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Massive sewer blockage causing sanitary issues Atascadero State Hospital

April 24, 2019

A massive sewer blockage at Atascadero State Hospital has kept a total of 77 patients in two different units without easy access to toilets and drinking water for at least nine days, prompting some ASH employees to voice their frustration. [Tribune]

Hospital officials are providing the affected patients with drinking water and access to centralized restrooms. Likewise, the patients without running toilets have received portable urinals.

But, ASH staffers must dump the urinals into a 5-gallon trash can, which must then be dumped into a neighboring unit. Officials are also providing staff with disposable gloves and hand sanitizer.

According to the Tribune, ASH employees must escort most patients in the impacted units to another unit in order to use restrooms, brush their teeth or shower. Some patients are now showering every three days, rather than every other day.

Additionally, some hospital staffers worry that ASH has been slow to address the problem. It took eight days from when the problem began for ASH to send an email to employees about the situation.

“We have experienced a major blockage of the main waste line, affecting both Units 25 and 26,” the email to employees stated. “Plant operations worked diligently throughout the last week to unblock this line. Unfortunately, all conventional methods have failed up to this point.”

The email said a contractor was consulted on Monday, but the hospital was not offered any methods of solving the problem beyond what it already attempted.


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Sanitary issues are the least of their worries.


0

I’ve seen inmates flush 8 , 9 ,10 bedsheets down toilets in protest or just bored ….they furle them up like 10 ft long snakes .. Flush and feed the dragon .. The toilets very powerful


12

Inmates?! Where does the article mention inmates, huh?!!! It does however mention “patients”, right?! And that would be patients in a hospital that’s there for those with mental health issues. No wonder we don’t have enough mental health beds in this country, you’d rather have it full of prison beds and just relegate mental illness into a criminal status and a criminal activity, right?


Yea,well, that’s alright though; when ignorant fear mongering is the call of the day it doesn’t matter that these human beings, these “patients” , are subject to unsanitary conditions you just relegate them into inmates, a prison term, and it’s all good!


What’s next? Sterilize them as not to spread their “criminal activity”? Maybe even euthanize them? You could get some advise on that from the Nazis, they killed over a quarter million of your “inmates”, and almost a half million more were sterilized.


Just goosestep on down to your local representative and remind them of the success Hitler had with his “Sterilization Law” in eradicating this menace from Germany and I’m sure you’ll get the support you need, especially from the Party of Trump The Pervert…


Cheers!


-27

Wow! Just wow!


3

Yes they are inmates .. Not many criminally insane inmates are released .. ASH is a maximum security mental hospital ( Prison ) if they are released …..the next place is called a prison.


10

Get a clue and then respond to me the D’…


They are called patients and not inmates for a reason, a very good reason, as the courts have found them either mentally incompetent to stand trial or not guilty due to insanity (by-the-way, in California the insanity defense is not available on the basis of a personality disorder or to those who are made insane by their voluntary use of alcohol or drugs); the same court(s) you support when a person is found guilty are the ones who very infrequently find in the favor of the insanity plea (the chance of a person being found not guilty by reason of insanity are almost nil, only an estimated one-120th of 1 percent of contested felony cases end in a successful N.G.R.I. defense in this country while many states have done away with this defense all together)..


Do you have any clue as to why “Not many criminally insane inmates are released “? No? Because they are incarcerated under an archaic law that allows them to be locked away indefinitely and most often far past what a “sane” person would receive in a jail/prison sentence for the same crime. In your state, California, that incarceration under the law cannot exceed what that person would get if he or she is “sane”, but the D.A., who would be Dan Dow there in SLO, has the right to challenge that release and that can add years to a persons stay (which in California happens more often than not). So, if you think being found not guilty by reason of insanity is a “get out of jail free card” you’re dead wrong!


“ASH is a maximum security mental hospital ( Prison ) if they are released …..the next place is called a prison.” Again, fear mongering. as you make it sound that the occurrence of this is the norm’, when In reality those who have been committed on a not guilty by reason of insanity defense have a far lower recidivism rate when (if ever) they are released than those who have been sentenced to prison.


As long as we keep referring to these hospitals as prisons, a place for punishment and not treatment, the likes of what happened to Andrew Holland grows exponentially, along with the apathy that most like you feel towards those like him, and the community at large is put at a far larger risk.


Cheers!


-10

Not like the taxpayers paid top dollar to designers, engineers, contractors and prevailing wage to their employees…actually they did, and this is the result. Pure corruption… we in the business know who gets these contracts and why.


7