Redefining Dry January, RVA Style

by | Jan 13, 2025 | COMMUNITY, RICHMOND NEWS, RICHMOND POLITICS

The start of every New Year often comes with people making resolutions to do more exercise, choose better eating habits, and make changes to improve one’s life. One of the newer traditions in recent years has been Dry January, which started in England but has spread worldwide and challenges people to spend the first 31 days of the year alcohol free to improve their health, lose weight and let their bodies rest and recharge. 

But this year, Dry January has taken on a new meaning for Richmonders after the self-inflicted failure of the city’s water plant and ensuing five days of chaos that is now, hopefully, behind us. If you made the Dry January pledge here but found yourself instead with a 12-pack of brews this week because there was no water from the tap or at the store, then don’t feel too bad. Just redefine it as “Semi-arid January,” declare victory, and get back on track now the water is flowing and clean again. 

I jest, of course, (but only a little) because what happened this week in Richmond is a serious matter that underscores what we have seen for more than a decade — massive negligence of essential infrastructure investment in critical city functions. I won’t repeat much of what happened because local media has done a fantastic job of covering it. The Richmonder, CBS6WRICVPM News the Times-Dispatch in particular have been covering and digging and showing what was happening across the region and that water is finally flowing again.

This crisis is also solid proof to the corporations and media overlords who have slashed and burned local media in recent decades that local coverage of local news is vitally important to people’s lives and well-being. There is a very real demand for local news. It’s also proof what can happen when local media is not there or able to cover local government that allows local politicians to get away with spending money on things they want instead of things that the people need — you know, like water to drink, live, prevent illness, take medicine, for cleaning, and putting out fires.

That media coverage has also begun to uncover what many of us have known for too long — two inconsequential mayors who had electoral success chose not to turn that into a mandate to improve the city, but focused on chasing big shiny projects instead of looking after the basic needs of Richmonders. Rather than being focused on trivial things like the safety and reliability of drinking water, Mayor Stoney and Mayor Jones chose to focus on things like a training facility for the country’s fourth most valuable sports franchise, a zillion dollar arena boondoggle that would have bankrupted the city’s general fund, and a casino that both former mayors were set to cash in on politically and championed to the end even thought the people kept saying no. 

Stoney was even given roughly $155 million in federal COVID money, and he spent a lot of that on roads and community centers — both basic government functions, to be sure — but not as essential as safe water. While you might think he would have looked into using some of that money on fixing the shortcomings at the water plant, especially after the scathing EPA report in 2022, you must remember water plants don’t provide photo ops for Twitter and are out of sight and out of mind — until the tap runs dry. 

The water treatment plant failure was not the fault of Mayor Avula. He had been on the job less than a week when this happened, and reporters have already begun to uncover documents and other information that show the failure was systemic and years in the making and the result of a blatant lack of investment, training, and focusing on running what used to be a well run, efficient, safe operation and letting it fall into disrepair.

Soon after the failure of the water plant and the boil water advisory broke on Monday afternoon (after many people were already wise to it through social media and having no water pressure at home), the original line from City Hall was that a snowstorm knocked out power and the redundant systems meant to keep operations running failed and also led to an electrical and computer failure that reset the system and caused flooding in the plant that caused a massive outage. 

However, more and more reports show the negligence of equipment, staffing and training have been major issues that few people were made aware. A two-inch snowstorm does not cause an entire water system to fail — the lack of proper procedures, training, staffing, and contingencies does. Any system, whether it is a power plant or an airplane or a water treatment plant, always has a manual solution to prevent a meltdown. Even if the normal process is controlled 99.9% by a computer, the manual override/solution is the last resort when you absolutely need that last 00.01% to prevent the worst from happening.

And the evidence of that this was a ticking time-bomb is becoming more evident. Ryan Nadeau at WRIC-8 detailed a July 2022 report by the federal Environmental Protection Agency found, after a three day tour of the city’s facilities, all kinds of fault at the plant, from rusted pipes to unsanitary conditions to equipment not being adequately inspected on a regular basis or even monitored by someone at all times in case a disaster strikes — just as it did. The top 5 threats listed in the EPA report were summarized in the article:

  1. Staff were not prepared for emergency situations.
  2. There was degrading, broken and unreliable infrastructure.
  3. Inspectors found debris, rust, corrosion and standing water.
  4. Parts of the system were poorly monitored — if at all.
  5. Threats to public health were identified across the system.

