Las Vegas Weekly

March 27, 2009 · 9:09 AM

Las Vegas joins in Earth Hour one-hour blackout tomorrow night

By Robin Leach

The Strip.

Photo: Tom Donoghue/www.donoghuephotography.com

Las Vegas will officially go dark at 8:30 p.m. tomorrow for one hour! The lights go out! The neon is switched off! For all intents and purposes, we’ll be operating with candles!

It’s all to mark Earth Hour, and some 2,000 cities and hundreds of millions of people across the world will join the blackout. The unique effort is being propelled by the World Wildlife Fund to make a bold statement about climate change.

Our Flamingo headliners Donny & Marie Osmond star in this PSA promoting the Earth Hour blackout:

At the Las Vegas Earth Hour Web site www.earthhourlv.org, you can find the most up-to-date list of participants, a list of events and other news about what’s happening here on and off the Strip tomorrow night.

In America alone, there are more than 100 cities signed up, including Las Vegas. From coast to coast, national landmarks will go dark, including the United Nations in New York and Santa Monica Pier’s Ferris wheel! The nation’s most famous skylines including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C, will all go dark along with cities in 81 countries including Beijing, Berlin, Copenhagen, Dubai, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Nairobi, Paris, Rome, Sydney and Toronto as Earth Hour cascades through the world’s time zones on the historic night.

In New York, Times Square and the Empire State Building will be blacked out. In Chicago, the Sears Tower and the John Hancock building will go dark. In San Francisco, the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge will be switched off. In St. Louis, the Gateway Arch will vanish in the dark.

Overseas, the Sydney Opera House in Australia, the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, Niagara Falls on the Canadian-U.S. border, Edinburgh Castle in Scotland, Table Mountain in South Africa, the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, the Moscow State University London’s Piccadilly Circus and King Hussein’s mosque in Jordan will all go dark.

On the Strip, most hotels will switch off the power, including the giant beam from the top of the Luxor pyramid. At New York-New York, when the lights go out on the roller coaster, riders will wear glowing neon necklaces, and the acoustic band Alternative Energy, will perform without electricity! Downtown on Fremont Street, when the Viva Vision canopy and hotel casino marquees are switched off, more than 5,000 glow necklaces will be handed out free to guests.

Even the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign will be turned off. Clark County Commission Chairman Rory Reid and WWF’s Nick Sundt will turn off the sign from a six-foot-tall light switch at 8:30 p.m. to signal everything else in town to go dark.

It should be an extraordinary hour!

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

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