Avula commits to ‘independent’ report on water plant failure

Richmond Mayor Danny Avula said Friday that an upcoming report on this week’s failure of the city’s water system will be conducted by an outside contractor and not handled solely by city staff.

“We are absolutely outsourcing this. We’re going to bring in a third party to do that investigation,” Avula said at a Friday morning news conference on the ongoing water situation.

Officials have said a weather-induced power outage caused the cascading failures at the water plant Monday morning that disrupted water service for much of the Richmond region for at least five days.

As he’s faced numerous questions about the exact timeline of events and what steps were taken when to try to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control, Avula has said more precise information will take time but will be released eventually in a public report.

It was not clear until Friday if the city would be preparing the report on its own or Avula would bring in outside expertise.

“We have already put calls out to several different vendors,” the mayor said. “And I expect early next week we will have an independent, third-party investigator on board to start that.”

Avula said he has been focused on getting through the immediate crisis and prepping the city for more snow in the forecast starting tonight.

Officials could not immediately say when the report might be completed and released. The timeline could become clearer once the city formally chooses a firm to conduct the investigation.

Late Friday afternoon, Gov. Glenn Youngkin confirmed there will also be a state-level investigation into what went wrong in Richmond.

"The commonwealth will start a detailed after action assessment and investigation immediately coordinated through the Virginia Department of Health Office of Drinking Water," Youngkin said in a statement. "I know that the city of Richmond has announced they would do an independent assessment at the city level, but we need to do this work, because there are lots of issues, from operations to maintenance to infrastructure. We need to understand exactly what happened and what we need to do in order to make sure it doesn't happen again."