No algorithms. No content filters. No A.I. — Honest and insightful analysis from Richmond, VA.
Following the release on Tuesday of Henrico County's after action report about the water crisis, two things became even more clear than before the presentation.
First, the city failed miserably to communicate the sudden failure of the water plant that provides water to hundreds of thousands of people across the region and treat it as a major emergency with a Defcon 1 alert. The failure on January 6th happened just before 7:00am and the flooding that caused the plant and knocked out the software that controls the plant happened soon thereafter, but the mayor was not even notified it was serious until about 1:00pm and our regional partners, who buy millions of gallons of water from the city every day, weren’t told until about 2:30pm.
The second thing clarified by this crisis is that the Stoney administration’s legacy of incompetence is now worthy of a statue, because key people hired by Stoney running the water plant and those in charge of handling a crisis for a new mayor five days into his term seemed to have hoped the disaster would fix itself or could be handled without revealing years of neglect and ineptness. Instead, as the crisis grew worse, they chose to keep key people (like the Mayor) in the dark as to the severity of the problem instead of immediately getting help to fix it.
The Henrico report is the most detailed analysis of the water crisis so far. Chris Pomeroy, head of the AquaLaw firm detailed what happened using Henrico’s communications and emails and interviews but informed the board it was not a complete account of what happened that day because it only reviewed information and communications from among Henrico officials in their communications with each other, the city, and around the region. The report’s timeline revealed that the city was not telling anyone that there was a major failure at the city’s Water Treatment Facility, which is referred to in the report as “Richmond WTF”.
Henrico, which is the city’s largest water customer and is contractually obligated to buy a minimum of 12 million gallons per day, was notified at 7:01am that the Richmond WTF had a power outage when a Henrico DPU official received a call and was asked if the county could temporarily reduce the draw of water from the city’s system until it was resolved. Throughout the morning, Henrico DPU employees continued to check in with the city and were told, according to the report, that the distribution system was looking good and left the impression they would soon be back to normal operation.
Henrico’s DPU Director Bentley Chan was informed at 9:18am that the city’s WTF was down and it was still unknown when water production would resume. Henrico began to increase water production, draw less water from the city as a precaution, and began to shift water from the county plant on Three Chopt Road to pipes in the eastern part of the county.
According to texts from a CBS6 story, at 11:51 a.m., the city’s then-Department of Public Utilities director April Bingham updated her boss (Interim Chief Administrative Officer Sabrina Joy-Hogg) with a text that said: “We have ALL HANDS on deck,” both sides of the water plant “are underwater,” “If we can get one side FULLY drained, the electricians can start to inspect and make repairs so we can start production again,” and if they could start production again to refill the reservoir they would “avoid a boil
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to RVA 5x5 to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.