Red Bay's new jail ready for inspection

The past year-and-a-half has been a whirlwind for Police Chief Pat Creel.

The department has been working out of the Franklin County Sheriff's Office substation in Red Bay since a fire destroyed the town's municipal building May 13, 2006, after a squirrel caused a power line to fall across the building, which also housed city hall.

"Has it been that long?" Creel said, as if asking himself.

Final inspections on a new jail, built on the old city hall site, are planned for Thursday and Friday. An open house is planned for Dec. 2.

"We may start moving in that afternoon," Creel said.

The 3,500-square-foot facility will include four cells, where the previous jail only had two.

"There were always problems in the old jail because we would have to move people around if we had a female inmate," Mayor Jeff Reid said.

Each cell will have its own shower so inmates will not have to be moved from their cells.

"It will keep our dispatchers from having to move the prisoners," Creel said. "Everything will be self-contained, and there won't have to be a lot of interaction with the inmates except for taking them out for exercise."

The jail also will have a training room for conferences and meetings. In the old building, officers would have to use the city council meeting room for large gatherings.

"We will have about three times as much room as we did have," Creel said.

The Red Bay Police Department has six full-time and officers one part-time officer as well as four full-time and two part-time dispatchers in addition to Creel.

"We are going to have a place set up for the sheriff's office in case they ever need to use our facility," Creel said. "They really helped us by letting us use their substation. I am sure the sheriff never thought we would be there for a year-and-a-half, but they were very helpful to us by providing that and keeping our inmates at the county jail."

A new city hall has already opened on Fourth Avenue, the main road through town.

City hall operations were moved to a downtown storefront after the fire.

The city secured a $150,000 grant for the work on the two facilities.

"We didn't have to borrow any money," Reid said. "Both of these facilities are great for the town and something that should last for years to come."

Creel said each room in the two buildings is built so that fires would not easily spread from one room to another.

"In theory, if one of the rooms caught on fire, it would take 30 to 45 minutes to get through to another room," he said.

Jonathan Willis can be reached at jonathan.willis@timesdaily.com or 332-0140.