KEY POINTS:
Power was cut to large parts of downtown Wellington this afternoon after a piece of equipment in a Transpower station failed.
Power is believed to have been cut to Parliament and all of Lambton Quay and the Fire Service reported that two people had been trapped in lifts.
The power cut happened just before midday and electricity was restored at about 12.15pm.
Cabinet continued during the outage.
A Transpower spokeswoman said: "The power cut occurred when one of the transformers at our Wilton substation tripped."
"That took out 70 megawatts of load, but we had some guys up there already and they were straight onto it."
Vector spokeswoman Philippa White said about 14,000 households and businesses were effected.
- NZHERALD STAFF
