As temperatures reach the 90s in D.C. on Tuesday, various public facilities including the city’s Central Cell Block and a few schools have been without air conditioning.

The Central Cell Block, a detention facility separate from D.C. jail where people who’ve been arrested are held before prosecutors decide whether or not to charge them with a crime, has been without A/C since Saturday, according to Taylar Nuevelle, the founder of Who Speaks for Me. She said her organizers learned of the outage while offering support on Monday to people who were leaving the Central Cell Block after being detained over the weekend.

The D.C. Department of Corrections, which oversees the Central Cell Block, confirmed the A/C issues, but disputes when the problem first arose. NBC 4 first reported the news.

An agency spokesperson told DCist/WAMU that a contractor is currently onsite to complete repairs to the A/C system. Additionally they say no one is currently being detained at Central Cell Block: The Metropolitan Police Department agreed to hold arrestees at various district headquarters until the cooling issues have been resolved. The spokesperson also said the agency immediately stopped intakes once they became aware of the issues Monday morning.

Nuevelle is surprised the agency learned of the issues two days after people first reported having no A/C to Who Speaks for Me organizers. She estimates 30 people were held while the facility was without cool air. Some of them described unbearable conditions during detainment, including stainless steel bunks so hot that people couldn’t rest on them. Some arrestees felt dehydrated because the water guards handed out was not enough, said Nuevelle, while others threw up because of the heat.

“It’s a human rights violation,” Nuevelle told DCist/WAMU, adding that the issue of overheating at D.C. corrections facilities isn’t new. “The mayor and the Council need to get together and understand that they need to close it down because it’s only a matter of time before someone dies there from heat exhaustion.”

Last summer, Central Cell Block went multiple days without AC. Community-based jail support volunteers report ongoing issues at the facility, including problems with heat in the winter and cockroaches year-round. Several people have protested the facility’s conditions, including Rev. Graylan Hagler, the pastor of the D.C.’s Plymouth Congressional United Church of Christ.

“It’s not about me going to jail, but there are prisoners living in inhumane conditions in the Nation’s Capital,” he told Washington City Paper in 2018 after his 28-hour detainment following an arrest for a civil disobedience action outside the Supreme Court.

Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen — who chairs the public safety committee and has been in talks with the Department of Corrections since learning of the A/C issues Monday — notes that the city has plans to build a new central cell block. Allen said the current facility is not a place where anyone should be held, but implementation of a new one will take time.

“The city can’t move fast enough to build a new facility that will be able to manage those needs, but in the interim, the clear expectation is the A/C has to work,” he tells DCist/WAMU. “People’s health and safety and well being has to be prioritized.”

In the winter we had no heat, now it’s supposed to be 90 degrees and the ac in my room still doesn’t work. My school admin and custodial staff have been calling and submitting to @dcpublicschools and @DCDGS asking just for fans! And nothing!

— Maya Baum (@maya_baum) May 31, 2022

Meanwhile, staff and families of multiple D.C. Public Schools reported problems with the A/C the same day Mayor Muriel Bowser activated the city’s heat emergency plan, put in place when temperatures reach 95 degrees.

Evan Yeats, a parent of three students at Thomson Elementary School downtown, said several staff members at the school told him the air conditioning is not working in most fourth and fifth grade classrooms.

Yeats, who is also an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for ANC 4B01, said his oldest child, a fifth grader, reported feeling uncomfortable at school last week because his classroom became too hot.

“It’s deeply frustrating,” Yeats said. “We’re talking about the system that moves air around in an air-borne pandemic.”

The Department of General Services is responsible for maintaining and repairing HVAC systems in D.C. Public Schools. A spokesperson for the Department of General Services did not respond to a request seeking comment.

Enrique Gutierrez, a spokesman for D.C. Public Schools, said the school system is aware of air conditioning issues at Thomson. He said DGS is working to fix the problem.

A handful of schools are having A/C problems, according to Scott Goldstein, the executive director of the local teacher advocacy group EmpowerEd, who conducted an informal poll Tuesday morning. For example, he said he heard that the A/C was not working in the early childhood wing of Truesdell Education Campus, so educators had to move instruction to the gym or library. HVAC issues are often only resolved after DCPS staff and families report the problem to councilmembers, he added.

“It makes it much harder for students to focus on their learning and teachers to be able to focus on their teaching. So these are just things that we should be more proactive about,” Goldstein said. “They pop up all the time and we don’t have a great system, both for keeping track of them transparently through DGS and for being proactive about them before we get to the season.”

At Cleveland Elementary School in Shaw, parent Becky Reina said her 11-year-old son told her the temperature in his classroom swelled to 87 degrees on Tuesday morning.

DCPS did not immediately respond to questions about reports of high temperatures at Truesdell or Cleveland Elementary.

Reina, along with many other parents and members of the D.C. Council, have pushed for repairs to HVAC systems in school buildings throughout the pandemic. She kept her son home from school in the fall in part because the heating, cooling and ventilation system in one of her son’s classes did not work.

“It’s beyond frustrating at this point,” she said. “These are known problems.”

Jenny Gathright contributed reporting.