Power back; Mass. outage hit Harvard, MIT areas

Cambridge, Mass. (AP) - Officials say power has been restored in Cambridge, just outside Boston, after a about a two-hour outage delayed commuters and affected the campuses of MIT and Harvard University.

NStar utility spokesman Mike Durand said about 17,000 customers were affected at the height of the Thursday outage, which was related to a transmission line.

Harvard canceled an early evening forum featuring top officials of the Obama and Romney campaigns. University police said the entire campus had been without power, and officers assisted a few people stuck in elevators.

A spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said people also were rescued from elevators there but critical services had backup power.

Traffic was snarled, and transit authority spokesman Joe Pesaturo says the area's Red line was experiencing delays.