RALEIGH, N.C. -- In the six months since a jail fire killed eight inmates trapped in their cells, North Carolina inspectors have overhauled safety programs and increased pressure on local officials to improve their lockups.

"It's the nightmare you didn't want," said Robert G. Lewis, who heads the Jail and Detention section of the state Department of Health and Human Services.

"The whole ballgame changed" with the May 3 fire at the Mitchell County Jail, he said.

The evening blaze began in storage room where a wall-mounted heater apparently ignited a leaning stack of cardboard. With thick smoke pouring through the building, the jailer pulled a towel over her face and tried to crawl to the inmates, but each cell door had to be unlocked manually. Seven of the inmates died still behind bars on the second floor.

Prosecutors investigated the response by authorities and, on Friday, cleared both the jailer and sheriff of any wrongdoing.

The May 3 blaze was the first fatal jail fire since North Carolina began its jail inspection program 35 years ago. Still, Lewis began calling managers of the 22 jails built before 1967 -- the year minimum standards were introduced by the state -- and ordered fire and building inspections.

The inspections found hundreds of problems, including faulty or absent smoke detectors and improper storage of wood, paper and other combustible materials -- some of the same problems found in Mitchell County after the fire, the state Labor Department said.

In the Cherokee County jail, inspectors found a stairwell fire door tied open with a wire so jailers could hear prisoners on the second floor. In Madison County, an addition to the jail had been built without a permit and exit signs lacked emergency lighting.

More should be done

Many of those types of problems have been corrected, but Lewis wants counties to do more.

Ideally, each jail would have a sprinkler system, though Lewis says that would cost tens of thousands of dollars that counties don't want to spend on aging jails. So he is asking every county without a sprinkler system to install ventilation systems that can suck smoke out.

When local sheriffs haven't been able to persuade county officials to pay for safety improvements, Lewis has gone to the meetings himself to lobby for money.

He told Montgomery County commissioners in September to replace their 1927 jail, and ordered them in the meantime to add a smoke evacuation system, alleviate crowding and put another officer on each shift.

Unlike state-run prisons, jails are almost all the responsibility of local governments, usually counties. Most states have jail standards and inspection programs, but nationwide standards set by the American Correctional Association are voluntary.

Kari Hamel, a lawyer with North Carolina Prisoners Legal Services, worries about jails' crowding, oversight and safety problems. At the Person County jail, for example, male and female inmates were able to sneak from their cells to a canteen on four different nights in September to have sex.

"When you have those kinds of breakdowns and you don't know what's going on in your jail for a week, anything could happen," Hamel said.