Engineering consultant says staff training and emergency protocols must be priority after Richmond water crisis

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — A professional engineer said a deeper look into staff training and emergency preparedness protocols is needed at the Richmond Water Treatment plant.

Joel Paulsen, an engineering consultant with 20 years of experience, said he’s never heard of a plant completely losing power, having a boil water advisory and taking nearly a week to get water restored.

His comments were in reference to the Virginia Department of Health’s (VDH) Notice of Alleged Violation that led to the water crisis three weeks ago.

“It's out of the ordinary in the United States to have a large water system like Richmond's go basically completely dark,” Paulsen said. “They had two power sources. They had backup diesel generators. The problem was the transfer switch for the power did not automatically transfer.”

According to the VDH’s notice to the city last week, its investigators did not believe Richmond was capable of consistently providing clean water to all residents. The notice alleged there were not enough staff on hand when the power went out and not enough of them were trained to transfer power.

Paulsen said when the plant's power switched to backup batteries the authorities should have been notified immediately.

“The frustrating thing, I think for everybody here, is that they did have generators on site that could have easily been operated and those were not turned on,” Paulsen said. “When the power went out, there just was no storage available at the facility and it ended up flooding. And once it flooded, there's really nothing you could do at that point to operate the water system."

City staff are still reviewing the recommendations VDH made and officials said they will incorporate them into the after-action report produced by its third-party investigator, HNTB Corporation.

Paulsen said all failure components should be removed for analysis and stored as artifacts. He also said looking at the water plant's aging infrastructure and how it contributed to the crisis, should be a priority. He also explained what he thinks the city should do moving forward.

“Let's get that water plant back in working condition,” Paulsen said. “Let's make sure it has the redundancies, let's make sure the staff are trained so that the folks just don't need to worry about this ever again.”

Paulsen also said employee work logs, pictures, texts and emails should be reviewed during the investigation.