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| Power not fully restored to Michigan jail |
| By Macomb Daily |
| Published: 08/19/2003 |
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The nation's largest electrical blackout may be over, but problems persist at the Macomb County, Mich., Jail in Mount Clemens where a faulty transformer has forced corrections officers to perform manually tasks normally done by computer. When the power outage hit Thursday, a transformer broke down and replacement parts being shipped out of Atlanta likely won't arrive until Tuesday at the earliest, officials said Sunday. 'This situation is just driving us up a wall,' Sheriff Mark Hackel said. Without the transformer to pump the electricity, many services in the jail that impact both the public and the 1,400 prisoners are being affected. 'Our corrections officers are cooking food on gas grills instead of in the kitchen. There's no air conditioning in sections of the jail. We have to turn away visitors because we haven't been able to keep up with the records to see who's supposed to be being released from custody,' Hackel said. County jailers also faced a near disaster when the initial outage hit last week when a generator energizing a sewage system at the facility failed and the basement of the building began to flood. A private company loaned a generator to the jail, even as corrections officers -- some using flashlights -- were moving prisoners out of their cells and into a holding area. On Sunday, jail officials were worried about the latest potential disaster. 'Everything in our computer system was fried and there wasn't a backup program in there,' Hackel said. 'Now we're doing everything manually.' The new system was ordered Sunday and may arrive by Tuesday, but Hackel said he anticipates the jail will operate on limited power until the end of the week. Hackel said he's had to order a number of workers to remain on the job on an overtime basis to complete the work, but the officers' energy is running low. 'We've been asking them to dig into the well quite a bit here,' Hackel said. In an unrelated matter, police officials in local communities say their prisoner lockups are filling up quickly. Since government offices were closed Friday and over the weekend, police have been unable to secure warrants and other paperwork from the Macomb County Prosecutor's Office to process people arrested in the past few days. |
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