Reporters at The New York Times get a lot of email. Much of it is spam, unsolicited press releases, questions or complaints about our coverage. Occasionally, there is a solid news tip. But even then, it rarely feels as urgent as this one did.

I thanked the sender, asked for details and offered my phone number. No one called or replied.

I searched Google, Twitter. There was no mention of a power outage at the M.D.C. — other than a tweet from a lawyer who had said two weeks earlier that she had recently been turned away from the jail: The staff said it had to shut down power because the jail was testing a generator.

I asked the lawyer, Betsy Ginsberg, who runs the civil rights clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, if she had heard anything more since then. Yes, she replied, there had been a fire at the jail on Jan. 27, four days before.

“They have had no power since then and are on lockdowns with no lights, no corrlinks,” the email system used by inmates, she wrote. “No social calls, some units have heat and some don’t.”