Power outages plague Monday Night Football

Updated 10:10 p.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO - The San Francisco 49ers-Pittsburgh Steelers game started after a 20-minute delay because of a power outage at Candlestick Park. Later, a power outage caused the game to stop with just a few minutes gone in the second quarter.

The power throughout the stadium first went off about 25 minutes before the scheduled kickoff of 5:40 local time Monday. The public address system stopped working and fans were left in the dark until an emergency light came on in the far corner of the stadium.

A 49ers team spokesman said transformers appeared to fail outside the stadium. City engineers were working to switch the power over to the backup generators.

Joe Molica, a spokesman for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said the power company was still investigating the cause of the outage.

"So far I don't know what the cause is yet," Molica said. "We do know that Candlestick was the only customer affected by this outage."

Molica said PG&E and park authorities had made all the routine checks earlier in the day and that all systems appeared to be in order.

He said Candlestick was back up on full power and multiple crews at the park were investigating.

The power first started to come back on in the press box and the scoreboard ring around the stadium about 15 minutes later, drawing cheers from Steelers and 49ers fans. The stadium lights slowly turned on about 10 minutes later.

[you_MAY_be_right]

I really didn't see a problem. Let them play in the dim light until it gets absolutely too dark to see. just have to do more running and less passing. There was a time in foolball that no one passed (first forward pass was Sept. 5, 1906), it was all running plays from the start (origin of professional football can be traced back to 1892).

And checkout: http://1890sweekend.com/1892ftbl.htm for a little light reading on this subject.