For more than two weeks this month, the jail at the Multnomah County Justice Center was nearly inaccessible to defense attorneys looking to meet with clients, psychologists trying to evaluate the mental competency of the newly arrested, and family and friends hoping to visit locked-up loved ones.
The visitors’ elevator at the jail broke down around September 6, and two others went down a week later—each due to unrelated pipe bursts. There are no publicly accessible stairs to the Multnomah County Detention Center, one of the county’s two jails, which sits on floors four through eight of the massive downtown building.
“It was the perfect storm,” says Multnomah County Facilities Manager Mark Gustafson, who oversees maintenance of the Justice Center. “We had three floods in the matter of two weeks—floods that were totally unassociated with each other. I look like the bad guy here as the facility manager, which I’ve been for 29 years. It really has been bad luck.”