Mayor Danny Avula said Richmond officials properly notified nearby counties that buy water from the city during January’s service outage, despite third-party reports faulting city communications for hampering how each responded to the crisis.
On Friday, Avula and Richmond’s interim utilities director, Scott Morris, discussed the recently released preliminary findings from HNTB, an engineering firm hired to investigate the regional water outage. It was released late Thursday, days after the counties’ reports criticized Richmond communications. Both Hanover and Henrico purchase water from Richmond’s treatment plant.
Avula said he believes the city consistently communicated with the counties and didn’t see major discrepancies in the timelines presented in each locality’s independent reports.
“What I can tell, and from what I was told in the event, I think there were appropriate communications that went out to the counties,” Avula said.
The mayor said he learned during his time as Virginia’s COVID-19 coordinator that there’s a “tension” when alerting the public about major events. He added that putting out information without a full understanding of the situation could create unnecessary issues.
HNTB’s report said Richmond’s water treatment facility had a short power outage that lasted several seconds beginning at 4:25 a.m. on Jan. 6, and then fully lost power at 5:45 a.m.
Henrico’s report indicates Richmond’s water plant staff called a county DPU employee at 7:01 a.m. to say the plant was having filtration issues, and asked for Henrico to “back off on its draw from Richmond.”
The Henrico DPU employee wasn’t told about the severity of the plant failure at the time and believed it would soon be operational, per the county’s report. It wasn’t until 9:18 a.m. that Henrico DPU Director Bentley Chan and others were told Richmond’s water plant was down.
The report said Richmond’s utilities director at the time — April Bingham, who was not interviewed as part of the review — spoke with Chan for the first time about the outage at 2:34 p.m. Later in the day, the report said, Bingham repeatedly texted Chan’s desk phone instead of his cell.
Supervisors from both counties this week said they’d support creating a group to oversee the regional water system or consider other options to be less reliant on the city’s water supply.
Avula said Friday that he’s willing to discuss adopting a more regional approach in the future, but the immediate concern is to ensure the plant can maintain water production for the area.
After an investment request in the Virginia General Assembly didn’t move forward, Avula said the city will look for other funding sources to bolster the regional water system.
HNTB, the Kansas City-based engineering firm that ran the investigation, conducted staff interviews and toured the Douglasdale Road plant as part of its inquiry. The firm found no established safety protocols, training manuals or operating and emergency policies at the plant during the Jan. 6 outage.
For Avula, these findings were “the most concerning part” of HNTB’s preliminary report. He said the city’s utilities department is creating those missing policies.
“I think that while we had an electrical event that led to an equipment failure, there was clearly a component of not having practiced emergency response that led to this event,” Avula told reporters at Richmond City Hall. “I think Dr. Morris is absolutely in tune with that, and is responsible now for making sure that those standard operating procedures in both typical time and emergency time are created.”
Some water plant employees told HNTB “there are some written SOPs for basic processes” but some are more than 10 years old, potentially out of date and multiple staff members wouldn’t know where to find them.
These findings come months after two city audits determined there were no written policies at DPU warehouses.
Morris said DPU has put a process in place to revise all SOPs, master plans and emergency protocols. The department aims to finalize them in a couple of months, he said.
“All those standard operating procedures will be incorporated into the plant operations, and then we're going to be doing annual training on those, annual exercises, on those to make sure that the operators, the maintenance staff, are fully informed of those activities,” Morris said.
Morris said he doesn’t expect HNTB’s final report, slated to be completed in March, to be all inclusive, but instead touch on necessary changes that DPU is already in the process of developing.
