2 power outages, massive early flooding and more takeaways from Richmond's third-party water report
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Mayor Danny Avula at a presser at City Hall on Valentine's Day. Photo: Karri Peifer/Axios
Richmond's preliminary third-party report about what happened at the city water plant on January 6 dropped this week.
Why it matters: The 15-page report offers the most detailed account yet of the failures inside the city's main water treatment facility that led to a days-long regional water outage last month.
- It also included new details about what went wrong and when.
The big picture: Representatives from HNTB Corp., a Kansas City-based infrastructure firm, visited the Richmond plant over three days late last month.
- They interviewed more than a dozen plant workers and officials at the state health and drinking water offices. The firm also reviewed documents from DPU and noted they're waiting on more to complete their final report.
Zoom in: Some of the most striking new information in the report includes...
- A short, 4:25am power outage preceded the longer 5:45am outage that took the system offline.
- Within 10 minutes of the second power outage, "at least" 6 feet of water had flooded the basement where the main computer system lives, damaging that equipment and lengthening the time the plant was inoperable.
- Water continued to flood into the basement for more than two hours because workers on-site couldn't close the valves without power.
- Dominion was not notified that the plant lost power until 6:45am, an hour after the outage.
- Plant workers had not undergone "established training procedures" or formal safety or emergency training and there wasn't a written training manual on-site.
- Additionally, the plant lacked written standard operating procedures for regular and emergency plant operations. For plant processes that did have SOPs, they were more than a decade old and plant operators didn't know where they were.
What they're saying: Since the outage, the city has brought on a new DPU director, invested millions in plant upgrades, changed staffing models and increased equipment checks, Mayor Avula said at a news conference Friday.
- He also noted that the preliminary report only focused on the events leading up to the plant flooding and outage. A "much more comprehensive report" will follow.
What's next: HNTB's comprehensive report is due out next month.