Question of the Day - 01 April 2022

How many lightbulbs on the Strip blow out every 24 hours?

Lightbulbs are the subject of occasional questions we receive: how many there are downtown and on the Strip, how often they need to be changed, and how the casinos would be able to pay the light bills if they couldn't charge resort fees, parking fees, concession fees, service-charge fees, transaction fees, delivery fees, and fee fees (not the poodles).

We queried NV Energy and after some arm-twisting, a public information officer admitted to us that lightbulb life-expectancy on the Las Vegas Strip is a closely guarded secret.  

In our case, however, the PIO, a regular reader of QoD, slipped us some inside information. There are, by NV Energy's calculations, 1,786,452 lightbulbs on the Las Vegas Strip. That includes all the lightbulbs in every hotel room, every casino marquee, all the LEDs in the message marquees, and the single bulbs, swinging on exposed wires from the middle of the ceilings in the Strip-casino surveillance rooms and security back rooms. 

She didn't reveal the exact number, but she did give us a percentage. Of those 1,786,452 lightbulbs, approximately .0005% fail, on average, every 90 days. Doing the math, we find that 1,873 lightbulbs give out over your typical three-month period, or 20.3 bulbs every 24 hours. 

The most interesting thing the PIO revealed to us, however, is not the bulbs that fizzle out, but the bulbs that don't. She told us that three lightbulbs on the Las Vegas Strip have been burning brightly for more than 50 years. One is at the Tropicana, in a housekeeping closet on the second floor of the garden-room wing, still going strong after being turned on for the first time in 1957. The second is in the walk-in vault in the secret inner sanctum at Caesars, a room hidden behind a bookcase in the private boardroom in the original executive suite reportedly used by the boys to divvy up the skim. The third is at the Sahara, at the far end of the third level of the parking garage that was built in 1971.

Is it possible to move Allegiant Stadium to a location where there's parking?

To our surprise, the answer is yes.

A spokesperson for Mortenson, the stadium's general contractor, confided in us that in anticipation of the necessity of moving Allegiant for any number of reasons, 8,118 wheels, whose barrels are made of carbon fiber and hubs and spokes of titanium, were installed under the stadium, all held fast by an electromagnetic braking system that can be released with the flick of a single switch. A second switch activates 451 super-servos, each powering 18 wheels, that can roll Allegiant, at a rate of one foot every 13 minutes, to wherever it needs to go.

For example, if, for parking and branding purposes, the Raiders wanted to move the stadium to M Resort, which is slightly more than 10 miles away, it could make the trip in roughly 2,383 years.

What will happen to the Strat when the concrete fails? Is it constantly maintained to last beyond the normal expectancy? I ponder this from my Sahara room while facing the beautiful tower outside my window.

According to the City of Las Vegas Emergency-Management Skyscraper-Collapse Response Team (LVEMSCRT), the STRAT tower is designed to fall east-southeast, across Las Vegas Blvd. and onto the hotel-casino's overflow parking lot, thus minimizing damage to the surrounding neighborhoods.

Of course, some cars will be impacted, along with a few buildings across Paradise Road. In any event, the Sahara is just under 1,900 feet from the tower, which is 1,149 feet tall, so it would miss your hotel room by about an eighth of a mile.