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Oklahoma Jails Suffer Power Outages During Ice Storm

Thousands of Oklahomans lost electricity last week after a harsh ice storm cut through the state. The outages also left prisoners and staff in some local jails without power.

Power fluctuated in the Canadian County Jail for four days. Jail staff estimate they lost at most 48 hours of electricity. When the power cut out, the jail switched to generators and most of the building wasn’t seriously affected.

But County Undersheriff Kevin Ward says the old section of the jail, which is approved to hold up to 72 prisoners, lost heat while the power was out.

The Oklahoma County Jail's electric flow was weakened and some parts of the building lost power on and off for about two days.

Jail administrator Greg Williams says the generators wouldn’t always kick in during that time because the building was still getting partial power.

Williams says the jail locked down its prisoners during the fluctuations. He asked police not to bring new people to the jail if they could safely cite and release them, because jail staff had trouble accessing their computer system during the outage.

Multiple other county jails across the state reported short lived power outages to StateImpact.

The state’s emergency management agency reported Friday at least 47 counties are in a state of emergency and more than 230,000 outages have been reported statewide.

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Quinton Chandler worked at StateImpact Oklahoma from January 2018 to August 2021, focusing on criminal justice reporting.
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