Another day, another delay as Richmond waits for water to return

On Tuesday at noon, city officials sent out an optimistic update, titled “Richmond restores water production.”

It turns out, the celebration was premature.

A day of intensive work to bring water service back involved steps forward but also backwards, as well as an increased realization, said those close to the situation, that full restoration of the city’s main water plant is becoming an increasingly complex and involved operation.

After filtration, the facility has eight pumps that push water into the municipal system. Tuesday morning, an initial success saw one of those pumps begin to function.

However, the intricate system has provided surprises as well. An electrical panel malfunction Tuesday afternoon nearly led to an additional round of flooding, according to one account of the situation, and shut down the computer system that manages the plant’s processes, known as a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system.

The process was also hindered by plain bad luck. The Byrd Park Reservoir, which was initially built in 1876, is undergoing renovations, meaning at the time of the outage only half of the facility was storing water, which caused the system to be depleted quicker than would have happened otherwise.

Through it all forward progress is being made, but after twice missing service resumption targets, the city declined to offer another in a Tuesday evening update.

The reservoir must reach a critical mass before water pressure can return to area homes, which is happening at a slower than normal pace as crews work to bring more pumps online.

Mayor Danny Avula promised Tuesday to conduct a full postmortem on what happened at the plant, as well as the communication decisions that followed.

New information provided increased clarity into the sequence of events Monday after a winter storm knocked out power to the facility at approximately 6:50 a.m.

Notifications were placed to the surrounding localities almost immediately after, asking them to restrict their water usage, but it wasn’t until a 2:45 p.m. call, after water pressure started to decrease in The Fan, that Chesterfield and Henrico were informed how dire the situation was.

Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas expressed apparent displeasure with the timing at a Tuesday press conference.

“What was a little unusual about this situation is the duration at which, you know, the city understood that it had an issue, and then the call was ultimately made to public utilities and the region,” he said.

A water main break Tuesday morning in Highland Springs led to decreased pressure in that area. Vithoulkas said the county has plenty of water, but it is all coming from the west, meaning it takes additional time to reach Eastern Henrico neighborhoods.

At Richmond’s water plant, power was restored at 9:39 a.m., but damage assessment was only beginning.

City officials said that the proper backup power devices were on hand, but they malfunctioned, and a room containing electronic equipment flooded.

“We had redundancy. It just failed,” said Rhonda Johnson, a DPU spokesperson.

While the urgent restoration of service remains the top priority, Johnson acknowledged the price tag for repairs is likely to be hefty, which will likely lead to additional investigations surrounding insurance claims.

First, though, come the final steps of a recovery process that has proved to be extraordinarily complex.

At 8 a.m. Tuesday, Avula delivered an update outside the city’s Emergency Operations Center.

“Now that we are actively filling (the reservoir), as of this morning, it should not get worse unless we have another setback,” he said.

That setback happened, leaving Richmonders waiting once again for the restoration of water.

Graham Moomaw and Sarah Vogelsong contributed to this story.