Power restored to Cobb jail after a 12-hour outage

Sign for the Cobb County Adult Detention Center facility

Electrical power was restored to the Cobb County Adult Detention Center after an outage of just over 12 hours.

There have been two short public information releases from Sgt. Jeremy Blake of the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office.

The first was sent yesterday evening at just after 4:30 p.m. and read as follows:

“As of approximately 4 p.m. today, a section of the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office’s Adult Detention Center is experiencing a power outage. A vendor is onsite working to return power and will continue until the issue is resolved.  

“The Sheriff’s Office is providing additional personnel to ensure adequate care for the 726 detainees impacted by the outage. Deputies are also increasing the number of safety and security checks. Medical staff are also on standby. Detainee and staff safety remains the top priority. 

“We will provide additional updates as soon as possible.”

The second announced the restoration of power, and was sent at 4:32 a.m. this morning:

“Update: Power has been restored as of approximately 4:15 a.m.,” the public information release read.

There was no mention of why backup power failed to come online.

This is the second substantial power outage at the facility this year, and in neither of them did emergency power immediately come online.

In late July a power outage occurred that lasted around 36 hours due to water leakage, which according to the Sheriff’s Office also prevented the emergency backup power from coming online.

We will publish more information as it becomes available.

About the Cobb County Adult Detention Center

The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office website describes the facility as follows:

“The Cobb County Jail Complex is located at 1825 County Services Road. The Jail is a pretrial facility and encompasses approximately one million square feet under roof. The original jail (Building A) was completed in 1987 at a cost of $13.5 million dollars.

“The jail was expanded (Building B) in 1997 at cost of $39.2 million dollars. Both were paid for by property bonds.

“The most recent expansion – C Tower was completed in 2010 at a cost of $110 million dollars and was funded through a special sales tax. The total bed capacity for A, B and C Tower is 3,077.”