A Hard To Explain & Totally Inexplicable Interview About The Water Crisis.

RVA 5x5 - March 24, 2025

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Sometime next week, the city should release the final comprehensive third party report about the failure of the water plant on January 6th that left the city and parts of Henrico and Hanover counties without water for six days. April Bingham, the former Director of the city’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU), has been part of a roller coaster ride trying to find out what happened and why a major regional water plant would catastrophically fail because of a power outage from a storm that dropped two inches of snow.

Bingham’s role leading up to and the day of the plant failure has been something of an enigma. She was hired as Director but was not an engineer and had never run a complicated technical department with large water and wastewater facilities. However, clarity and zen have been reached after reading one of the most unexplainable and inexplicable interviews possibly in the history of City Hall (and that’s saying a lot), because now we know why Bingham was hired by Mayor Stoney and Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) Lincoln Saunders in 2021. In the interview, she took zero responsibility or accountability for the failure at the plant and pointed fingers in every direction and deflected all blame for everything that went wrong on to someone and everyone else.

Before we get to the interview she did with Tyler Layne from CBS6, let’s recap the roller coaster ride. Bingham appeared at the first few press conferences held by Mayor Avula during the crisis but was absent from them as it dragged on until January 11th. On January 15th, the city put out a press release that said Scott Morris had been hired as the city’s interim-Director for DPU and made a passing mention that Bingham had resigned that morning. The Mayor said Bingham "decided to step down" and that it was an "amicable separation." A month later, we found out that Bingham rescinded her resignation on January 22nd and the city issued a letter of termination the following day.

That kerfuffle came a week after the engineering firm HNTB, hired to do an after action report on the failure, issued a draft report that showed 14 interviews with DPU employees and people at the plant on January 6th, but Bingham was not on that list. Bingham notified City Council the week before via email that she didn’t do an exit interview when she resigned/was fired nor had she been contacted by HNTB for the report. On February 14th at a press conference that raised more questions (and eyebrows) than it answered, Mayor Avula said he didn’t expect her to be a part of the report because she is “no longer with the city.”

Graham Moomaw at The Richmonder reported that Avula said the city would be “totally open” to HNTB talking with her, but doesn’t know if the firm has requested an interview.

“We did not do an exit interview on the specifics of this case,” Avula said when asked if the city had done its own interview with Bingham prior to her departure.

Several members of City Council thought it would be essential to find out what happened from Bingham since she was in charge of DPU. But over the next few weeks, there was an almost puerile back and forth over Bingham’s participation in the HNTB report. DPU Director Morris told Council in late February that Bingham "declined" to participate, but she sent out another email denying she had been contacted. When asked who contacted Bingham, the Mayor’s spokesman did not respond as to when the outreach took place, but after her email, the spokesman said, “The city is now exploring options to connect Ms. Bingham with [HNTB and the Virginia Department of Health].”

According to a February 26 story from Layne, an email from Bingham to Council said she would "no longer allow" her opinions and knowledge to be "overlooked or dismissed," and she did not want to sit down with HNTB or the city administration anymore because she was "not confident" her words would be "used in a favorable fashion."

The interview with Layne released Friday is outstanding but also one of the most surreal things you might ever encounter involving city government (but she probably should have taken some of her own advice and said nothing). He did a masterful job with the questions and you absolutely have to read or watch it for yourself in its entirety (and to Bingham’s credit, there were no conditions or time limits for the interview).

Still, you can’t help but hear in the background the old idiom, “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”

Below are some of the more astonishing segments with light editing and commentary.