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City Council received a presentation Monday on the final report of the water plant failure conducted by third party firm HNTB. One could argue the city was short-changed on the $240,000 it paid for the final report considering it offered little new information not previously released in two draft reports on February 13th and March 3rd. Those draft reports left lingering questions while everyone was still asking for answers, but the common refrain from the Mayor’s office was those questions would be answered in the final report. Yet here we are still with as many or more questions than answers.
There were three things in particular where the report fell well short in helping to restore public confidence: it used an incredibly narrow and limited set of reference material to come to its final conclusions (or perhaps that was the intended goal); it was less than inquisitive about the role (or lack thereof) of backup generators as a power source, and it does not look back before January 6th as to how the water plant got into such precarious position to fail. Today’s issue will look at the first of these shortcomings.
Even before the shock (and embarrassment) wore off of a city of Richmond’s size suddenly and without warning losing its access to potable water for six days, local media immediately dove in to do the yeoman’s work of uncovering information and documents through Freedom of Information Act Requests (FOIA) and within a few days began to paint a clearer picture of the failure that made the draft reports and final report almost anti-climactic.
Understandably, the administration offered varying explanations in the first few hours and days as they pieced together what happened. The power went out, staffing was substandard, the generators weren’t used (next issue!), and valves were not closed which allowed a critical part of the water plant to flood which knocked out the software systems that run the plant delivering safe drinking water.
Within a few days, however, local media uncovered more and more troubling findings as to what happened before and during the water plant meltdown. The explanations from the administration became more defensive and less elucidating on what happened and answered more with “let’s wait for the final report” type answers. Yet, nothing of what the media found was included in the final HNTB report.
HNTB said they wrote their report based on “a site visit, conducted [23] staff interviews, requested and received numerous documents from DPU, reviewed available
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