Power restored after failure in East Cambridge

By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff

CAMBRIDGE -- A power failure cut electricity for about an hour this morning in East Cambridge, plunging the Middlesex Courthouse, county jail, and CambridgeSide Galleria into darkness.

The power went out at about 9:45 a.m. when equipment failed in a substation on East Cambridge Street, according to Caroline Allen, a spokeswoman for NStar. The outage only affected about 50 customers, but they included the courthouse and the mall. Power was restored at about 10:45 a.m.

In Cambridge Superior Court, the power failed as a defense attorney was questioning a witness in the retrial of Alexander Pring-Wilson, a former Harvard graduate student charged in the death of an 18-year-old Cambridge man. There was a loud pop and the courtroom went dark. A few moments later, emergency lighting kicked on. At least two people were trapped in an elevator during the outage, court officials said.

The Middlesex Courthouse is a 17-story building on Thorndike Street. The jail occupies the top floors of the building and is operated by the Middlesex Sheriff’s Office. The jail has backup generators and the power outage did not impact security, according to spokesman Michael Hartigan.

At the CambridgeSide Galleria, about 50 stores lost power just before the mall opened at 10 a.m., according to spokeswoman Jennifer Rotigliano. There were few customers in the mall, Rotigliano said.

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