Imagine walking into your office after a long weekend, only to find your office covered in raw sewage, dripping from the ceiling, running down the walls and soaking the carpet. Not to mention covering whatever you left on your desk before the weekend.

For the detectives, judges and other employees who work on the second floor of the Webster County Law Enforcement Center, they don’t have to imagine — it’s something they experience. Regularly.

How does this happen? Restless inmates in the Webster County Jail, according to Sheriff Luke Fleener.

Inmates will occasionally rip up their uniforms or tear out the padding in their mattresses and flush it down their toilets, knowing it will cause the building’s plumbing system to back up and flood the jail with water — and everything below it, Fleener said.

Fleener is being “kind” when he calls the liquid flowing down the walls and ceilings “water,” Webster County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Niki Conrad said.

“It’s raw sewage,” she said.

Sometimes, like with an incident that happened in September with Chief Deputy Derek Christie’s office, that sewage can flow all the way down to the first floor and even the basement.

Inmates will also plug their shower drains and just let the water run, Fleener said. At one point this year, an inmate figured out how to turn the shower head around so that it sprayed at the wall and the water could seep through a small gap between the shower lining and the wall.

The overflowing jail toilets and showers don’t just ruin the day of whichever unlucky office gets flooded — it causes significant water damage as well. It can also risk damaging or destroying evidence in criminal cases.

The Webster County Cyber Crimes Unit is located on the LEC’s second floor. The office is filled with computer equipment and sometimes the digital devices that investigators have obtained search warrants for. The inmates in the jail know this, Fleener said, and that can sometimes motivate their misbehavior.

Just a couple months ago, in August, the county spent $4,150 to replace the carpeting on the second floor of the LEC after one of these incidents. Another $1,900 was spent just two weeks before that for water mitigation repairs on the second floor because of a separate incident.

“This is becoming an almost monthly occurrence,” Fleener said.

Some of the most “unruly” inmates have found even more ways to cause damage, the sheriff said. In December 2022, the county paid $23,200 to repair the padded cell in the jail after an inmate pulled pieces of the padding off the walls, rendering the cell unusable until it was repaired.

Just in the last couple weeks, Fleener said, another inmate has caused major damage to the padded cell, so until it is repaired, it cannot be used.

When inmates do cause damage to the facility, they are charged with additional crimes, usually criminal mischief, Fleener said.

Last year, a jail study commissioned by the Webster County Board of Supervisors found, among other things, that the cost of upkeep and repairs on the aging jail and LEC is eating into the county’s budget.

Compared to most of the other buildings in downtown Fort Dodge — many of which are upwards of 100 years old — the 41-year-old LEC is relatively young. However, unlike buildings used for residences, offices or retail, a jail facility experiences significant wear and tear over the years, Conrad said after a recent informational meeting for the proposed jail project.

In the last three years, the county has spent more than $364,000 on repairs and upkeep for the jail and LEC.

The problems with the building start at the top, according to county leaders and the consultants on the jail project.

The roof of the building is flat and during heavy rains and the spring thaw, it begins to leak, causing water damage on the third floor, which houses the jail, Conrad said. The “leakiest” spot, she said, is just above the kitchen where the inmates’ meals are prepared.

Then come the plumbing problems and water damage intentionally caused by some inmates on the third floor. That is a reason jails are no longer built on the top floors of buildings, John Sabinash, of Venture Architects, said during an informational meeting on the jail project.

The design of the proposed new jail fixes these problems in a few different ways. First, by having the floor plan with two levels of cells in a horseshoe formation, with a centralized control room where the corrections officers have a direct line of sight into each cell. The existing floor plan is a “linear” design and there are no direct lines of sign into the cells — corrections officers monitor the inmates wholly through security cameras.

Sabinash said the horseshoe floor plan allows corrections officers to better monitor inmate behaviors and respond when necessary. If an inmate were to try to flood their cell, he said, the corrections officer in the central control room would be able to shut off their water from within the control room.

Sabinash also noted that while there are two levels of cells, the building is actually a single-story with a mezzanine level. And though the mezzanine level of cells would be directly above the main level cells, he doesn’t anticipate the plumbing floodings to be an issue because those inmates would have no “incentive” or “satisfaction” of ruining an officer or a judge’s day.

Inmate-caused damage isn’t the only repair expense the jail racks up.

Technology has evolved so much since the early 1980s that much of the hardware on the jail floor is still original to the construction. Many of the companies that manufactured that hardware either have gone out of business in the four decades since, or they no longer make the parts, Assistant Jail Administrator John Garretson said during a tour of the jail last month. In fact, he said, when an important piece of a locking mechanism broke recently, he had to take it out to the County Roads Department to have it welded back together because the part is no longer made.

In June 2021, the county spent $98,000 on new sliding doors for the jail because the originals were worn out, getting stuck and unable to be repaired, Conrad said.

A new jail facility constructed with steel and concrete would be built to last and withstand the kind of wear and tear that a jail goes through, Sabinash said.

The first four parts of this series ran on Oct. 25, Oct. 27, Nov. 2 and Nov. 3.