The central air unit at the DeKalb County Jail Annex quit working Friday and it may be Monday before it’s repaired. As a result, Sheriff Patrick Ray said several prisoners have had to be taken to other county jails. Meanwhile family video visitation for this weekend has been canceled.
“On Friday evening, we noticed that the annex side of the jail was starting to heat up,” said Sheriff Ray. “We knew at that time that there was probably something wrong with the central heat and air unit. We called a local central heat and air company to come up and check it. They found out that one of the motors in the air unit had burned up. We feel like this was due to the transformer blowing Thursday in the city limits of Smithville. We’ve had some power surges at the jail from that and we think that was the cause of the unit going bad. They found a part in Nashville. They were going to go get it. At that time, we knew we needed to do something to try and keep the jail annex as cool as we could. We contacted Jamie Turner, who has an industrial sized fan that takes water across a fan through a radiator system to produce cool air. We asked to borrow that from Turner. He was good enough to bring that up here to the jail and help us with that. We also got high speed fans from the volunteer fire department, so we could circulate some air in here so it wouldn’t be so hot. When they came back from Nashville with the part, they discovered that it would not work. We called to check with other area central heat and air companies and found that nobody has this particular part. We learned that it would be Monday before anybody could get the part needed to fix the unit and to install it for us. So we knew at that time, we had to do something with our inmates,’ said Sheriff Ray.
“At the time this happened, there were thirty eight male inmates in the cells. We took five of the inmates and moved them to a different area here in the old part of the jail, where the central air is still working. We took fifteen inmates to Rutherford County, twelve inmates to Warren County, and four inmates to Smith County to the county jails there. Warren County was good to us. They provided a ten passenger van which is set up to haul inmates. Smith County also did some transports for us, back to their facility. We will not house any inmates in here (jail annex) until this (central unit) is fixed.,’ said Sheriff Ray.
“This also affects our visitation for inmates. Our video visitation is set up here in our jail where a family goes into a room. They look on a monitor and they talk through a hand set to the inmate which is still in their cell. The place where the family goes is in the annex so we have suspended the visits up here for this weekend, which is on Saturday and Sunday. Both days have been suspended. They will resume next weekend. So we’re hoping that we can get this fixed on Monday and get our inmates back over here. Hopefully, everything will be okay with the original side of the jail, with the central and air unit there,” said Sheriff Ray.
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