RICHMOND, Va. —A DPU employee submitted a work request to the maintenance program manager for the Richmond Water Treatment Plant about a “power bump” impacting pump-related equipment two-and-a-half hours before a power outage at the facility was reported to Dominion Energy on January 6th.
That’s according to records CBS6 obtained through a public records request.
Initially, Dominion Energy told CBS 6 they received a report of a power outage at the plant at 6:50 a.m., but Richmond Mayor Danny Avula said the outage actually occurred at 5:50 a.m.
We asked Dominion if it was the city that reported the power outage at the water plant, but Aaron Ruby, director, Virginia and Offshore Wind Media, would only say there were “multiple reports of the same outage."
In the work order sent at 4:42 a.m. that CBS 6 received through a public records request, it states the plant experienced a “power bump” at 4:25 a.m.
After the bump, it states, “VFD would restart, reach 20 percent speed, shut itself off, then attempt to restart over and over again. Please investigate.”
“What do you think should have happened at 4:25 a.m. when that power bump was noted and those VFDs were struggling to come back online?” CBS 6 reporter Melissa Hipolit asked Joel Paulsen, a licensed professional engineer with ESi, who has 20 years of experience designing water systems for municipalities.
“An immediate call should have been made to the power company at that time to verify that power was being provided to the water treatment plant to try to understand what the power bump was, and there should have been a complete assessment of the electrical system at that time,” Paulsen responded. “Had that been done, I think they would have flagged issues a lot earlier than what ended up occurring and more than likely would have prevented the flooding of the clearwell, which shut down the entire plant.”
Paulsen said he thought there should have been calls made to supervisors as well.
We’ve asked the city if the plant superintendent or maintenance program manager was called at that time, and we are waiting to hear back.
We’ve also asked Dominion if they were notified of the power bump by the city when it happened, and we are waiting to hear back.
CBS 6 talked to Paulsen at the beginning of the water crisis, and we have been sharing our public records requests with him to get a better understanding of what may have happened at the plant.
Chain of Events
A second document in our public records request seems to shed more light on the chain of events that morning.
An email sent by another DPU employee appears to lay out a timeline of that employee’s morning.
At 5:50 a.m. he noted a “no power and low battery power” alarm from Douglasdale, which is the location of the water treatment plant.
“Almost all water treatment plants nowadays have uninterrupted power supplies which are in the form of battery systems,” Paulsen said. “When the plant lost its primary power source, those batteries would turn on automatically. Low battery power would indicate it’s about to fail, and they don’t have any electrical source backing it up.”
The employee stated that he called two people who would both respond and asked them to check all stations while out.
“All of these things should have been directed to a supervisor immediately. These are critical warnings, red flags that need to be addressed immediately with somebody that understands the plant so they know what is going on and can take corrective action to prevent a crisis,” Paulsen said.
We’ve asked the city if the plant superintendent or maintenance program manager was called about the 5:50 alarm, and we are waiting to hear back.
At 6:30 a.m., the employee wrote that “effluent flow was going over,” and the city redacted the rest of that sentence.
“That means their clearwell was flooding within the water treatment plant,” Paulsen said.
At the same time, he said the Douglasdale battery power was low.
“At a minimum they should have had the backup generators on,” Paulsen said.
A little before 7 a.m., DPU and plant leadership started getting involved.
At 6:55 a.m. the superintendent of the plant texted the then-director of Richmond DPU, April Bingham, and told her, “Loss of power at the plant. Assessment in progress. Production is down. Crews are responding."
Bingham asked him to call her and wrote that he was en route to the plant with an ETA of less than 30 minutes. She said he was reaching out to the counties to cut back on demand.
At the same time, the maintenance program manager for Richmond’s water treatment plant sent a text stating, “The plant is down due to a power issue. That’s all I know right now. I’m on the way in. Our folks are there.”
He sent another text at 7:16 a.m. stating, “Power is back but dealing with flooding issue.”
According to information shared by Mayor Danny Avula with reporters in the days after the water crisis, when the power failure occurred, the switchgear did not automatically transfer power to the secondary power source.
Avula said an electrician was called in, and they made the decision not to activate the generators, but instead to manually switch to the secondary Dominion power source.
“I’m still under the belief the emergency generators should have been powered on immediately at 4:30 a.m. Had that occurred it would have prevented all these issues with the water system,” Paulsen said.
Avula said power was restored a little after 7:30 a.m., but the plant’s IT system, which is the brain of the system, did not reconnect to servers after a reboot, which was crucial for the plant's operations.
The IT system had backup battery power, but it went offline before full power was restored. These challenges led to flooding at the plant due to the inability to close valves that were pumping water into the basement.
“As soon as they started getting low power notifications the director should have been notified that there is a major problem at the water treatment plant and everybody should have been on call to try to get there to figure out what was going on and try to take corrective actions the best they could,” Paulsen said.
We are waiting for a response from the city to our question about what plant policy/protocol is when a power bump occurs, or when an alarm goes off indicating no power/low battery power, and who should be notified/who was notified in this situation.
This is a developing story. Email the CBS 6 Newsroom if you have additional information to share.
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