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This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the after action water report about the January water crisis. You can read Part 1 here about the narrow and limited set of reference material (and lack of any footnotes) in the report’s final conclusions.
The most succinct summary of the January water crisis to date came from the Virginia Department of Health’s (VDH) preliminary report when they issued the city a Notice of Violation a little more than two weeks after the water plant meltdown:
“The water crisis never should have happened. The city ... could have prevented this crisis ... by ensuring sufficient staffing was physically present in the event of a power outage, and making sure staff present ... had appropriate training to effectively respond.”
VDH is expected to release a more complete report in the next week or two, and one area that will hopefully be covered in detail was the role (or lack thereof) of any use of the generator in trying to restore power to the plat’s software system that could have prevented the meltdown.
Hopefully it will answer some of the still-unanswered questions about the generator that seemed to escape the curiosity of the third party firm HNTB that city hired and paid $240,000 for an after action report. The HNTB report seems to have left as many questions as answers and lacked even basic footnotes and had an incredibly narrow list of references they used to derive their narrative conclusions. They also also made it seem as if the generator that could have saved the day had no role to play and was dismissed as a viable option to restore backup power, even though one thing water plant staff did in advance of the storm was, according to HNTB’s report:
"The only preparation taken by staff were to fuel vehicles and backup generators and fill chemical tanks. The backup generators were also verified to be operational by staff during a pre storm check on January 4th.
HNTB’s lack of curiosity about the generators and failure to do more extensive research or use any of the volumes of information uncovered by local media is evidenced in numerous places, but nowhere more perhaps than one story in particular from January 12 by Michael Martz in the Times-Dispatch. Martz discovered in less than six days after the January 6th water crisis that after the widespread destruction of Hurricane Isabel in 2003, which knocked out the city’s water plant and more than 100 water pumping stations across the state, then-Governor Warner was unhappy that so many localities were unprepared for the storm.
“I would have liked to have seen better backup in our public water supplies,” Warner said in the week after the 2003 storm, suggesting that local government leaders “are going to have to take a look at additional generator backup power.”
Richmond’s then-City Manager Calvin Jamison said the estimated $48 million cost to install reliable backup generators was too expensive and did nothing. Then, in 2005 Mayor Wilder began a $17 million project to install reliable generators at the water plant that was completed under Mayor Jones.
Martz interviewed Bob Steidel, who was Deputy Director of Public Utilities (DPU) under Wilder and later became the Director until 2017; he retired as Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for Operations just a week before the plant meltdown. Steidel said in the January 12 article the backup generators were designed to operate the plant at 50% capacity. The backup includes two 45-kilowatt generators to ensure that the basement of the plant stays dry to protect sensitive electronic equipment.
Which is exactly the scenario that occurred on the morning of January 6th — except for the generator part. According to the HNTB report, press conferences held by the Mayor, and numerous local media reports since January, the power got knocked out at the water plant (like in 2003), but this time it took so long to restore power that water
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