RICHMOND, Va. — Mayor Danny Avula said Saturday that if another power outage occurs at Richmond's water treatment plant the city now has “external expertise and consultants in place to help with an immediate response."
On the sixth day that Richmond residents did not have safe drinking water, Avula celebrated the lifting of a boil water advisory region-wide by drinking water out of the tap at Richmond’s Main Library.
"We have now had two rounds of test results confirming the safety of water for human consumption,” Avula said.
For some of the six days, many Richmonders did not have any water coming out of their taps at all after a power outage at the 100-year-old water treatment plant at 5:50 a.m. Monday led to multiple system failures and even triggered a devastating flood.
WATCH: Video offers shocking glimpse into flooded Richmond Water Treatment Plant
Avula said Thursday that when the power outage occurred, the plant attempted to automatically switch to a second power source provided by Dominion Energy but the transfer switch failed.
So, a plant electrician was called in to help.
As time was ticking, the electrician made their way in to the plant and decided to manually try to switch over to the secondary Dominion Energy power source as opposed to switching to backup generators, which also needed to be manually activated.
He ultimately did restore power a little after 7:30 a.m. by switching to the secondary Dominion source, but when that happened the IT system, which runs the plant, did not reconnect to the servers after a reboot.
That IT system had backup battery power, but it went offline before power was fully restored.
“I’ve had so many engineers reach out to me to talk about how this water plant was structured and the redundancies that were in place to make sure power remained on there. Going forward, obviously, there is a lot to be done, but how can you guarantee to people in the City of Richmond this is not going to happen again? That there are redundancies in place right now so that this doesn’t happen again?” CBS 6 investigative reporter Melissa Hipolit asked the mayor.
Avula said exploring "how do we build redundancy" was a top priority after getting everything back up and running at the plant.
“Ordering extra backup batteries, testing and retesting the existing systems and backup generator, looking at our protocols, instituting walk-throughs in the plant on a regular basis, and then really increasing staffing numbers on all shifts,” Avula responded. “If there were to be another weather event or another power outage, we believe that we’ve got the people, the external expertise and consultants in place to help with an immediate response.”
Noticeably absent from Saturday’s press conference was DPU head April Bingham, who has not attended any of Mayor Avula’s many press conferences about the crisis since Wednesday.
“She actually was all night overnight at the water treatment plant, and so she went home this morning at 6 a.m.,” Avula said when we asked about her absence.
“As we make sure everything is up and running, we will have DPU and April ready to answer some questions for you next week.”
WATCH: How Richmond's backup systems failed, what took so long to tell residents
In the meantime, the Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Drinking Water, which regulates water plant facilities, is actively investigating what went wrong.
“One of the things that we're looking into is why the fail-safe systems and the redundant systems didn't work. Because you shouldn't have this kind of problem," the agency's director, Dwayne Roadcap, said. "Then there's personnel issues about trying to test the fail-safe and backup generator and those kinds of things in advance of a system storm," the office's director, Dwayne Roadcap, said.
Avula also said the city is already taking steps to have a third party conduct a transparent after-action analysis to better understand what happened at the water treatment plant and help the city make any needed fixes.
This is a developing story. Email the CBS 6 Newsroom if you have additional information to share.
📲: CONNECT WITH US
Blue Sky| Facebook| Instagram| X| Threads| TikTok| YouTube
