At California’s San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, the men’s prison that sits on the banks of the San Francisco Bay, incarcerated people were left without an emergency preparedness plan in the face of a tsunami warning in December 2024 that wreaked havoc and confusion. Internal staff emails obtained by Prism through a Freedom of Information Act request bolstered what those who were incarcerated said was a lack of preparedness and care offered to people in state custody. 

Of California’s 31 adult institutions, San Quentin is one of two prisons built adjacent to the ocean and the only facility in the state’s arsenal with the explicit task of trial-running the so-called California Model, championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, that claims to prioritize services over punishment to encourage healing and lessen recidivism. But if health was the primary priority of the prison, advocates say, the state would address the rapidly changing climate system and the risks it creates for people inside. 

Interviews with men incarcerated at the prison and documents obtained by Prism illustrate San Quentin’s neglect. 

Left in the dark 

At 10:44 a.m. on Dec. 5, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake occurred off the coast of Eureka, California, about four and a half hours north of San Quentin. A resultant tsunami warning was issued by the National Weather Service for much of northern California’s coastline, with a tsunami expected to hit the San Francisco Bay Area at 12:10 p.m. For those residing in regions subject to the tsunami warning, emergency alerts were broadcast by telephone. Staff at San Quentin received telephone alerts, and some were notified by email. 

But incarcerated people were left in the dark, only learning of the warning after it was called off.  

With tsunami warnings, every minute counts, experts say. Factors relating to wave pattern, intensity, and how waves interact with coastal formations make tsunamis somewhat unpredictable. The best advice, said Dave Snider, a tsunami warning coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is for people to retreat from the coast as quickly as possible. When the federal agency issues a warning, it’s intended for people to take it seriously. It’s an “action message,” Snider said. 

But no action was taken to alert those who were incarcerated or move those in lower units to higher ground, emails obtained from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) show.  

In an email exchange Dec. 10, five days after the tsunami warning, San Quentin’s senior psychologist supervisor, Brooke Zanoli, wrote to the prison’s chief of mental health, Rachel Chen, expressing her concern. “I’m not personally aware of any of the systems we have in place for emergencies. … I’d also love to know what emergency plans are for [sic] already in place for patients as well.” 

Of the more than 1,300 documents Prism obtained from Dec. 5 through the following week, Zanoli’s appears to be the only email exchange regarding the tsunami that references incarcerated people or patients in custody of CDCR at San Quentin. Other emails show that some staff were given permission to evacuate the premises, while some joked about moving to the upper floors in the facility. 

Steve Brooks, a journalist and former editor at the San Quentin News who is incarcerated at the prison, told Prism that he is still not aware of any evacuation plan for people in custody.  

“There’s never been any type of training for emergency preparedness since I’ve been in San Quentin,” Brooks said. “There’s never been any type of evacuation training for incarcerated people as far as fires, earthquakes, or anything.”

That might be because neither the CDCR’s strategic plan nor the most recent sustainability roadmap from 2020 discusses the confluence and unique threats of climate change on incarcerated populations. Every state agency must prepare a report detailing specific climate concerns and plans of action for contingency, long-term, and emergency planning. The agency’s strategic plan fails to enumerate the ways that extreme weather, like drought, wildfire, and flooding, are already impacting prisons and will continue to do so. 

The state sustainability roadmap warns against the expected rise in sea level and cautions against the construction of new facilities in floodplains and along coastal areas that are susceptible to flooding and erosion. The report also explicitly names San Quentin as being particularly vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal flooding. According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, sea level rise will average 2 to 6.5 feet by 2100. 

However, there’s no mention of how the agency plans to protect prisons or those who live in them against tsunami threats, despite the entire California coast being in the risk zone for tsunamis, according to the California Geological Survey. There is also little consideration given to the ways that sea level rise—of which even moderate predictions will necessitate massive infrastructural redesign of coastal areas—exacerbates tsunami risk. 

Despite the rare occurrence of tsunamis coming off the coast of California, Snider said that’s no reason not to prepare for them. “In geologic time, they’re not unusual,” Snider said. “They’re just unusual in our short time.” He said that the challenge is convincing people living in hazard zones that they should familiarize themselves with emergency evacuation routes and develop emergency plans.

In emergency situations in which there’s no institutional guidance, it’s incumbent on individuals to enact their own safety measures. But that’s not possible in a prison where people have no autonomy and their access to basic communication services are tightly controlled by the state. 

Timothy Peoples, who is incarcerated at San Quentin, said that he felt defeated by CDCR and prison staff’s business-as-usual attitude in the face of a serious emergency alert. 

“You understand how much your life is really worth being in prison: not worth much when it comes to natural disasters,” said Peoples. He told Prism that he learned about the tsunami warning from the daily news program that he watches every morning, not from any prison administrator. “Being wards of the state, you have no expectation of survival for something like that,” Peoples said.

An inequitable burden  

The larger issue isn’t just about the state’s lack of response to the tsunami threat on Dec. 5; it’s about prisons’ broader emergency alert and preparedness systems. 

“If [you’re] going to treat these people with dignity and humanity and give them the tools that they need to return to society, you also have to make sure that they’re safe while they’re in prison,” said Brooks, adding that the state’s Office of Emergency Services should include incarcerated populations in its risk assessment. The agency did not respond to Prism’s request for comment. 

Juan Declet-Barreto, a senior social scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, urged government agencies to take threats of sea level rise, flooding, and other climate events seriously. Even moderate modeling of future flooding portends risks to at least 900 critical infrastructure facilities, like schools, hospitals, and wastewater treatment plants, according to research conducted by Declet-Barreto and others.

The lack of preparedness isn’t specific to the CDCR, though. As Brooks’ own reporting has pointed out, a 1964 tsunami killed 11 people in Crescent City, where Pelican Bay State Prison is located. Prisons and detention centers across the country are not outfitted to withstand any major weather event or chronic conditions, including flooding. President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in the Florida Everglades suffers from flooding, extreme heat, and other conditions that lawyers claim are violations of detainees’ constitutional rights.  

The risk of sea level rise and flooding disproportionately impacts those with the lowest level of individual or familial financial resources to combat repeated intrusion of water, rendering government preparedness even more important. 

“How inequitably distributed this burden is is also very shocking,” Declet-Barreto said. “We found that more than half of the infrastructure at risk by 2050 is in communities at a disadvantage based on historical racism [and] discrimination.”

It’s clear to Declet-Barreto that issues like sea level rise and flooding are “not strictly environmental or climatic or social or economic or political issues.” In actuality, he said, climate-related problems are the result of the “interplay of all of those conditions.”

As a consequence, emergency planning should appreciate how infrastructure, zoning, and development require more than a single-issue approach. For instance, a tsunami emergency management system that relies on a text alert ignores the access needs and infrastructure of incarcerated people, who lack easy access to phones and the ability to evacuate. 

Without what Decelt-Barreto calls a “transdisciplinary approach,” emergency planning will continue to sideline vulnerable groups and preference those who have benefited from “fossil fuel burning run amok for hundreds of years.” 

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor