RICHMOND, Va. — An automatic power transfer failure at the Richmond water treatment plant set off a 'cascade' of events Monday morning that ultimately led to the city's water crisis, Mayor Danny Avula explained on Thursday.
He said a plant electrician made the call to manually switch the Richmond Water Treatment Plant to a secondary Dominion Energy power source when the plant lost power Monday morning instead of activating the backup generator when a process that should have automatically transferred power to that second Dominion Energy source failed.
The chain of events stemming from the failure of the automatic transfer to that secondary Dominion Energy source triggered the water treatment plant flooded sparking a week-long water crisis in Richmond and surrounding counties.
CBS 6 hoped to ask April Bingham, head of the Richmond Department of Public Utilities, about what exactly happened with the generator at Richmond's water treatment plant on Monday to cause a catastrophic failure. But Bingham did not attend the city's news conference Thursday afternoon.
Instead, CBS 6 asked Richmond Mayor Danny Avula, who took office five days before the power failure.
"Why was the system designed that way?" investigative reporter Melissa Hipolit asked. "When were those powered on by somebody? Was there a delay that could have led to this catastrophe that we are now experiencing, and was anybody actually at the plant when this all went down to manually turn those on?"
"I've heard some discussion about this," Avula replied. "I am just as interested in figuring out exactly what the sequence of events is."
WATCH: Video offers shocking glimpse into flooded Richmond Water Treatment Plant
He went on to say that Bingham had not shared any of that information with him yet.
A few hours later, the mayor followed up, saying he had gotten some answers.
The power failure occurred on Monday at 5:50 a.m., he said, when the plant lost power and automatically switched to the second power source.
However, the transfer failed.
"That was the component failure that started the cascade," Avula said.
CBS 6 heard different things about when the power went out at the Richmond Water Treatment Plant.
Dominion Energy said it received a report about the power being out at 6:50 a.m., however Avula stated the power went out at 5:50 a.m.
"I don't know exactly what time they got there," Avula said referring to the electrician called to help fix the power issues. "The electrician made the determination we didn’t need to activate the generators because he manually switched to the second Dominion feed."
IN-DEPTH COVERAGE: Watch latest updates on Richmond Water Crisis from Thursday, Jan. 9
Power was restored a little after 7:30 a.m., but the plant's IT system did not reconnect to servers after a reboot, which was crucial for the plant's operations.
The mayor said that disconnection to the servers was one of the main issues at play.
The IT system had backup battery power, but it went offline before full power was restored.
"I think that was happening in real-time as the electrician was trying to assess the manual switch over to the second power source and in that window, we ended up losing power," Avula said.
"A lot of reliance on a person as opposed to automatics going into place, you what I mean?" Hipolit asked.
"Yeah, yeah," the mayor said.
An engineer with 20 years of experience designing water systems told us he felt that the generator should have been activated immediately when the automatic switch failed.
CBS 6 is committed to sharing community voices on this important topic. Email your thoughts to the CBS 6 Newsroom.
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