More On the Plumbing Catastrophe in Bullock Prison, Alabama, Christmas Week

Prisoners Taking Matters Quite Literally Into Their Own Hands to Try to Fix It, Being Denied Cleaning Supplies. This is an Unfolding Public Health Disaster.

(Photo from gatherhear.com)

(More parts in the Bullock Prison series, and Part Two in the St. Clair Series, are still forthcoming.)

Given the updates I’ve been getting throughout Christmas week regarding the ongoing plumbing disaster in Bullock Prison, I figured I’d make the plumbing and flooding stories their own short side series, separate from the overall series on that prison.

The day after Christmas, “Derek” called me again to follow up about the plumbing issues we’d discussed Monday night (toilets not flushing, sewage overflowing from the floor drains into the dorm, prisoners unable to shower, shit, or piss, and other problems).

I ask how things have been the past couple of days. This time, I have my recorder.

“Two mornings ago, when we came back from morning breakfast, chow hall — this is at, like, 3:00, 3:30 in the morning — me and [“Jordan”] started working when we came back from breakfast. And I know — I know, man — we worked for at least six hours straight, sweeping the water and stuff up off this damn floor,” says Derek.

He and another prisoner, referred to as “Jordan” in Part Two of the main series on Bullock, took it upon themselves to do anything they could to try to clean up the mess. The state won’t help them fix the plumbing or clean up the mess, and as far as prisoners, “because of their mental health,” says Derek, “some of them are incapable of doing it, but the ones who are, some of them are just like, ‘Nah, I’m not going to clean that shit up for the state.’ They’re like, ‘Fuck the state. I’m not doing shit for the state.’ But, if we don’t do it, they’re going to track through that shitty, pissy water, and track it all over the dorm. We’re trying to keep it contained in just the bathroom area.”

Derek continues, “So, Jordan and I had to take trash bags — and [a guard] did give us a pair of rubber gloves, thank God, but if they hadn’t, we were going to do it with the trash bags anyway and just wash our hands — but we had to take trash bags in deep down into the shitters, like, take a trash bag and pop it open, and get the bottom of the trash bag in one hand and sort of open it up and feed it down your arm and then reach down into the toilet and get the hunks of shit and toilet paper and stuff out of there and throw it into a big trash bag.

“We had to clean all that shit out of those shitters in order to start trying to get that water to go down. And now, we got it [down] but still cannot flush the toilets, shitters, take a shower, nothing, without the water running up in the drains in the floors. They had to call Roto-Rooter type people out there, free world people, to come out. We got word through the ear from one of the maintenance men that works here that said that the septic tanks that they have on the outside of the camp, out back right there, are overflooding, and they have to get [free world plumbers] to come out here and, I guess, pump some of that stuff out of those septic tanks.

“But, anyway, all that water and stuff that we were getting up, we were having to put it in those trashcans. Remember I told you we didn’t have any trash cans right now because they were filled up with water? And a lot of that water had trash and stuff in it, pieces of shit, man, toilet paper and stuff like that. But irregardless, we had to drag those trash cans full of water, I mean, 50 gallon trash cans, man, things are heavy. We had to take and drag those out by the back door, by the shift office.

“The thing about it is what I’m telling you can all be proven because they’ve got cameras, and we’ve got times, and dates.

“We had to pull those trashcans out the backdoors, by the shift office, and pour that water out the back doors. So, all that water is standing out there now. It looks like a shit pond out there is what it looks like. I don’t know if you live in the city or whatever, but we have shit ponds around here, down in the South, that people throw stuff like that into. It’s around chicken plants and stuff like that.

“But, anyway, that’s what it looks like out the back door of that shift office, man, and it is nasty. And it stinks in here so bad. We tried to get them to give us some bleach, and some other chemicals like Pine Sol and stuff like that, to try to help us clean up in here, so we can get rid of some of the smell, but they ain’t give us any.

“We just had to clean the mop out as much as we could with good hot water, and wring it out as good as we could, and keep it cleaned up. And me and Jordan, we worked for six hours straight on Christmas Eve,” early into Christmas morning.

Sometime between 2007 and 2009 — he can’t remember exactly — “I was at Easterling [Prison],” Derek recalls, “and they had, not a riot, but a lockdown. 108 of us went out in the middle of the field during yard call, and when they called the lockdown to put us back into the dorms and everything, to close the yard down, we wouldn’t go back in. We stayed out there. And we stayed out there and then they brought in their riot team, their CERT team, all that. But there was 108 of us.

“Actually, they didn’t have enough personnel to do anything with us if we had really wanted to buck. You know what I’m saying?

“So, the other day, when all this shit water was in here and we couldn’t breathe in here and these people wouldn’t open the doors, when they did open the doors, for pill call and stuff like that, a whole bunch of us started to get together and do that same thing.

“We were all going to just leave out of the dorm — and we were going to chow — but we were going to walk down the hallway, and we weren’t going to walk back down until they’ve done something about this shit.

“That’s the state of mind that these guys are in, Matthew. And they are talking about doing that big time ever since they started talking about it the other night.

“I’ve been trying to keep up with this stuff for you, but right now, I know I counted 213. Now, think about that. Back when we did this [in Easterling], there was only 108 of us. You got 213 prison inmates go down the hallway and tell them, ‘Fuck you. We ain’t marching down until y’all do something about this shit,’ and there’s not going to be anything they can do about that. They’re going to have to call in the riot team and the CERT team and all that shit.”