What’s going on in Las Vegas? According to this article, the Bellagio resort in Las Vegas has been without power since Sunday! Don’t these resorts have backup generators?
Apparently it’s a Bellagio problem since Nevada Power says it isn’t in their lines. What kind of problem could take a single facility out and keep them off-line for going on two days. This isn’t a case where an entire power grid is down; it’s essentially just one building. Anyone have any solid info or rampant speculation on what’s going on?
According to this article thay have a backup power system.
Unfortunately due to an amazing piece of design, repairing the primary power system can only be done with the backup power turned off. 
According to a news report this morning (on the local NBC affiliate), the backup generators failed to kick in. An AP article in the morning paper said that enough of an emergency power system was online to turn on dim emergency lights throughout the casino. A spokesman for the casino said in the same article that the power line coming into their casino is what failed. My guess is that it’s some finger-pointing/blame-shifting and eventually they’ll figure out what’s up and who was at fault.
What I’ve seen in the news is that Bellagio’s primary underground power feed from the utility substation failed. It’s unclear if it was dug into, water damaged, crushed, insulation failure, etc. They’re working on replacing the cable, and probably won’t know what went wrong until they find a charred squirrel, soggy section, or whatever. There’s a few thousand feet of wire involved, so it may take some time to do the “forensics” on it.
They, like most of the major properties in Las Vegas, have a redundant connection to another utility substation. If the primary feed fails, transfer switches at the hotel automatically kick over to the backup line. If this happens, the guests would at the worst, see a momentary flicker in the lights. Given that most lights in a casino are blinking anyway, it’s likely to be entirely missed.
For some quirk in the system, they had to disable the backup feed to work on the primary feed. Whether this is due to bad design, mis-wiring, or simply that both the primary and secondary feeds terminate in the same enclosure, and they had to disable the secondary for safety, I don’t know. In this day of color-coded threat levels, I’m a little surprised they’ve divulged this much information about their electricity.
They’ve also got emergency backup generators that are sufficient to power something like two elevators and some emergency lighting. They’re closed at the moment, and intend to re-open on Wednesday.
Regarding “finger-pointing”
Bellagio owns the power cables. Nevada Power owns the substations. Seems pretty cut-and-dried, but at least NP has been working with Bellagio on the cable replacement.
Looks like the cable has been replaced, and they’re testing now.
Any finger-pointing will be at the maker of the cable (defective?), whoever installed it (installed improperly?), the last person to drive a heavy truck near it (damaged it?), etc.