Friday, September 27th, 2019

Inspector General Releases Report on 2019 MDC Power Outage

The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report on the electrical fire and ensuing power outage at the MDC Brooklyn last winter.  You can access the report here.

There were significant heating issues at the MDC, but these were unrelated to the fire.  Turns out, there are “long-standing temperature regulation issues,” which caused temperatures to drop as low as 59 degrees one week before the fire, and to rise over 80 degrees.  The MDC’s management did not effectively address heating during the power outage.  It also failed to address certain medical issues, namely, inmates who used CPAP machines, or provide an alternative means of making medical requests once the standard electronic request method was unavailable during the power outage.

If you have a client who was at the MDC during the outage, this report may be useful at sentencing.  If you have clients who were at the MDC at other times, the information on the heating issues may be useful.

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