Evacuated Sacramento County jail ‘still in danger of flooding.’ Where were inmates moved?
Sacramento County’s jail facility near Elk Grove remained empty Tuesday as crews installed temporary dams around the detention center to protect it from flooding.
Heavy rain and strong wind on New Year’s Eve flooded roads, breached levees and created widespread power outages throughout the Sacramento region but left the south county facility spared.
More rain fell Monday evening, and the National Weather Service forecast shows another major storm will arrive Wednesday in Northern California. The storm could dump another 3 inches of rain on the region with wind gusts up to 50 mph, creating a high risk of widespread power outages and flooding in low-lying areas.
Sgt. Amar Gandhi, a spokesman for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office, said the 1,075 inmates evacuated on Sunday afternoon from the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center remained housed Tuesday at other detention facilities in the Sacramento area. The inmates were relocated to the downtown Main Jail; California State Prison, Sacramento, also known as New Folsom; and California State Prison, Solano.
“They’ll be there for the foreseeable future,” Gandhi said Tuesday. “The last thing we want to do is bring them all back and have to evacuate them again.”
He said the Sheriff’s Office has a plan in place to return inmates to the facility near Elk Grove but that won’t happen until the weather improves and the flood threat dissipates. Gandhi said crews have been called to install the tiger dams, which are reusable flexible tubes filled with water, around the jail which “is still in danger of flooding.”
The sheriff’s command staff, in collaboration with regional agencies, decided evacuating the facility on Bruceville Road was the best course of action to safeguard the inmates and jail staff, who have been relocated to assist in the care and housing of the inmates at the other facilities.
Deciding who goes where also took extensive planning. Gandhi said authorities took into account the inmates’ criminal history, the charges they face, whether they’ve been convicted and sentenced or are still awaiting trial and whether they’re associated with groups likely to assault rivals while incarcerated.
Gandhi said nearby road conditions eroded as the storm continued to pound the region, so there was a fear it would be difficult to get vehicles into or out of the south county facility, often referred to as The Farm. The Sheriff’s Office expressed its gratitude to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which also assisted in the transportation of the evacuated inmates, and regional agencies that cleared roads to facilitate the evacuation that went on for several hours Sunday.
“It was no small undertaking,” Gandhi said. “It was a massive operation.”
This story was originally published January 3, 2023 at 1:57 PM.
