RICHMOND, Va. — CBS 6 is raising questions about the head of Richmond's Department of Public Utilities blaming a region-wide water crisis solely on a winter storm power outage at the Richmond water treatment plant.
“I think this incident here was simply caused an outage at the plant," April Bingham said during a Wednesday press conference.
On Thursday, Mayor Danny Avula said that after the outage occurred Monday morning, the plant attempted to automatically transfer power to a secondary Dominion Energy power source, but the automatic transfer switch did not work.
A plant electrician, who was initially offsite, was called in to help. That employee decided not to activate a backup generator, because he wanted to manually switch to the secondary Dominion power source.
When the power was transferred over, the IT system which has been called "the brains" of the facility and has the ability to open and close valves, did not reconnect.
A backup battery kicked in to power the IT system but did not last as long as expected.
These challenges led to flooding at the plant due to the inability to close valves that were pumping water into the basement.
Watch: Past inspections cited Richmond water plant for deteriorating equipment, outdated emergency planning
In the event of a power outage, experts and regulators say there are multiple layers of backup protection that should be working and in place to keep the system running.
When a main Dominion Energy power source fails, like it did on Monday, the facility can then rely on another Dominion Energy backup source, a generator, and three backup batteries which have separate functions to temporarily power different assets within the plant, before resorting to manual procedures.
According to information provided in a Thursday briefing to the Virginia Department of Health's Drinking Water Director Dwayne Roadcap, two of Richmond's three backup batteries are currently out of service.
It's not yet clear if those two batteries were out of service before or after the storm hit on Monday.
And even if all those backup sources fail, Roadcap said it's his understanding that there's supposed to be a procedure for staff to manually close the valves to prevent flooding into the basement where equipment is stored.
But according to information shared during the briefing, he said staff were unaware that they needed to do that until after the flooding occurred on Monday. He said operators have now been informed of that process.
CBS 6 asked Avula why staff weren't aware of that process, and he said he did not immediately know and would follow up with DPU officials.
CBS 6 has also previously asked whether all backup systems were tested before the expected winter storm, and Avula has said that will be part of an after-action investigation.
Just last week, Director Bingham sent a letter to federal regulators at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to them citing the city in 2022 for corroding equipment, lacking maintenance, and outdated emergency plans. In it, she highlighted the capabilities of the facility's redundancy system.
But that system failed just few days after Bingham sent the letter.
Bingham was not made available to answer questions and was not at the two press conferences hosted by the city on Thursday, so CBS 6 asked Mayor Avula for his reaction.
“So yesterday, DPU Director April Bingham said that this crisis was caused by a simple weather-related power outage. But as you know, power outages happen all across the country all the time, and whole cities don't completely lose their water, and this is why we have redundancy systems in place, right? And so last week, April, sent a letter to the EPA and said, “redundancy is a key feature of our system, ensuring that critical services remain uninterrupted despite the temporary unavailability of certain assets.” A couple days later, that whole system failed, and now we were in a crisis. What is your reaction to that? And do you stand by the fact that this is just a simple weather outage issue?” reporter Tyler Layne asked.
“So the weather clearly caused the primary issue. The thing I do understand is that the UPS battery backup, and I'm not exactly sure what that stands for, but the battery backup system didn't last as long as it needed to, and so we did have a failure of that battery backup that led to the valves in the system not opening up and water backing up into the plant. So that's what I do know. I think this is why we're testing our battery backups now. It's why we're testing our generator backups. And I agree, I think at least what I heard about that statement, that redundancy is a key feature, and in this particular case, the power outage and then the failure of our battery backup system have led to the situation that we're at," Avula said.
He promised a rigorous review to find out the facts.
“As you do that, if you find that there are leadership or management failures, personnel failures, they didn't do what they were supposed to do, are you going to hold those people accountable?” Layne asked.
“That’s the job, right? We need to make sure that we've got the right protocols in place, the right people in place, the right systems in place to provide the basic services that our city needs, so absolutely," Avula said.
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