This story was told by a person incarcerated at Solano.
Caller: And, and the thing is, the gym, they have I think they have what they call a swamp cooler on the roof. There is no heat. The conditions of the ambient temperatures up here in the Solano area are like 40, 50 degrees in the, you know, early morning.
UCI: Mhm.
Caller: There hasn’t been any heat or, it’s like freezing. I’m sleeping literally with a beanie, a jacket, and two blankets. And the cops are coming around, the officers are coming around harassing us about putting tents up. Just about trying to stay warm. You know.
UCI: Mhm.
Caller: And I’m, all of us in the gym, have, per se, tested positive for COVID. So, if we’re tested positive for COVID then that means that we are all patients. In a hospital situation. There, this cold air blowing in is not giving us the benefit to recovery. You know.
To beat COVID you have to deal with pneumonia. The flu, after COVID, and it’s just ridiculous. Well, let’s see, there’s no, the HVAC units in the gyms are inoperative. So, we’re not getting any heat. And it’s blowing cold air from the outside, from the ambient temperature outside.
Let’s see, there’s a sergeant in that came and talked to us about some of the things that were going on and I wrote a list out for her. But there is no hazmat material cleanup crew to clean the isolation cells, and the areas designated for inmates who are sick. So, that means, that when they told us that they were going to move us, there was a fit.
They told us, the 60 of us, to roll all of our property up, we were going over to Building 7, which is in Facility B, which are cells. So we’re going from the dorms to the cells. When we got to those cells, those cells were filthy. You could just, apparent, obvious, no one had cleaned those cells, no one had sanitized the cells, nothing. So, a lot of guys ended up catching, some kind of, I don’t know, some, a lung infection, some kind of allergic reaction to the poor ventilation that we were getting. That’s another issue I want to talk to you about, about the ventilation of the prison. So, they’re exposing us to unsanitary- they’re exposing us to unsanitary conditions.
UCI: Mhm.
Caller: And that they’re not cleaning the cells. They’re rotating inmates, rotating a circulation of the population around and they’re not sanitizing this place. So, the guys that had been in that cell before me, if he had COVID, then the COVID is in the walls, it’s on the table, it’s on the desk, and we’re exposed to it.
