By the time it was over, more than 100 people were injured and $15 million worth of damage had been done.

And a small-scale war had been fought inside the fences of the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill.

Thirty years ago, from Oct. 25 to 27, 1989, the eyes of the state and nation were focused on that embattled lockup in Cumberland County.

Even as the smoke was still wafting from the wrecked buildings and the wounds were being bandaged from the two consecutive riots, lessons were being learned.

And they still are being applied today, said Susan McNaughton, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections.

For one thing, she said, prison officials today have a better feel for the mood of their inmates than was the case on the eve of the eruption at Camp Hill.

The riot had several causes, according to a report made to the National Institute of Justice, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, in 1993. The Camp Hill uprisings were among several U.S. prison riots covered in that evaluation.

A leading cause of the Camp Hill turmoil was crowding. The prison was holding 2,600 inmates, 45 percent more than it was equipped to house. Services and programs were likewise lacking, and many prisoners had nothing to do during their long days of incarceration.

Nor were the cell locking mechanisms effective, investigators found. Some were even broken. And there were no real, solid plans for handling a riot.

It all boiled over when an inmate struck a corrections officer on the afternoon of Oct. 25. Other inmates joined in, and soon officials lost control of several blocks of the prison. Police rushed in to secure the perimeter.

Hostages were taken and beaten in front of their fellow guards. Fires were set. A rioter tried, and failed, to ram a maintenance truck through the perimeter fence.

A show of force and negotiations seemed to end the stand-off, but a second riot erupted at 7 p.m. on Oct. 26.

A full-out assault by state police and prison staff ended that one. Miraculously, no one was killed.

"The memories are burned into my memory and are as clear today as if it was just yesterday," Dennis Pletz told PennLive in 2016. Pletz, a retired corrections sergeant, was working in the prison when the riots erupted.

'"It looked like Vietnam,’” an emergency medical pilot said as helicopters churned in the night sky, flames ate through buildings, beaten and bloody guards collapsed onto stretchers, and shotguns boomed," the Patriot-News wrote during its coverage of the riots.

The full tally of the cost of the riots, including overtime paid to the scores of police, fell between $40 million and $50 million. More than 150 prisoners were prosecuted for crimes committed during the uprisings.

“The riots were a statewide embarrassment to the Department of Corrections,” the authors of the Justice Department report wrote.

Yet the debacle also “was a catalyst for a number of changes that are still in effect at all (corrections department) institutions,” McNaughton said.

Those changes include the creation of a State Corrections Analysis Network that gives officials a better idea of the “climate” within the state’s prisons. Communications between the prisons and DOC leaders were improved with the creation of regional deputy secretary posts, McNaughton said.

She said “improved readiness” of the staff to handle disturbances has been realized through the formation of special teams, including a corrections emergency response team, hostage rescue and negotiation teams, a rifle specialist team and critical incident stress management and fire emergency response teams.

The very design of state prisons has been changed to favor fire-resistant concrete structures that are sectioned off to better allow for containment of prisoners. Better lighting and increased use of security cameras are an offshoot of the riots as well, McNaughton said.

The riots also triggered a massive expansion program that added 10,000 cells to the state prison system by 1997, she said. Thousands more corrections officers were hired to reduce the inmate-to-guard ratio. Educational and job training programs for inmates were expanded to give them more to do.

Prison officials have said they hope all those changes will prevent what they have called “another Camp Hill.”