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Utah Relocates Prisoners Amid Largescale Wildfire

Loaded on Sept. 1, 2026 published in Prison Legal News September, 2026, page None
Filed under: Transfers, Transportation. Location: Utah.

Wildfires blazed across the American West this summer, with an unprecedented 2.9 million acres scorched in Washington and Oregon alone. In Utah, as of mid-August, 820 fires across the state had burned more than 514,000 acres. As The Salt Lake Tribune reported, the total scale of destruction is equal in size to 3.5 Zion National Parks or two-thirds of Rhode Island.

On July 4, Utah’s Department of Corrections (DOC) evacuated 76 detainees and prisoners from the San Juan County Jail, located in the southeastern corner of the state, amid the Babylon Fire, which was at one point the largest in the country and is still currently burning as of this writing. The San Juan County Jail, in addition to housing pre-trial detainees, also locked up prisoners under a DOC placement program dated to the 1980s. Most of the jail’s population were sent to the Utah State Correctional Facility (USCF), while 10 detainees were relocated to the Sanpete County Jail.

One month later, Widemouth 2, a second large-scale wildfire, prompted the evacuation of a separate jail in the western half of Utah. On August 3, KUTV reported, the state DOC transferred 40 detainees from the Millard County Jail to the USCF.  

 

Sources: The Salt Lake Tribune, KUTV

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