RICHMOND, Va. — Five days into what's become a regionwide water crisis, some Richmond City Councilmembers are raising questions and concerns of their own and supporting calls for a third-party investigation into what caused tens of thousands of residents and business owners to go without water for an extended period of time.
This week, CBS 6 has uncovered documents and spoken to experts suggesting potential prevention failures and prior knowledge of water plant concerns within the Richmond Department of Public Utilities.
The head of the Virginia Department of Health's office that regulates the water plant told CBS 6 there appears to be regulatory noncompliance on the city's part related to the crisis.
“I think that some of the reporting that you and others have done have indicated that there are protocols that seemingly weren't followed or best practices that weren't followed," said new councilmember Kenya Gibson.
Watch: Tyler Layne questions Richmond leaders about storm readiness before water crisis
"There's some desire to use a third party, lots of resources at our disposal, to really do the deep dive and assessment that we need to do to analyze both what happened on Monday so we can prevent that from happening again, and more importantly, what price tag, what budget, what costs are we looking at to bring some of those much needed infrastructure improvements if those are warranted," said councilmember Stephanie Lynch.
According to information provided by Mayor Danny Avula, the citywide water outage was the result of a power outage at the water treatment plant Monday morning that led to multiple levels of failed backup systems and ultimately triggered catastrophic flooding at the plant.
A city spokesperson confirmed Friday that though the power outage was reported to Dominion Energy at 6:50 a.m. Monday, the outage occurred an hour before at 5:50 a.m.
But multiple backup systems that are supposed to be in place to keep operations going failed including the automatic switch to a secondary Dominion power source, a backup generator that was not used, and a backup battery to keep the IT system running not lasting as long as expected.
According to VDH official Dwayne Roadcap, who has been briefed on the matter, two of Richmond's three backup batteries were out of service this week. However, it's still not clear whether those batteries were inoperable before Monday.
DPU Director April Bingham was not at a Friday press conference to answer questions.
“Were you able to find out why two of Richmond's three backup batteries were out of service? Were they already out of service before Monday? And are they all working for tonight's storm?” reporter Tyler Layne asked Avula Friday at the press briefing.
“That'll be part of our after-action review. What we did in the meantime was ordered a new backup battery that was delivered and installed over sometime within the last few hours," Avula said.
Interim city spokesperson Julian Walker said he was still working to answer that question as of Friday afternoon. He did confirm that at least two backup batteries were working at the facility on Friday. Another backup battery was still in the process of being replaced.
Additionally, Roadcap said that DPU operators were not aware of a manual procedure to turn off the valves after the backup and online systems failed until after the flooding began on Monday. The valves need to be closed in order to keep water from rushing into the basement where equipment is stored.
Roadcap said staff have now been informed of that process.
"Did you find out why staff were not aware of the manual procedure to go in and turn off the valves to prevent the flooding for Monday's storm? Was that a training issue? And has everyone been trained to do that in the event that it happens again?" Layne asked Friday.
"I should say I don't know that that was an issue of staff not knowing about it. Again, there's a lot of details about the step by step of how we got to flooding that will come out in our immediate investigation that starts right after this weather event," Avula said.
Avula said that investigation would be handled by an external third-party and that a vendor could be identified as soon as next week.
Councilmember Gibson said she wants to know who knew what and when and what possible gaps could have been addressed before the crisis.
“It definitely raises the need to make sure we find out what fell through the cracks," Gibson said. “You need to make sure that you have people with a high level of experience to understand. This is a highly technical, highly regulated field, and we need to ensure that we have people who are staffed, who are going to sound the alarm.”
She also stressed the importance of assessing infrastructure needs, which was echoed by Lynch.
“The big question is what do we have before us on our plates as we head into budget season, and being very judicious about how we fund that, because it's a very careful balance between getting the infrastructure improvements that we want and then ensuring that we keep our rates, our utility rates, low," Lynch said.
“Can you say confidently, now that you've been in council over the past eight years, that this has been a priority and that you haven’t overlooked this?” Layne asked Lynch about funding needs.
“There has not been a funding request that has been made that we have not accommodated within our [capital improvement plan] budget. So for that reason, we're really kind of curious to dig in and want to dig in on what more we need to do," Lynch said.
While council can agree to funding requests, she said the body doesn't have control over day-to-day operations and whether departments are following through on spending the dollars on the necessary improvements.
However, she acknowledged that oversight could be better.
"One of the things that we are working collaboratively with our mayor's office to try and address is what support do we need to put it in place so that there is better oversight, contract management, etc., so that those types of funding and operational management issues do not arise again in 2025," Lynch said.
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