RICHMOND, Va. — Joel Paulsen, a licensed professional engineer with 20 years of experience designing water systems for cities and counties said it was “very out of the ordinary” for a water system of Richmond’s size to experience catastrophic failure.
“Typically we put a lot of redundancy into potable water systems because they’re so important,” Paulsen, who works for Engineering Systems Inc., said.
Paulsen, who lives in Minnesota, said he, like many Richmonders, is looking for answers from the city to several questions related to the plant.
As many Richmonders prepared to return to work and school Monday, Dominion Energy received word at 6:50 a.m. that Richmond’s water treatment plant had lost power.
When the outage occurred, a backup power system comprised of batteries took over to keep the plant running, according to the interim spokesperson for the mayor, Julian Walker.
But, Richmond Mayor Danny Avula said at a press conference Wednesday morning that one of those battery backups, the one that runs the IT system, called SCADA, which operates the entire plant, quickly lost power.
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"In this case, the battery backup, at least on the IT system did kick in. It just didn't last long enough, right? We had a power outage that was a little bit over two hours. The battery backup lasted about an hour, and so the IT system went down,” Avula said.
When a backup battery stops working, Walker said there are gas-powered generators in place that can kick in and provide power, but Walker said those have to be manually activated.
And, while he did say they were turned on, he stopped answering my questions when I asked how much time passed between the battery dying and a person activating the generator.
Paulsen said he’s never seen a system that relies on backup batteries before generators.
“Typically we would use a backup generator, you know diesel or gasoline, and those can run indefinitely as long as they continue to be refueled. That is usually industry standard the approach you would take,” Paulsen said. “One hour would not be sufficient enough time to provide backup power for a critical system like a potable water system.”
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Avula said Tuesday that in addition to that battery harming the IT system, there was a failure in a redundant system that caused the plant to flood that morning, which damaged equipment.
“Our folks were in there. They were. Setting up pumps. They were trying to pump that water out, but that there was a couple of hours delay from the initiation of the power outage to the time that water actually started to build up in the in the treatment facility,” Avula said.
“It seems odd that the water treatment plant would be flooded itself. There are a lot of relief valves and overflows that should have been designed into the system,” Paulsen said.
Paulsen said it’s unheard of for a locality's water supply to go off-line, especially after a power outage that lasted fewer than three hours.
“How could a power outage that only lasted a couple of hours cause catastrophic failure in a water system in a capital city?” CBS 6 investigative reporter Melissa Hipolit asked Paulsen.
“Those are all great questions and I want to know the answer to them as well. The only thing I can think that would completely out a water system either contamination at the source of the water or critical failure of the water treatment plant itself. Those two components would certainly take out a water system for a significant amount of time, but neither of those seem to be related to a power outage because the water treatment plant should have redundant, backup power,” Paulsen said.
This is a developing story. Email the CBS 6 Newsroom if you have additional information to share.
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