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This is Part 3 of a series on the after action water report about the January water crisis. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
The flurry of after action reports generated by the failure of the city’s water plant concluded last week when the state released a 314-page document that sums up what most of us already knew: (1) “the water crisis was completely avoidable and should not have happened,” (2) “…management and leadership allowed a complacent and reactive culture to persist,” and (3) “General acceptance and normalization of problematic issues at the [water treatment plant] resulted in high risk for a water crisis.”
Nothing like hitting the trifecta.
Both the state report and the soft-serve report delivered by HNTB for the city varied slightly on their definition and identification of the “root cause” of the failure. A more apt term might have been to refer to what each report found as a triggering event, or a spark that lit the fuse. That’s because the root causes in both reports were created long before January 6th from a mess that resembles more of a bamboo root system, which is so intertwined and twisted up beneath the surface and out of sight (and which is why removing bamboo is so difficult).
Photo: Bamboo roots, via Temperature Climate Permaculture
As Graham Moomaw reported in The Richmonder, the state report pointed to failure to maintain a more modern piece of technology — backup batteries meant to keep key equipment working during a power outage — was the “root cause” that allowed a relatively minor winter storm to knock out the city’s water supply for days.” The HNTB report used a slightly different definition and reported that the “root cause” was the mechanical failure of an automatic switch that would have automatically transferred to a backup power feed.
Each report found what it wanted using the simplest terms and the most convenient
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