the last question was the easiest to handle: Because Paris-Las Vegas is physically conjoined with Bally's and sits next to Planet Hollywood, most of the perishables from the fridges and freezers could be and were transported to either of those two resorts.
"It wasn't easy, but it was feasible."
It would be much more difficult had the blackout happened at a stand-alone property like the Rio, but it would still have several hours to salvage what it could. After all, Paris wasn’t evacuated for four hours after the blackout, when the Clark County Fire Department intervened, saying that batteries in smoke-detector and fire-suppression units were going dead.
Hotel guests, casino patrons, and other customers weren’t allowed back onto the Paris premises for several hours after power was restored -- around 10:30 p.m. -- because the fire department needed the extra time to make sure that all the safety systems were up and running.
As for table-game players, "People take their chips with them, so that's easy," Broome says of collecting one's winnings.
In most cases of electrical failure, auxiliary power will kick in, giving slot players time to cash out their machine credits (TITO from the machine and cash from the kiosk or cage) and table-game players time to cash in their chips from the cage. If it's a large amount of chips, it's advisable to immediately cash them in; cashiers have to verify where the chips come from, so a time lag might make that difficult, and casinos are under no obligation to accept chips that could be under contention.
In the Paris case, however, construction workers drilling in the bowels of Paris accidentally sliced through all the power cables, including the auxiliary system, leaving the property, basically, helpless in the dark.
In a similar situation, slot players are advised to wait by their machines, wait for a slot attendant or an employee from guest services to arrive, and establish how many credits they’re due, then obtain a voucher that validates winnings. This might be tough to pin down exactly, since the machine, like the lights, are dark. But it will establish a ballpark figure that can later be double-checked once power is restored: The machines have a fail-safe that records the state of play at the time it was interrupted. "The machine can tell you where it was when it shut down," says Broome.
Karl Bennison, chief of the enforcement division at Nevada’s Gaming Control Board, verified that. "When there's a power loss, the gaming devices are designed to recover their state of play and the players’ credits."
In theory, once the slots power back up, play should not resume until the player returns to the machine. If he or she doesn't, the casino can take the information it gleaned from the device and send the player his or her money. (And in case anyone is tempted to make a false claim, surveillance footage is checked to verify that the players were on the machine they say they were.)
Some hotel guests were forced to find other accommodations and Paris waived their charges for that day.
Of course, all of this advice only pertains to a relatively minor emergency like a power outage. If, God forbid, the fire alarms go off, forget your chips or your slot credits and get the heck out of there. You'll thank us later.
