RICHMOND, Va. — Richmond’s Department of Public Utilities is investigating whether a brief loss of power at its water treatment plant, which occurred more than an hour before the plant lost full power, may have led to a failure at the plant that caused devastating flooding on Jan. 6.
CBS 6 was the first to report on the “power bump” at 4:25 a.m. on Jan. 6.
Interim DPU Director Doctor Scott Morris said the consultants from HNTB, who are conducting an after-action review of the incident, are investigating if that quick outage caused flooding minutes after a complete loss of power at the plant at 5:45 a.m.
Inside their preliminary report, questions are raised about a backup battery connected to the valves that need to be closed to prevent flooding.
“[The after-action report] says there was a backup battery attached to those valves, but the DPU staff didn’t even know if that backup battery did what it was supposed to do, or if it was capable of doing what it was supposed to do, which was to close the valves to prevent flooding in the event that the loss of power occurred,” CBS 6 investigative reporter Melissa Hipolit said to Morris at a Friday morning press conference.
“We are still investigating that as part of the preliminary report, but it looks like there was a power blip earlier in the morning that caused the UPS to get depleted to some degree,” Morris replied.
Watch: Water Crisis preliminary report conference (Friday, Feb. 14)
Joel Paulsen, a licensed professional engineer with ESi with 20 years of experience designing water systems for municipalities, said he believes the backup batteries, otherwise known as UPSs, might have turned on when that power bump occurred at 4:25.
CBS 6 has shared information with Paulsen throughout the water crisis.
“It certainly is possible they could have been operating off of unstable main power and batteries trying to compensate and eventually they ran out and all they were left with was the unstable power from the main power source at that time,” Paulsen said.
Paulsen said he thought Dominion Power and the on-call electrician should have been contacted immediately after that power bump.
When the plant lost power, its IT system also went down and lost communication with the plant without power, according to the report.
Previously, Mayor Danny Avula said the backup battery on the IT system died after about 40 minutes.
CBS 6 is still working to get confirmation on what exactly happened with the IT system and its backup battery.
When asked about it, Morris said, “the SCADA system, that functions on the UPS, that makes sure that the SCADA system is functioning. But the inputs to that SCADA system are from the other components of the plant. So, you might have a PLC that loses power and loses communication, doesn’t feed that communication back to the SCADA system. The SCADA system still is operating. So, that UPS is sized to keep the SCADA system operating.”
The plant was also equipped with at least one backup generator that needed to be manually activated and could be used to power the plant. But it was not.
An electrical supervisor who was called to respond and arrived 45 minutes after the outage occurred opted to try to switch to a secondary power source from Dominion instead.
“Would you recommend that staff have activated generators immediately upon the loss of power?” Hipolit asked Morris.
"I believe they took the proper procedures in trying to restore power,” Morris replied.
“If they had only, just after 5:45, switched on the generators, they would have established secondary power until they could get that second feed up,” Hipolit said.
“Those individuals that would hook up the swap over from primary to secondary power are the ones that would swap over the generators as well. Those are the electricians. Those are the individuals that are on call,” Morris said.
When asked if a water treatment plant has backup generators that need to be manually turned on if the plant should have someone on-site during a storm event that can turn on a generator, Paulsen said, "Yeah, absolutely yeah."
Mayor Avula said he expects the more comprehensive after-action report to be released in March.
CBS 6 is committed to sharing community voices on this important topic. Email your thoughts to the CBS 6 Newsroom.
📲: CONNECT WITH US
Blue Sky| Facebook| Instagram| X| Threads| TikTok| YouTube
