To be effective, emergency preparedness plans need to address the specific risks facing an institutional or commercial facility. But when the occupants of a particular facility are prisoners, the challenges for facility managers involved in developing and implementing a plan are more complex than usual, as the state of California is finding out.
2023 flooding that threatened two California state prison, Corcoran and the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, exposed major problems with the facilities’ emergency preparedness, revealing that neither facility had a robust evacuation plan on hand nor was ready for the looming disaster.
The floods that year ultimately did not reach the prisons, but the threat they posed illustrated how California’s 90,000-prisoner corrections system has failed to prepare for natural disasters, according to Cal Matters, detailing a report issued recently by the state’s Office of Inspector General. which reviewed emergency plans for 30 state prisons after fielding concerns about the department’s disaster response.
The report detailed deep fractures in the department’s emergency preparedness, including issues of transportation, varied risk assessment methodologies, lacking mutual aid agreements, timely evacuations, and prison overcrowding. As of December, California’s prison system was operating at roughly 120 percent beyond its designed capacity, according to the report.
The report also noted that some prisons are overcrowded and that the department is unable to evacuate the incarcerated population and staff at most prisons within the first 72 hours of an emergency.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.?
