Like everything else in lower Manhattan, Hurricane Sandy knocked out power at the US Nation Guard’s armoury. The 69th Infantry Regiment would’ve been screwed. Victoria’s Secret saved their arses. Here’s how the servicemen got their groove back.
Every year, the lingerie company tapes its fashion show at the regiment’s armoury, and this year, it happened to coincide with Sandy. For the show, they brought eight 500W generators to the armoury. The Victoria’s Secret producers were happy to help and by Tuesday night, the armoury was fully powered. Hurray for bras! [Wired]
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the National Guard should probably have backup generators.
Indeed... although they probably did have backup generators, enough for essentials but not enough to be "fully powered"
Well, they were National Guard. Unfortunately, they tend to be under trained and their equipment under maintained. It is likely that the Guards' generators were non operational or lacked trained personnel to operate them.
500w is pretty small for a generator. That's enough to power 5 light bulbs. I don't think the facts are right.
Source says 500kw generators were used.
You beat me to it, the difference is HUGE! I'd hate to imagine how much stuff they have to put on that show if they have 8x500kw that's massive.
Well, 4MW would power a good sized multi-channel TV station, but I expect Victoria probably allowed n+1 redundancy at the very least (probably n+2) - based on the location, prestige and one-off nature of the event.
On top of that, she probably isolated the remaining capacity between technical, lighting and 'other' services - to minimise the risk of transient noise and 'crosstalk' between the different load types.
Which ever way you look at it, that's a lot of power!