Richmond officials address water crisis report, engineer gives analysis

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — Richmond Mayor Danny Avula and Department of Public Utilities (DPU) Director Scott Morris held a press conference addressing questions regarding the city's preliminary report on the recent water crisis. This marks the first time since the report's release that city leaders have publicly commented on the issue.

The preliminary findings by third-party investigator, HNTB, highlight several key points. Two outages occurred at the water treatment plant, with the second one, around 5:30 a.m., causing a pump to go offline. The report notes that a failure in connecting power sources prevented the automatic backup system from taking over, contributing to the outage.

The report also challenged earlier statements from city officials, claiming the plant's computer system went down immediately after the power outage, not after backup batteries failed 45 minutes later as initially reported.

In addition, the report indicates that the Virginia Department of Health officials were on-site at the plant by 12:30 p.m. on January 6, not closer to 3:00 p.m., as previously stated by the Virginia Department of Health.

Both Mayor Avula and Director Morris discussed the investigation’s findings and provided updates on efforts to address the issues. Mayor Avula emphasized the city's significant investments in restoring the filters and pumps, as well as changes to staffing models to prevent future issues.

“We’ve put a lot of investment into getting those filters and pumps back up and running,” said Avula. “We’ve also, in this interim time, changed our staffing models.”

Avula said he felt appropriate communications were made with Henrico and Hanover counties when the power outage happened -- more specifically that Henrico’s report noted that they were notified around 9:00 a.m. 

He also feels there were inconsistencies in the timeline of events but is not overly concerned about it. 

Director Morris addressed the power failure protocols in place during the crisis, explaining that staff followed standard operating procedures by attempting to restore secondary power after the primary source failed.

“You lose your primary power, you go to secondary power, and then you try to restore secondary power first. And that’s what they attempted to do,” explained Morris.

Despite these efforts, professional engineer Joel Paulsen, who reviewed the report, believes more staff could have been involved in the crisis response. He also stressed the importance of proper training for such emergencies.

“I think staff training and staffing needs to be looked at as well as investments into replacing their old equipment and bringing that up to the modern state of where it should be today,” said Paulsen.

"If I were to compare it to some similar facilities that I am familiar with, you would probably have anywhere between 5 to 10 employees on site during an emergency situation," Paulsen noted. "We do yearly emergency mock scenarios where staff practice dealing with power outage situations so they know exactly what steps to take to resolve the issue as quickly as possible."

Moving forward, Director Morris assured that improvements would be made to all standard operating procedures. Mayor Avula added that a full after-action report is expected to be released next month, which will provide further details and recommendations for the city's water treatment processes.

The investigation continues as city leaders work to prevent future water system failures and ensure a more efficient response to emergencies.