Vegas Resort’s Giant Sportsbook Screen Taken Out By Heavy Rain, Even Though It’s Inside!

August 2, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Keeping spare components is rarely a bad idea when it comes to mission-critical technology, and I suspect either the supplier, integrator or operator was happy that was evidently done for the giant screen in the sportsbook of the Circa Resort in downtown Las Vegas.

The city doesn’t get a lot of rain, but when it does, there can be flash flooding because the city is just about covered in solid concrete and asphalt.

There was a big rain storm late last week in Vegas and several casino properties incurred rain damage, most notably the flashy, new-ish Circa property off Fremont Street. Photos and videos surfaced of water pouring out of several LED cabinets on the main fine-pitch LED viewing wall in the sportsbook.

Most of the flooding was at ground-level, and this sportsbook is – from what I recall – up two or three floors from the street (I recall escalators). So a window or vent or something else with a flaw let the water in, and it channeled its way to that screen.

This is what the huge, tilted screen looked like when I popped in to see it during InfoComm in June …

If you don’t have spares, you might be looking at weeks for replacement, and the new LED unitss might not totally match up with the rest of the screen because the teeny light emitters came from a different production batch and aren’t matched up for light and color properties. But if you do have spares, you make a call and set the wheels in motion to replace the water-damaged units. I don’t know the back-story here, but it’s a pretty safe assumption there was a spares pool in place … somewhere nearby.

Impressively, the storm happened Thursday and by Sunday, the screen was back in operation, like nothing ever happened.

 

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