Two elevators inside Fulton County’s Rice Street Jail were out of service during a recent medical emergency, forcing a medical team to haul equipment up several flights of stairs to reach an inmate who was actively bleeding. The inmate survived, but Sheriff Patrick Labat says the incident is proof that a jail elevator modernization project approved by county commissioners two years ago needs to be finished immediately, not treated as a routine maintenance backlog.
Labat sent letters to Fulton County commissioners on August 18 detailing the elevator failures and their consequences, according to AJC.com. In a follow-up letter dated August 19, Labat wrote that two elevators were unpredictably not working, causing delays of at least one minute on every floor during the emergency. He also disclosed that an officer had been trapped alone in a stuck elevator with several inmates, an incident he described as part of a pattern of failures involving door mechanisms, controllers, boards, cabling and circuit components throughout the jail.
Rice Street Jail houses 1,729 people but has only four functioning elevators, according to the same report — a ratio Labat says leaves virtually no margin for error when equipment breaks down inside a facility that includes elevators serving medical areas, inmate housing and a kitchen elevator used to transport food. The sheriff’s office has reported that the jail’s elevator problems have repeatedly affected medical transport and other inmate housing operations, and the outages have persisted since January 1, 2024, including one stretch that lasted 178 days.
A Two-Year Wait for a $4.4 Million Fix
Fulton County commissioners voted unanimously on August 2, 2024, to fund the elevator modernization project, allocating $1.65 million in emergency elevator funding at the time. A consultant hired by the county completed a formal cost estimate in January 2025 that put the initial project price at $1.65 million, but the county now expects the full elevator modernization contract to cost around $4.4 million. Two years after that initial vote, the project remains unfinished…