NEW ORLEANS — Was it a car? Or a confetti canon?
That was the question on everyone's mind Saturday morning after something knocked out power on the Uptown parade route Friday night.
“We’re out here having fun and next thing I know it got dark and I was like 'did it just get dark?! What happened to the lights?'” Mindy Lumzy, who was watching the parade from just a block away, said.
Nearly 2,000 buildings along the St. Charles Avenue part of the Uptown parade route near the Pontchartrain Expressway lost power for about an hour. Entergy initially said the outage was caused by a car hitting a pole, but that explanation turned some heads.
For one, cars are few and far between as the parades roll down St. Charles Avenue. And on top of that, there's video that shows a confetti canon being shot into the power lines as the lights go out.
By Saturday morning, Entergy conceded that the confetti may have caused the outage. An Entergy spokesperson said that the crew on the ground told them there was damage on the pole that looked like a car hit it and that's all they had to go off of at the time.
But with the video in hand, they can't rule out confetti.
“Is it a cat? Or a squirrel? Or a confetti canon or what?" Courtyard Brewery owner Scott Wood said. "You know, at least there’s a little bit of levity, but these things seem to happen all the time.”
According to the spokesperson, some confetti canons contain mylar, the material used in shiny, metallic balloons. Those balloons have caused outages when they strike power equipment just right and this confetti can do the same thing.
But even though that canon would turn off the lights, it couldn't stop the parade.
“An hour later the lights came back on and we were like ‘they’re back on! Let’s go have fun!'" Lumzy said. "We felt safe though. A lot of police patrolling.”
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