Aaron Ortega looked at the lieutenant’s computer screen through the glass window in the prison dayroom. It was January 22nd, and local news featured footage of a new flame that had come at Kastatic late that morning.
As he and several of the men around him continued to watch, they learned that the flame was the flame of Hughes’ fire. Suddenly, the camera pulls back and Ortega realizes that the scene appears familiar.
“It’s across the street,” someone said with caution. “It’s fire!”
Then they realized they could smell smoke. And there was nothing they could do.
The Hughes fire began that morning less than five miles from Ortega’s dorms at Pitges Detention Center North, one of four lockups in the county’s vast Castitic prison complex. Ortega asked not to use his birth name for fear of retaliation.
As the day went by, the fire grew to 10,000 acres, becoming so close that the facilities (about 4,700 prisoners and 300 guards) all fell into the evacuation zone. Officials from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department will move hundreds of prisoners from barracks to sturdy concrete buildings and find and rent more transport buses when large evacuations need to be organized. I scrambled like that. At one point, flames creeped up within a mile of prison before the firefighters beat them.
“I’m willing to lose one person at the facility,” Sheriff Robert Luna said at the time.
However, citing the advice of firefighters, the Sheriff’s Department did not empty the lockup, so he wrote about life safety and defensible spaces around the prison “after assessing strategic options.” The better it was to evacuate. . The department compared the situation to a Franklin fire last year. Meanwhile, Pepperdine University told students to take shelter to libraries and other fire-resistant structures instead of from the escape campus.
The students survived, as did Castati inmates last month. But a few weeks later, families of justice advocates, lawyers and prisoners are still plagued by what-if.
“But there could have been a catastrophe that would have been something else in the point of physical death due to winds blowing in another direction,” said Deputy Director of the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. One Collen Kendrick told the Times this week.
She pushed back her comparison with Pepperdine, noting that university students were “not locked up in dorm rooms” by university staff.
Over the weekend, civil rights groups raised other lingering concerns in a website post, questioning whether air or water quality tests have been in place since the fire, and calling on county leaders to “request an effective evacuation plan in the future.” I urged him to do it.
In a statement emailed late Monday, the Sheriff’s Department said it has not tested air quality at the prisons, but will ensure fires and water are routinely tested to meet state guidelines. Therefore, he said the air filters have been inspected and in place.
When the fire broke out shortly before 11am, Ortega would read books and glimpse into television from time to time. In his unit, the guards control the channels and often leave them in sports and films, but rarely in the news.
After losing interest in books, he stood up, took a shower, sat up to wait for lunch, and arrived around 1pm, a little later than usual.
By then, the flame had spread over 5,000 acres. LA County Public Defenders Union has issued a social media statement calling for all custative facilities to be evacuated.
However, it wasn’t until the afternoon that Ortega and other men in his dorm found the aide’s screen and noticed that there was a fire nearby. As soon as they did, they called home for more information and began sharing what they had learned.
When he found the free phone, Ortega dialed the number for his sister. She had already been worried after seeing the news reports of the fire, so she wanted to know if anything was said about what was going on.
“Nothing,” he told her. “They didn’t take us to the garden for air quality.”
As the day went by, there were other confusion. Weekly committee orders were not received. The smoke became thick and the man began to cough. Ortega was worried that he would not go to court the next day.
Black clouds loomed outside the facility’s small window at the nearby North County Correctional Facility. Prison officials locked up the facility and closed the air circulation system to avoid smoke.
Those who asked not to name them for fear of retaliation said some were trying to understand if there was a way to break the window and escape if the flames got too close. Rather than emptying the facility, officials moved more people there, taking hundreds of men south from exposed barracks at the Pitches Detention Center, and moving to the NCCF’s concrete safety I did.
Still, supporters and inmates’ families were worried. Kimberlin Ortega told The Times, who felt “helpless” as she waited worriedly for her brother’s call. Erica Lewis said she was “terrifying” when she wasn’t hearing from her son who was in one of the Castati prisons when the fire broke out.
Just before dinner – it appeared late – Ortega said deputies handed out N95 masks. Some men tried to ask the guards about the fire conditions.
“The delegate just said, ‘If that gets worse, we’ll move you,'” he recalled.
He has heard about the shortage of buses – about three-quarters of the department’s inmate transport buses have no more fees – and wondered whether such a massive evacuation is really possible. Ta.
Until 10pm he realized there would be no evacuation that night. “That’s when I started to worry,” he said. “What would you do if this building was set on fire? I don’t want to burn. I would rather be drowned than burn.”
Shortly before midnight he went to bed and covered his face with an extra shirt to prevent smoke. By the time Ortega woke up in the morning, the worst danger had passed. The flames recede, and in just over a week, the firefighters were fully involved.
Ultimately, the Sheriff’s Department raided nearly 100 buses, borrowing from the state’s prison system, local public transport, in case the winds change. He said that. In a budget presentation before the Private Monitoring Committee this week, sheriff’s officials purchased another $11 million bus next year, in addition to the 20 new buses covered by the current budget. He said he is asking the county to do so.
But even so, it is not enough to completely replenish the division’s 82-bus fleet, which had been diminished to around two dozen operational buses by the end of last year.
“La County escaped a half mile of disaster. The ACLU wrote in a blog post on Saturday. “In LA County and across the country, imprisonment alternatives could reduce our awfully oversized calsal footprint.” It can and makes it much easier to protect our community from the disasters that are coming.”
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