Pitt cancels some classes after outage

The University of Pittsburgh has canceled some classes after a water main break caused an electrical outage that left several buildings without power.

The buildings affected by today’s outage include Clapp, Langley, Crawford and Alumni halls, as well as the Life Science and Music and School of Information Science buildings.

Employees of those buildings were also told not to report for work.

The school said the problem would take several hours to repair.

It was not immediately clear if the water main break was weather related. Temperatures were slightly above zero when the outage occurred about 7:30 a.m.

Crash snarls road for miles

A major downtown road was clogged this morning by a multivehicle crash.

State police said the crash in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 376 was not serious, but that the number of vehicles involved caused them to close the lanes. That caused traffic to back up for miles on the artery known as the Parkway East that runs along the Monongahela River downtown.

The crash happened sometime after 7:30 a.m. near the Oakland exit, a couple miles east of downtown.

Traffic was backed up across town and out through the Fort Pitt Tunnels, which carry the interstate into the city from the southwest.

It was not immediately clear how long it would take to reopen the highway.

There were no immediate reports of serious injuries.