RICHMOND, Va. — Speaking before Richmond’s newly elected City Council on Monday night, Mayor Danny Avula summarized a week-long water crisis that impacted the city and three surrounding counties. He also promised accountability and potential financial assistance for families and businesses most impacted by the crisis.
“We are going to do a transparent, thorough, rigorous after-action report to figure out how did we get here,” Avula said. “We know that operations were significantly impacted for several days. Some businesses had to close, restaurants had to close, people couldn’t go to work.”
Avula announced the city plans to reopen the regional emergency response fund that was created during the COVID-19 pandemic and said that $25,000 in funds originally slated for his inaugural events, will instead go into the fund, along with other money that is allocated or raised by philanthropic partnerships.
Watch: Richmond only had 3 operators at water plant at time of outage, likely didn't test backup systems
The Office of Economic Development is also looking at ways to assist small businesses, while a 10-day grace period has been extended to tax and rate payers for January bills.
“The city itself continues to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in eviction diversions that is administered by our non-profit partners so we’ll continue to work with the Southside Community Development Center to fill up some capacity there,” Avula said.
The topic of evictions was a concern Monday night, as a large contingency of people held signs on rent and affordable housing, especially in wake of the crisis.
Eighth City Council Representative Reva Trammell also raised questions about accountability, referencing a 2022 report by the Environmental Protection Agency, that cited the city with faulty infrastructure and sloppy emergency preparedness at its water treatment plant.
“These pictures!” Reva exclaimed. “I wonder has this water been safe to drink for the past two years.”
The water crisis started last Monday, Jan. 6, when a power outage and subsequent automatic transfer failure triggered a chain of events, including flooding that damaged equipment and an IT failure that took the plant’s operation software offline.
Avula says a three-phase response will address the crisis, including hiring a third party to investigate and do a “deep dive” into the problems that led to the crisis. The process is expected to take about six months to complete.
Phase II will involve securing funds for short and long term infrastructure improvements and enhanced staffing and protocols. Avula says the city plans to evaluate and reconstruct an emergency preparedness culture that will prevent another catastrophic failure. The process could take about a year and a half.
Avaula says Phase III will involve reaching out to federal and state partners to create a regional support system. A plan that could take years and billions of dollars.
“I think our partners in the county are very quickly looking at how do we create redundancy and resilience and less dependence on one solo water treatment plant,” Avula says. “So this really feels like an opportunity to look at the whole regional water system and figure out what long term investments we can make that creates multiple sources of water.”
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