With those dire observations noted in the summer of 2022, the city’s Director of the Department of Utilities did not respond to the report until just a few days before last week’s crisis.

Tyler Lane at CBS6 reported on Thursday after speaking with the Virginia Department of Health’s Drinking Water Director Dwayne Roadcap who oversees water treatment facilities across the state. He told Layne that two of the three city’s backup batteries were out of service (but it’s unknown when they went out of service) and that there’s supposed to be a procedure for staff to manually close the valves to prevent flooding into the basement where equipment is stored. 

But according to information shared during the briefing, he said staff were unaware that they needed to do that until after the flooding occurred on Monday. He said operators have now been informed of that process.

CBS 6 asked Avula why staff weren’t aware of that process, and he said he did not immediately know and would follow up with DPU officials.

Sierra Krug at WRIC also spoke with Roadcap who told her by the time the city’s on-call engineer made it to the site to fix the problem, flooding had already broken out. Roadcap said this fix shouldn’t have taken that long.

“When the main backup power didn’t work and the battery under an uninterrupted power supply battery backups didn’t work as expected, there should have been some manual overrides that the plant staff could have done,” Roadcap said.

This circles back to the 114 page 2022 EPA report that found the plant’s emergent operations plans outdated and unfinished.

Additionally, the water system’s Emergency Response Planning (ERP) guidelines were several years old and referenced outdated information. According to the EPA, its inspectors were given an unsigned and unfinalized ERP dated for 2020, but this document also contained an outdated contact list.

Several of its action descriptions were kept in a separate document — an Emergency Operations Manual (EOM), which was also unsigned and unfinalized, dated April 2021.

Furthering the unfolding theme of long-standing negligence, Samuel Parker of the Times-Dispatch reported Friday that the city never acted on three Requests For Proposals that would have replaced the main switchgear equipment at the water treatment facility, which is what failed last Monday. The RFP’s were issued in 2016, 2021, and 2022 and, according to water treatment plant staff, had not been replaced in twenty years. For whatever reasons, none of those solicitations were selected by the city, and the RTD has filed a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request that will presumably provide an answer in the next week or so.

The truth will out, as they say, and Avula has promised repeatedly this week he will call for a third party after-action report to find out what happened and why. Fingers are tightly crossed. But until that report, several things have been made clearer in the immediate wake of this mess. 

First, this big fix of the water plant will be expensive and lengthy; the solution this week was an emergency one only; but we are talking about one of the city’s most vital roles — to provide clean and safe drinking water that people literally can not live without. You see what happens to people when water systems fail as they did in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi, and when fire hydrants have no water to fight fires as seen by the recent horror and tragedy and loss of life in Los Angeles.

While Avula is not to blame for the failure, the responsibility to fix it is now clearly on his shoulders. Not fixing it or pretending the problem doesn’t exist (as Stoney did) is no longer an option because people’s lives are literally at stake — and Avula is a doctor who knows that without being told.

Second, this problem at the water plant is only the tip of the iceberg of deferred and ignored maintenance of basic and government functions that have been too long ignored – the finance department, social services, permitting, and many other areas are a mess and need roadmaps to functioning and serving residents. 

And third, if there is a silver lining in this crisis, Avula now has a mandate. If he had harbored any desire to chase a big, shiny project of his own that relied on city tax dollars to fund it, he knows now he better discard any such ambitions, stat. His new mandate is unequivocal and now clear to everyone in Richmond with a faucet, whether they supported Avula or not: identify what essential city infrastructure and departments have been ignored and neglected, create a schedule to start funding their modernization and replacement over time, and hire and train people to run them properly. 

He doesn’t have to fix it all in four years, but he has to get started and stay focused. He is the doctor now on call and has to come up with the cure in the years ahead. Forgetting about it, ignoring it, or turning to something else over the next four years is almost certainly a prescription for pitchforks and electoral defeat. 

Read more from Jon Baliles at his RVA 5X5 Substack HERE.
Also, send emails, thoughts, questions, comments, tips to rva5x5@gmail.com.

Photo by Denny Muller

Jon Baliles

Jon Baliles

Jon Baliles is the founder and editor of the Substack RVA 5x5 newsletter (https://rva5x5.substack.com). He spent a decade in City Hall as a member of City Council and also served as an advisor to Mayors Wilder and Stoney and also served as the Executive Assistant to the Director of the Planning Department.




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