Jan 11, 2025
RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) -- As the City of Richmond anxiously awaits test results that will determine whether or not the city has clean drinking water after nearly a full work week without it, many Central Virginians are also holding their breaths for another round of snow. Richmond Mayor Danny Avula announced on Friday, Jan. 10 that the city has a new battery backup ready to go in case there is another power emergency after Richmond's water reservoir system experienced a malfunction that was caused by a power outage on Monday, Jan. 6. The new Richmond leader hasn't had his formal inauguration ceremony yet, but -- one week after being sworn in -- Avula is already preparing for a report breaking down the catastrophic Richmond water plant failure. In the meantime, 8News is digging deeper into what exactly happened Monday morning at a Richmond water treatment facility -- leading to Central Virginians across the community going days without clean water. This incident has sparked seemingly innumerable questions regarding transparency, accountability and miscommunication within the city. On Thursday, Jan. 9, 8News spoke with Dwayne Roadcap, director of the Virginia Department of Health's Office of Drinking Water. He shared that this top state agency wasn't informed about Monday morning's budding crisis until that afternoon. On Friday, Roadcap spoke with 8News again to talk about additional concerns raised regarding Richmond's Department of Public Utilities' preparation for the storm that served as the root cause of this series of issues. "Had [Richmond's Department of Public Utilities] tested the systems before the storm event, it would seem that they would have known that there would have been a problem with them," Roadcap said. "And so we're trying to understand whether they actually have a process and procedure in place." Questions arose immediately about what happened prior to the incident. Regarding the incident itself, Avula has made himself available throughout the week to speak with the press and provide updates on preliminary investigations into what happened. We're told Richmond's -- historically reliable -- automatic switch did not work when the facility lost power at around 6 a.m. on Monday. The site, instead, switched to backup batteries for power, which only lasted 45 minutes. "Our electrician came in, you know, within 30 minutes or so and was assessing the situation, made the manual switch," Avula said in a press call Thursday afternoon. However, by the time the city's on-call engineer made it to the site to fix the problem, flooding had already broken out. Roadcap said this fix shouldn't have taken that long. "When the main backup power didn't work and the battery under an uninterrupted power supply battery backups didn't work as expected, there should have been some manual overrides that the plant staff could have done," Roadcap said. When asked about the manual override delay, Avula admitted he wasn't sure that this was an issue of staff not knowing about this safeguard. 8News has formally requested access to the city's training manuals for employees who work in relevant capacities at the site. As of Friday morning, officials confirmed that two out of three of the city's backup battery units are not working. However they said they ordered, and have since received a new one. 8News asked Roadcap if this is a concern heading into Friday night's anticipated winter storm. "Not right now," Roadcap said. "The plant staff and the leadership have come up with a plan to do a work around if if any problem develops. If the main power does go out, it will be immediate types of response from Virginia Dominion Power." At a press event on Friday, Avula reiterated that the focus as of Friday afternoon is about making sure a similar disaster doesn't happen once the new round of snow begins. He added that once the city gets out of this state of emergency, they will take action through an "after-action" report which he suggested will be conducted by a third party.
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