Richmond, Va. (Newsradiowrva.com) - City officials on Thursday provided a clearer timeline of the events leading up to Richmond’s water outage.
During a press briefing on Thursday, Jan. 9, Mayor Danny Avula gave details about the situation at the plant on Monday, when a winter storm-related power outage caused a malfunction of the city's reservoir system.
According to Avula, the affected water treatment facility has two power sources supplied by Dominion Energy. If one fails, the other should automatically take over in order to prevent service interruption. They are on two different power grids to prevent lapses in service.
The plant lost power before 6 a.m. on Monday, and the automatic switch did not occur. Avula said the last time this happened was 21 years ago, during Hurricane Isabel. The city is actively looking into possible reasons the failure occurred, but officials believe it was not caused by any issue on Dominion Energy’s end.
Avula added that whatever caused the issue will be dealt with to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.
According to Avula, the on-call electrician was called to the plant by the Department of Public Utilities (DPU) staffers who were at the plant when the power loss occurred. The election was able to manually switch the power sources at around 7 a.m. Before the manual switch had taken place, the plant was without electricity.
Avula said it was during that time that the computer system that controls water operations – known as “SCADA” (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) – failed. SCADA was turned back on once power was restored.
Flooding also took place during this window of time, and DPU staff worked quickly to try and pump the water out. Avula said the area where the flooding was taking place filled very quickly and the pumps had trouble keeping up.
“It’s remarkable how quickly that area can flood,” he told reporters.
In an update on Friday morning, Avula said water pressure is back and testing is underway. Two consecutive negative test results must be obtained before the boil water advisory can be lifted. The hope is that the advisory can be lifted sometime Saturday.
