WITH FLAMES BEARING down on the remote California town of in August 2021, residents were getting ready to evacuate. The Dixie Fire, the state’s second-largest blaze ever, had already been wreaking havoc on the main business in town: the two state prisons, each with capacities in the thousands, that call Susanville home. The wildfire had taken out power lines supplying the prisons, with the California Correctional Center’s C-Yard hit particularly hard: The facility’s backup generator had failed, and the people incarcerated there had been without lights for nearly a month.
No power meant no cooking, no televisions to furnish a distraction. Time in the communal day room was scrapped. Prisoners could only rarely call their loved ones. Toilets stopped working for hours at a time, and the ventilation systems would go down as smoke wafted into the facility, according to two people incarcerated there at the time. (A California prisons official said the facility was “running full-power operations.”)
Now, with the Dixie Fire approaching, incarcerated people in the C-Yard were locked in their dark, smoky cells. Cell doors, normally electronically powered, were in some cases padlocked by guards, according to a man incarcerated at the C-Yard, who asked for anonymity to avoid reprisals. He said the guards dismissed prisoners’ concerns about how to open the locks if the flames came into the prison complex: “The COs would laugh at us and tell us, ‘You effers are going to stay in your cell.’”
No one in the C-Yard, five buildings constructed to house hundreds of people, had any idea if, when, or how they would get out if the flames encroached on the prison campus. “We never had any evacuation drills,” said Joseph Vejar, a prisoner at California Correctional Center who served as chair of the inmate advisory council; he says he discussed the fire and the generator failure with prison officials. Vejar said he was never shown the details of the prison’s emergency protocols: “I never heard of them having a plan for evacuation.”
WHILE MOST PEOPLE in places threatened by wildfires can flee — some residents in the Susanville area did last August — imprisoned populations, by definition, do not have control over their movements. They are instead at the mercy of the state.
Absent any details about evacuation plans, prisoners and their advocates across California are skeptical that meaningful arrangements exist.
In Susanville, a fire event was foreseeable. Using U.S. Forest Service data, The Intercept mapped wildfire risk against the locations of more than 6,500 prisons, jails, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers listed in a 2020 Department of Homeland Security register. The analysis showed that the California Correctional Center falls in the 90th percentile for wildfire danger in the nation.
With its vast expanse, enormous population, and hot, dry climate, California is the state with the most detention facilities at the highest risk levels: About a fifth of the state’s institutions are above the 95th percentile, according to The Intercept’s analysis. (The count includes a couple dozen small fire camps, where incarcerated firefighters are trained and work, that are by design in the most fire-prone areas.)
Meanwhile, wildfires in California have been getting worse — larger and more destructive, with each fire season coming earlier than the last. Warming temperatures and drought exacerbated by the climate crisis are creating an ever more parched landscape, leaving swaths of land ready to ignite.
“The California prison system should figure out the most high-risk prisons,” said Joe Scott, a wildfire researcher, “and make a plan.”
In an email, Terry Thornton, deputy press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which operates under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, said the agency regularly reviews and updates emergency protocols, including evacuation plans, for each prison. “Due to the construction features of many of our prisons and camps, landscape fuel management modifications, dedicated fire brigades, and planning, many of our state prisons are well prepared for any wildfire risks, regardless of the area they are located,” she said. Thornton declined to share any specific details “for safety and security reasons.”
Asked if the prison system analyzed wildfire risk for institutions, Thornton said the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services “develops and maintains planning, preparedness, prevention, response and recovery strategies.” Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the office, said the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation was responsible for identifying risks to prisons. “Our general take,” he said, “is every place in California is wildfire country in 2022.”
SCOTT HAS BEEN researching and modeling wildfire behavior since the 1980s, when the work was “an esoteric backwater of forestry that nobody cared about.” In 2004, Scott founded Pyrologix, a research firm based in Missoula, Montana, that assesses wildfire threats. After the deadliest and most destructive wildfire seasons on record in 2017 and 2018, Congress passed legislation calling for a nationwide assessment of the dangers posed by wildfires; the U.S. Forest Service hired Scott’s firm.
Scott and his team set out to develop a dataset that could be used as a tool for prioritizing the management of fuel before a blaze breaks out and the response after it does. To determine the most high-risk areas, they looked at both the probability that an area will burn in any given year and the potential for intense fires. They also sorted the data by housing density to identify areas where concentrated numbers of people might face fires.
As they combed through the data, Scott and his team noticed something: patches of very high-density housing in remote areas that were prone to burning. At first he suspected some kind of error in the model. As he went through each location, he was surprised instead to find carceral facilities. “Every time I look,” Scott said, “it’s a prison camp, a juvenile detention facility, a jail.”
The Forest Service fire data, which The Intercept used for its detention facility risk analysis, does not fully account for how fires are changing. Its assessments are based on historical records that cover 1992 to 2015 — not including, for instance, the Northern California blazes of October 2017 or the fires that have torn through the Pacific Northwest in recent years. The 2017 fires forced researchers like Scott to rethink changing wildfire behaviors. It soon became clear that the number of “fire weather days” — characterized by a combination of heat, strong winds, and low humidity — are proliferating from Oregon to Texas to Oklahoma.
“I do not see anywhere in the country where risk is going down,” Scott said. “It’s either flat or going up very, very fast.”
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