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The release of the after action reports from three localities this week led to a plethora of information to chew, swallow, and digest. While trying to write about the city’s report, it quickly became apparent that adding a second issue was necessary. As today’s Part 2 was being written covering some of the questions and answers from the Mayor’s press conference on Friday, it became clear a third was needed. You can read Part 1 here about some of the initial findings in the city’s preliminary after action report. Part 3 will arrive tomorrow and cover the discussion and possibility of a regional water solution that will be a front and center topic in the coming months and years.
The Mayor held a press conference Friday and pushed back on the theme from Henrico and Hanover’s reports earlier in the week that cited a lack of timely communication from the city on the morning of January 6th. We know that the plant failure occurred about 5:45am, and the city called Henrico at 7:01am to ask them to draw less water from the city system. There has been no documentation of communication that conveyed just how serious the problem was to anyone until 2:34pm. A virtual call was held at 2:45pm among the four main localities’ utilities directors when they were told the city was going to run out of water.
When asked what he thought about the level of communication between the city and counties that morning, the Mayor replied:
“Communication was substandard across the board. We let our regional partners down. We let our residents down. We apologize to all those affected and pledge we will do everything to make sure it will not happen again. Moving forward, we will set and follow established communication protocols that everyone at the city be trained to follow.”
Actually, that’s not what Mayor Avula said. At Friday’s press conference, he did say:
“You know, I've done sort of an initial scan of the Henrico report, and I looked at our timeline and obviously, my involvement as I've shared previously, I got a call at 11:00am. We had our internal meeting at 1:00pm. But when I looked back both at our report and Henrico’s report, earlier that morning, within, I don't know, an hour a half, maybe two hours of the initial outage, even Henrico’s report noted that their operations director was notified around 9:00am. So I think there are probably inconsistencies with different reads on this. But as I look at the timeline that has been laid out in these multiple reports, it all looks fairly like within a an hour or so, you know, the discrepancy isn't huge. I'll say that.”
“I'm not overly concerned with the timeline that I'm seeing in these multiple reports. I feel like there was pretty consistent communication from what was being managed at the plant to then letting partners know and then partners responding to divert their water utility, you know, as of nine that morning.”
The night before the press conference on Thursday, when asked by WRIC about the lack of communication, Avula said:
“I’d have to read the [Henrico] report,” said Avula. “I mean, what I understand from what happened early that morning was that there, and I don’t know exactly what time but that the regional partners were brought into the conversation about midmorning. So that doesn’t quite jibe with what I’ve heard. But again, I haven’t read the report.”
On Tuesday evening after Henrico’s report had been released, the Mayor’s office released a statement that said on January 6th the city “was in regular communication with local, state, and regional partners about the situation.”
The troublesome issue here is the Mayor is either not reading the reports, is receiving
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