VACAVILLE – While firefighters managed to reach the progress of the LNU Lightning Complex Fire from reaching the city center, thick smoke and ash hung in the air Friday, raising concerns among family members of people who there were concerns about the health of their loved ones, who say the conditions have been terrible in Vacaville prison facilities.
The health effects of the smoke from the massive complex fires that have been raging throughout Northern California all week add to the COVID-19 pandemic that has shocked the state prison system, prompting calls for people in ‘ e war to be released and to maintain their health.
Robert Pape, who is being held at the California State Prison Institution in Vacaville, called his sister Christy Pape-Somerville on Wednesday and told her that N95 masks were only given to people while they were outside on the prison grounds, including officials from disputed the prison.
Inside, not everyone was provided with a mask, and although residents may have already had dust masks in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, those did not protect against the harsh smoke of the fire, he told his sister.
Pape told her that in the cells she would face the choice of sitting in sweltering heat or opening an air vent and letting smoke and ash into the LNU Lightning Complex fire.
He said he gets a bag of cold water – two at least – a day, Christy Pape-Somerville said in an interview with this news organization.
“No one deserves circumstances like this,” she said, adding that the air conditioning system was not working, according to her brother.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, she has not been able to personally visit her brother – who has been serving a life sentence since March, but she even experienced the summer heat of Vacaville last year when she saw him at the prison facility.
‘It was there all summer like a sauna. I would drip out and that was the better situation in the visiting room, ‘she said. “The situation in their cells is significantly worse.”
A spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Aaron Francis, in an email denied Pape’s allegations that not all inmates were offered N95 masks, stating that “Due to poor air quality caused by the Lightning Fire in Vacaville , all prisoners and staff were offered N95 masks. “
As for the heat, Francis said that when temperatures reach 90 degrees inside or outside, cooling measures will be put in place at the prison, including supplying ice water to residential homes, giving extra access to showers, opening cells of housing units, fans in housing set up units and send medical personnel to look for signs of exposure to heat.
But Adnan Khan, executive director of the nonprofit Restore Justice, has taken to Twitter to report concerns and reports from friends in the Solano facility similar to that of Pape.
“I got a call from my friend who is in the Solano State Prison near the fires,” Khan said in a Tweet on Friday. “He said the last few days that correctional officials entered the building with as if on the shoulders and hats.”
I got a call from my friend who is in the Solano State Prison near the fires. (We were barely 4 years self-employed in another facility). He said for the past few days that correctional officials had entered the building with ashes on their shoulders and hats.
– Adnan Khan (@ akhan1437) 21 August 2020
In a separate Tweet, Khan, who has been in the facility for several years, said the ventilation system is historically poor.
“The ventilation system was horrible,” he said in his Tweet. “Whatever the temperature and air quality were outside, it would blow into the cell.”
Questions are also being raised this week about whether the state should evacuate the jail because the fire in the rural north of Vacaville shocked and crept into the outskirts of the city, killing at least one person in Vacaville and killing at least three others in its distribution in Napa County. While the weeks around the jail on Wednesday were given warnings to evacuate, Francis said the jail was not geared towards evacuating.
He did not answer questions about whether the prison has an evacuation plan for the ongoing fires, instead noting that “we will continue to monitor the fires statewide and will adapt to temporary housing as necessary to protect the health of all persons.”
He also pointed to a program of fire irradiation and training conducted in June, in which CDCR staff worked with CalFire to conduct a controlled fire on 50 acres of state property on the hill behind the prison in Vacaville. That was aimed at creating a fire department around the prison to keep the vegetation around it from fire.
Health risks – and the threat of evacuation – are particularly high regarding the Solano Jail, which is located very close to the California medical facility, where people who are detained by the state are receiving medical treatment.
Rasheed Stanley-Lockheart, a former detainee who is now advocating for prison reform, said the nearby prison and medical facilities are full of people with health conditions, including respiratory problems, as well as elderly people – those ‘ t are all particularly sensitive to smoke.
He said he was not surprised to hear of bad air conditions in the Solano prison, where he has been held in the past. That prison, like others in the state, has a poor ventilation system.
Add the COVID-19 to the mix, and it’s a scary time for those stuck and the people who love it, Stanley-Lockheart explained.
His own family member, detained for more than 40 years, was moved to a tent set up at the CMF facility during COVID for dozens of residents to increase distance, but when the fires broke out, he and the rest of those in the outlying area tents were relocated, which Stanley-Lockheart fears will expose them to greater risk of COVID.
Stanley-Lockhart had not heard from his lover in a few days, but remained afraid that the circumstances would not be right.
That fear of COVID exposure will continue, he said, “unless they release it.”
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