The Guardian reports:

California’s raging wildfires have created a crisis at multiple state prisons, where there are reports of heavy smoke and ash making it hard to breathe, unanswered pleas for evacuation, and concerns that the fire response could lead to further Covid-19 spread.

A massive fire in the Vacaville area, north of San Francisco, has rapidly spread within miles of two state prisons this week, including one that imprisons terminally ill people in hospice care and the elderly and medically vulnerable.

Despite mass evacuation orders in surrounding areas authorities have resisted calls to evacuate the two adjacent prisons – California Medical Facility (CMF) and Solano state prison. In Los Angeles, a separate fire has grown near the Lancaster state prison, which has also suffered a significant Covid outbreak.

“They are breathing in fire and smoke, and they have nowhere to run,” said Sophia Murillo, 39, whose brother is incarcerated at CMF in Vacaville. “Everyone has evacuated but they were left there in prison. Are they going to wait until the last minute to get them out?”

To increase social distancing and limit the spread of Covid, CMF had moved 80 people to sleep in outdoor tents instead of indoor cells, but with the fire approaching and air pollution rising, the prison moved them back indoors. Murillo said she now fears a major Covid outbreak inside the prison, and noted that mass evacuations could also spread the virus if people are packed in buses together.

“I’m furious at the incompetence and severe inhumanity of this,” said Kate Chatfield, policy director with the Justice Collaborative, a group that fights mass incarceration. “Covid is allowed to rage through the prison system and kill people, and then they have tent hospitals set up … and now with wildfires, they take down the tents and put these people back in the Covid-infected building?”

Aaron Francis, a spokesman for the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR), told the Guardian late Thursday that officials were monitoring the Vacaville fires but that the two prisons were “not in immediate danger” and had no current orders to evacuate. The prisons were initially located within the direct evacuation zone on Wednesday, but were later removed. The Solano county sheriff’s office, which issues evacuation orders, did not respond to an inquiry.

California depends on incarcerated laborers to fight wildfires and Covid lockdowns inside prisons forced a dozen of the firefighting crews to shut down earlier this summer, adding to the chaos. More than 1,300 incarcerated firefighters were currently responding to the blazes, Francis said. [Continue reading…]