pic: Rock City Power Outage

[Breakaway3937]

Originally Posted by Tim Sharp

This weekend at Rock City was definitely a unique experience for me in my five years of FIRST. It was disappointing to miss out on all of our qualifying matches on Saturday, but the event organizers made the best of a very difficult situation that could have been much much worse.

No injuries were reported that I know of which is nearly a miracle. Moving around safely in the dark was not trivial.

We were kept well informed of the situation and the possible solutions. The coordination between the event staff and headquarters was well executed and, given the circumstances, the best possible solution was arrived at. Kate, the FTA was professional and extremely helpful throughout the entire ordeal.

The partially lit field looked really cool.

The stands resembled a concert when viewed from the arena floor with all of the cell phone flashlights being used.

I echo Tim's remarks. Sandy, Meredith, John, Kate, Greg, Blair, and all others involved handled it extremely professional and kept the information flowing constantly. I cannot commend the team enough for how they handled themselves in these tough matters. I think the outcome of the matches on Saturday morning was exactly what needed to happen. Way to go Arkansas FIRST and FIRST HQ!

[JDNovak]

From my recollection, within twenty minutes of the outage the event staff relayed that the power company was having to collect the parts to build a new pole and the estimated recovery time was between 1:30 and 2:30 pm.

The light came back on at 1:30 by my watch.

The complications were that the failure was too close to the event to re-route power and the pole was totally destroyed so no patch was possible.

My experiences have been that the more rural the power company the more competent they are at dealing with failures.

[Paul Copioli]

I have to say that even with the 4 hour delay this was one of the smoothest events I have been to in a very long time.

Having Blair at the event was a bonus even though he didn't mc many matches (he was training someone).

It has been a long time since I have been at an event that Kate was the FTA. I forgot that she is definitely one of the best FTAs in the business. Even though her real job is being the FRC Kit of parts manager she is an example for all FTAs. She is courteous to all of the teams and even takes the time to have short conversations with the students during times where everything is running smoothly.

The entire Ark planning committee really had an event for other events to emulate.

The ref crew was great and so was the field reset crew. The nightmares that I have heard about at other events just did not happen in Arkansas. 3310 would definitely come back again.

The lights out experience was quite cool other than the 4 hour delay part of the ordeal.

Paul

[Brikien93]

Here's a view from the red alliance side
http://imgur.com/cGGi99b