The Manatee County Sheriff’s Office is urging people to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Milton’s arrival after officials decided against doing so for the jail’s inmates.
On Tuesday afternoon, a Manatee County Jail deputy confirmed to Newsweek that the facility was not planning on evacuating approximately 1,200 inmates.
The decision comes despite state and local officials stressing that Florida residents should heed all evacuation warnings ahead of Milton’s arrival because of the storm’s life-threatening potential. The storm is expected to make landfall on Florida’s west coast on Wednesday night.
The jail is located in evacuation Zone A. The county has issued evacuation orders for Zones A, B, and C. If storm surges surpass 11 feet, it will inundate buildings in Zone A, including the jail. Some forecasts anticipate storm surges as high as 15 feet in the Manatee County area.
On Wednesday morning, the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office issued a message about the storm on Facebook urging people to evacuate.
A thunderstorm can be seen moving over Tampa in the distance from St. Petersburg, Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton’s expected landfall on Wednesday night on October 8, 2024. Manatee County urged residents to evacuate, even as officials decided against evacuating the jail’s inmates.
Bryan R. Smith/Getty
“NOW is the time to evacuate to a shelter or another loved one’s home outside of Evacuation levels A, B, C or if you live in a mobile, manufactured home or RV. Additional shelters are now open. For a complete list, visit manatee.org/storm or call 311 with questions,” the post said.
“Wind gusts are beginning to pick up and will continue to worsen. As a reminder, when wind speeds reach 45 mph, deputies will be pulled off the roads and will shelter in place until the storm passes and it is safe to for them to return to the roads.”
Besides stocking up on supplies and sandbags, the jail deputy previously told Newsweek that inmates would be moved to the second floor if the jail flooded.
When Newsweek called the jail to check on its evacuation status on Wednesday morning, a deputy referred us to the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office public information officer. Newsweek has reached out to the officer by phone for updates and comment.
Evacuations for Florida’s Coastline
Evacuation orders or suggestions have been issued for more than half the counties in Florida as Milton barrels closer to the Sunshine State.
Mandatory evacuation orders are in place for the following counties: Charlotte, Citrus, Collier, Flagler, Hernando, Hillsborough, Lee, Levy, Manatee, Marion, Pasco, Pinellas, Sarasota, St. Johns and Volusia.
Voluntary evacuation orders are in place for the following counties: Dixie, Gilchrist, Glades, Hardee, Lake, Miami-Dade, Okeechobee and Union.
Information about evacuations, such as suggesting that people seek an alternate location if they feel unsafe, are in place for the following counties: Brevard, Clay, Desoto, Duval, Highlands, Nassau, Orange, Osceola, Polk, Putnam, Seminole and Sumter.
Photos on social media earlier this week showed clogged roadways as people tried to flee the areas expected to be hardest hit by the storm. Now, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Austen Flannery told Newsweek it’s getting too late for people to leave, since gas stations are depleted of fuel and Milton’s impacts have already started to arrive.
“We are definitely at that point where the weather is just deteriorating from here on,” he said.
Leaving Incarcerated People Behind
David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, told Newsweek that there have been other cases where inmates have been left behind as a catastrophic storm approaches, such as the inmates in Orleans Parish Prison when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
“I wish I could say that Manatee County is a unique case, but unfortunately it isn’t,” Fathi said. “We have seen other cases when jails and prisons in the direct path of a hurricane or other potentially deadly storm, prisoners have just been left locked in their cells even when everyone else is under a mandatory evacuation order.”
Fathi went on to say that governments choosing not to evacuate incarcerated people in harm’s way “are on very thin ice legally.”
“The Supreme Court has said that when you incarcerate someone, when you take away their ability to fend for themselves, you take on a number of affirmative obligations toward them (…) one of which is to provide reasonable safety,” Fathi said.
“And so, knowing full well this is a potentially deadly storm and recognizing that by evacuating everyone else, but making a decision to leave prisoners to fend for themselves in this catastrophic weather event is quite probably a violation of the Eighth Amendment that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.”
