FSM
Power Supplies
Don’t Score An Own Goal With Your Back-Up Power Systems
The floodlights failure at the back end of last year that caused the postponement of the Portsmouth vs Millwall game highlights the severe consequences that power outages can have for football clubs, comments Russell Pritchard, sales manager at emergency power specialists, Central Power Services.
After all, nobody wants to see power failures leading to abandoned matches and thousands of disappointed fans leaving the stadium early, as happened at Fratton Park. However, there are even more critical assets in football stadiums that simply cannot fail for the safety
of everyone attending a game - especially when it comes to the need for quick evacuations. Critical Life Safety Systems
Lights Out
We can't be certain what caused the floodlights to fail at the Portsmouth vs. Millwall game, although Portsmouth’s chief executive has said it was due to a substation issue that the club had no control over1
.
Regardless of the specific cause and background of this incident, it serves as a stark reminder of the importance for football clubs to have robust, well-maintained back-up power systems.
Of course, it’s important to highlight that floodlights in football grounds present unique challenges due to their massive power requirements and the operational nature of certain bulb types (some of which can need time to cool down and restrike), which can result in rare outages that are hard to prevent.
For this reason, Premier League clubs have processes in place to avoid such threats. For example, all Premier League teams use generators to power the whole ground during games (including the floodlights), which is known as a ‘fail to mains system’. With this approach, the mains serves as a secondary source of power, rather than the other way around. This avoids the 10-15 second wait for the generator to start up in the event of a failure.
However, due to the substantial costs involved with this approach, many clubs lower down the league pyramid simply can’t afford such options. In short, for all but the richest clubs in the UK, the risk of rare failures of non-critical features such as floodlights are something that can’t easily be avoided. Indeed, the Fratton Park incident followed a similar failure at National League South fixture AFC Totton vs Gosport Borough just a couple of weeks prior.
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The same can’t, and shouldn’t, be said for essential life safety systems in a stadium. When you have tens of thousands of fans who may need to all leave at the same time quickly - in an orderly fashion - there is some evacuation infrastructure that simply must not fail, whatever the wider issues in the network.
After all, safety is always paramount during a football match, and Portsmouth specifically made the decision to cancel the Millwall game ‘in the interest of everyone’s safety’. The club's chief executive said that: “We got to a point where the floodlights were back on but there was still an issue with non- emergency lighting and CCTV…so we had a decision to make in terms of crowd safety2
.”
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