Dealing with January’s power outage at Richmond’s main water treatment plant should have been routine for the city’s Department of Public Utilities, but the state health commissioner said years of “neglect” led to the regional water crisis.
State Health Commissioner Karen Shelton shared this assessment with Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Richmond Mayor Danny Avula in an April 15 letter outlining the findings of an investigation led by the Virginia Department of Health's Office of Drinking Water.
The issues that caused the plant failure — which ultimately kept the city from delivering water to residents and nearby counties for days — include unaddressed systematic concerns, old backup batteries at the plant and “a complacent and reactive organizational culture.”
“The reality is the Department of Public Utilities did not do its job,” Dwayne Roadcap, director of VDH’s drinking water office, said during a virtual press conference Thursday. “It failed.”
Roadcap said VDH will issue another notice of alleged violation to the city based on the investigation and require Richmond DPU to take steps to correct 12 significant deficiencies found during the inspections.
Youngkin had previously directed VDH to investigate the cause of the plant failure, which it did with the help of engineering firm Short Elliott Hendrickson (SEH). Findings from three separate reports were released Wednesday.
The investigation found Richmond DPU’s management and leadership made three critical operational errors that led to the dayslong crisis.
One was having the plant in “Winter Mode,” which only supplies power from one source instead of the two used in “Summer Mode.” This left the plant with a single failure point when it lost power due to inclement weather. City officials said the plant has only operated in “Summer Mode” since the crisis.
DPU also did not take proper steps to maintain battery backup systems that “were past their design life” to prevent and respond to flooding events. The VDH report concluded the city didn’t take those steps, despite knowing for decades that it was a risk.
The city’s utilities department also overly relied on manual operating the plant and should have a more automatic system, the report found.
In addition to the three critical errors, Shelton said, the investigation also found that “faulty components and a faulty culture” contributed to the plant failure, including improper operational practices for decades.
Roadcap told reporters Thursday that flooding was a “routine occurrence” at the Douglasdale Road plant and that DPU had set up temporary pumps in response. He added that city staff thought it was normal due to the plant’s design: It was built in 1924 and expanded in 1950.
The state’s investigation found that flooding events in 2020 and 2021 could have led to similar failures as the one on Jan. 6, 2025 — but VDH was not informed of those at the time.
Roadcap said several things could have been different if the city notified VDH within two hours of the January plant failure instead of that afternoon, including quicker alerts to hospitals and businesses about the expected water pressure loss.
“One of the things that really was upsetting was that the hospitals and the health care facilities and the businesses ran out of water without a lot of notice, and we can't have that happen again,” Roadcap said.
VDH also found Richmond DPU “made insufficient progress” on several areas of concern found in a 2022 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency inspection.
After finding the city diverted funding for the plant into its general fund for “other purposes since at least 2006,” VDH recommended investing nearly $64 million for upgrades to the plant. But the report said funding for several of them are already included over $60 million in the city’s proposed five-year capital improvement plan.
The City of Richmond has invested $5 million to repair and improve the water treatment plant since January, according to a Thursday release responding to the state investigation.
The city was expected to get $12 million in federal grant funding to repair its water plant, but it was canceled by the Department of Homeland Security. In an April 14 letter, Virginia lawmakers in Congress urged the federal government to reverse the move.
“VDH’s report overlaps with the independent investigation conducted by HNTB for the City of Richmond,” Avula said in a statement. “We’ll of course review it and think through the best ways to integrate its recommendations into our work moving forward.”
When asked about differences in the investigations initiated by the state and city, Roadcap said that he believes the city asked the firm it hired to review “what it wanted to find out.” He said VDH’s investigation took a systematic approach, looking into the reasons why certain equipment didn’t work as it should have.
Roadcap said VDH expects to send the notice of alleged violations to the city within a couple of weeks. The city will have 45 days to respond from that point.
