RICHMOND, Va. — The third-party company the city hired to investigate the events of the water crisis found a power outage at the Richmond Water Treatment Plant is something the city’s Department of Public Utilities "should be equipped to handle," but there was "little action taken to prepare the plant for the event of a power outage."
That’s according to the draft of HNTB’s after action assessment report released by the city Monday.
Watch: Engineering firm sheds light on what went wrong at Richmond's water treatment plant
On Jan. 3, Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a State of Emergency in advance of an approaching storm and two days later, the new Richmond Mayor Danny Avula followed suit.
And, yet, according to the HNTB report, multiple staff members at DPU told investigators there was no discussion of storm preparation from leadership at the plant.
That is despite the plant already being “put at risk” by operating with one power feed off for the winter as a cost-saving measure.
That meant that if one power feed went down, a piece of equipment called the “switchgear” would have to function properly and transfer power to the other feed or power would go out.
On Jan. 6 that transfer switch failed, and, according to the report, none of the staff at the plant at the time of the outage knew how to operate the backup generators.
They also did not know how to manually transfer power to the second feed.
Watch: Richmond water plant had generators. So why did city plant flood after backup battery lost power?
HNTB said it remains “unclear” if a plant electrician who arrived 15 minutes after the power went out was ever trained on how to transfer power, since it was not until an electrical supervisor arrived that power was restored.
That was an hour and 20 minutes after power was lost.
HNTB told the city that if directions on how to manually transfer power other than the second feed had been attached to the cabinet housing the transfer switch, and an electrical staff members had been on site when the outage occured, critical flooding that damaged essential equipment may have been avoided.
DPU staff told HNTB that flooding was a common occurrence at the water treatment plant, and there was even a past flood that caused water production to pause for six hours.
Multiple staff members present during the event and in response to it said that there was a lack of leadership and little direction on a course of action.
As we have previously reported, HNTB found there were no training procedures, a lack of established standard operating procedures, and a lack of specific actions that operators at the plant would need to take in the event of a power outage.
The city said it is implementing recommendations from the report, including improving back up power systems and staff training.
Watch: City Council discusses draft of after action report on Richmond water crisis: 'Lucky that no one was hurt'
CBS 6 reporter Melissa Hipolit asked the Mayor and new DPU head Scott Morris how they held plant leadership accountable for the issues noted in the report.
“I’m not going to speak to personnel matters for some of those individuals, but I can firmly tell you that going forward the expectation is you are going to get the proper training and you are going to do the procedures that are needed,” Morris replied. “We are holding people accountable, making sure they do the right thing, and appropriate action will be taken in the event that somebody doesn’t."
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