By OLIVIA BERGMEIER
Salina Post
With a brand new building, many unseen hiccups regularly come to light once put to the "official" test.
At the new Saline County Jail, one hiccup presented itself during a record-breaking cold snap — inconsistent heating for two pods.
On Saturday night, staff at the Saline County Jail noticed two pods were not receiving proper heating from the working HVAC system, causing them to become chillier than the rest of the jail.
According to Saline County Administrator Phil Smith-Hanes, the failure stemmed from the computer system not properly sending a signal for heat in two of the pods.
"The maintenance staff at the jail became aware that in two of the pods, the heat being called for by the computer was not being delivered," Smith-Hanes said. "Parts of the building are being heated, so it's just not delivering to one part of the building for whatever reason."
Smith-Hanes said contractors fixed one of the pods' heating on Saturday but continued to work on the second through Sunday.
Even though temperatures dipped to 5 degrees below zero on Saturday night, Saline County Sheriff Rodger Soldan said every inmate kept warm due to the sheer size of the jail.
"The inmate population isn't up to the jail's capacity yet," Soldan said. "We only have 230 inmates, and we've got a 400-bed jail, so a third of it was basically empty."
The system errors have been a recurring issue for staff and inmates at the jail, which Smith-Hanes and Soldan said contributed to waiting to move inmates after construction concluded.
During this latest system snafu, the staff kept every inmate safe, with Soldan reporting no exposure or cold-related injuries.
"All the inmates got moved out of that pod into the third that was working just fine," Smith-Hanes said. "Everybody's nice and warm, and we're trying to figure out why the malfunction was happening.
Since the building is new, staff continue to learn about its complicated computer system and how to utilize its entire capacity best.
"It's one of the things where we had an issue earlier, a sort of similar thing in the medical unit, and we were figuring that out," Smith-Hanes said. "That was one of the reasons we didn't move people in quite as soon as we had originally wanted because we're trying to get ahead of these issues."
As of Sunday, staff continued to work on the second pod that did not receive heat from the system.
Salina Post will update this story as more information becomes available.