VACAVILLE — While fire crews managed to halt the progress of the LNU Lightning Complex Fire from reaching the middle of town, thick smoke and ash hung in the air Friday, prompting concerns among family members of people incarcerated there about the health of their loved ones, who say the conditions have been terrible inside Vacaville prison facilities.

The health effects of the smoke from the massive complex fires that have raged all week in northern California add to the COVID-19 pandemic that has rocked the prison system acros the state, prompting calls to release incarcerated people and preserve their health.

Robert Pape, who is incarcerated at the California State Prison facility in Vacaville, called his sister Christy Pape-Somerville on Wednesday and told her that N95 masks were given only to people while they were outside on the prison grounds, which prison officials disputed.

Inside, not everyone was ensured a mask, and while inmates may have already had cloth masks in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, those do not protect against the harsh smoke from the fire, he told his sister.

Pape told her that inside the cells, they face the choice of sitting in sweltering heat or opening up an air vent and let in smoke and ash from the LNU Lightning Complex fire.

He said he gets a cup of cold water — two at most — a day, Christy Pape-Somerville said in an interview with this news organization.

“No one deserves conditions like this,” she said, adding that the air conditioner system is not working, according to her brother.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, she hasn’t been able to visit her brother — who is serving a life sentence — in person since March, but she experienced Vacaville’s summer heat herself last year when she saw him at the prison facility.

“It was like a sauna in there all summer. I would come out of there dripping and that was the better situation inside the visiting room,” she said. “The situation in their cells is significantly worse.”

A spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Aaron Francis, in an email disputed Pape’s allegations that not all inmates were offered N95 masks, noting that “Due to poor air quality caused by the Lightning Fire in Vacaville, all inmates and staff were offered N95 masks.”

As for the heat, Francis said that when temperatures reach 90 degrees inside or outside, cooling measures are put into place at the prison, including providing ice water to housing units, giving additional access to showers, opening housing unit cells, putting fans in housing units and sending medical staff to watch for signs of heat exposure.

But Adnan Khan, executive director of the nonprofit Restore Justice, has echoed in Twitter posts  concerns and reports from friends inside the Solano facility similar to that of Pape.

“I got a call from my friend who’s in Solano State Prison near the fires,” Khan said in a Tweet on Friday. “He said for last couple of days, correctional officers have been entering the building with ash on their shoulders and hats.”

In a separate Tweet, Khan, who spent several years incarcerated in the facility, said the ventilation system has been historically bad.

“The ventilation system was atrocious,” he said in his Tweet. “Whatever the temperature and air quality was outside, it would blow into the cell.”

Questions also swirled this week about whether the state prison would have to evacuate as the fire scorched rural northern Vacaville and creeped into the edges of the town, killing at least one person in Vacaville and at least three others in its spread in Napa County. While the neighborhoods around the prison were issued warnings to evacuate on Wednesday, Francis said the prison was not being directed to evacuate.

He did not answer questions about whether the prison has an evacuation plan for the ongoing fires, instead noting that “we continue to monitor the fires statewide and will make adjustments to temporary housing as needed to protect the health of all individuals.”

He also pointed to a fire abatement and training program conducted in June, in which CDCR staff worked with CalFire to conduct a controlled burn on 50 acres of state-owned property on the hillside behind the prison in Vacaville. That was aimed at creating a firebreak around the prison to keep the vegetation around it from catching fire.

Health risks — and the threat of evacuation — are particularly concerning at the Solano prison, which is situated next to the California Medical Facility, where people incarcerated by the state receive medical treatment.

Rasheed Stanley-Lockheart, a formerly incarcerated person who now advocates for prison reform, said the prison and adjacent medical facility are full of people with health conditions, including respiratory issues, as well as elderly people — all of whom are especially sensitive to the smoke.

Add the COVID-19 to the mix, and it’s a scary time for those incarcerated and the people who love them, Stanley-Lockheart explained.

His own family member, incarcerated for more than 40 years, was moved out to a tent set up at the CMF facility during COVID for dozens of inmates to increase distancing, but when the fires broke out, he and the rest of those in the outdoor tents was moved back inside, which Stanley-Lockheart fears will expose them to greater risk of COVID.

That fear will continue, he said, “unless they release them.”