A new report documents widespread deterioration of fire safety, sanitation and building infrastructure at Rikers Island and the rest of the aging New York City jails system, the Daily News has learned.
A sprinkler failure during a near-deadly fire was among thousands of examples cited in the new report covering January through April filed Wednesday by a court-appointed monitor responsible for tracking conditions in the city jails.
The blaze started when Rikers Island detainee Marvens Thomas used wires attached to a battery to spark a fire in his cell April 6 that soon grew out of control as the sprinkler system meant to protect his housing unit sputtered and fell silent.
As the fire raged that day in Rikers’ North Infirmary Command, smoke blackened the walls, and rescuers seemed nowhere to be found. One detainee, Hector Rodriguez, got what air he could by sticking his head in a toilet bowl, and then scooped water from the bowl to try to douse Thomas, who was on fire.
“The entire time I felt sure I was going to die,” Rodriguez, 26, told the Daily News.
The sprinkler system failed because it was shut down after one sprinkler head was damaged by a detainee and never repaired or turned back on, investigators concluded. The Correction Department couldn’t say how long the system had been turned off.
“It appears that the department’s failure to track its work orders — an evergreen issue — was a primary cause of the inability to extinguish the fire quickly,” lawyers with the Legal Aid Society wrote.
The systemic breakdown exposed in the North Infirmary Command fire is one example of endemic problems in critical systems in the city jails like fire safety, sanitation, heating and air conditioning, and ventilation, the new monitor report says.
“Inspections conducted during this monitoring period recorded thousands of violations distributed across all facilities,” the report said, a sentence previously repeated in a March monitor report and reports prior to…
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