Avula says Richmond water pressure should be restored this afternoon, boil advisory still in effect

Richmond Mayor Danny Avula said Tuesday morning that water pressure should be restored to the city at some point in the afternoon as crews continue to work to restore systems that were knocked out by the recent snowstorm.

At a news conference shortly after 8 a.m., Avula said he had spent the night at the city’s water plant and — after some progress and some setbacks — could report at least some pumping capacity has been restored. That means water is being replenished at the city’s Byrd Park reservoir, the mayor said, which should allow pressure to return within four to six hours.

“I say that with some hesitancy, given the fact that the plant has sustained a lot of water damage,” said Avula, a former public health official who is handling his first municipal crisis after taking office a week ago.  “I just want everybody to really understand that it takes several hours to rebuild the reservoir and to get pressure to a point where people are feeling that.”

Officials said that out of eight total pumps across two plants, two are “available” and one is currently pumping water.

The boil water advisory the city issued Monday afternoon remains in effect Tuesday, Avula said, and is expected to last on the longer end of the estimate Avula gave Monday when the notice was issued.

“I said yesterday that that'll be 24 to 48 hours,” Avula said. “Given the progress over the course of the evening, that's going to look more like 48 hours.”

Avula urged Richmond residents to continue to conserve water to help with the effort to rebuild capacity at the reservoir.

Officials have said a power outage caused serious flooding and damage to equipment at the water plant, but they haven’t fully explained the precise sequence of events and how the failure occurred. On Tuesday, Avula and other officials said the power outage disrupted electronic systems that control the flow of water through the plant. A battery backup didn’t last as long as expected, Avula said Tuesday, and when the system came back online it “was not able to connect with the servers” to resume its normal function.

“We had all this electronic equipment sitting in water, and so fuses were shorted,” Avula said. “That's part of what led to some of the stops and starts over the course of the night. We would start a pump, and then a fuse would go out, and then we move back to square one.”

When asked if city staff missed anything after the power outage that allowed the situation to worsen, Avula said “not that I can tell.”

“We'll do an after action report and we'll dive in. We'll have some clarity from the logs of the IT system. We'll also look at the actual site staff response,” Avua said. “I've now been in this for almost 24 hours, and it really seems like power outage, the IT system and the dysfunction of the pumps led to a weather-related incident that would be really hard to avoid.”

Officials said they have already taken steps to provide bottled water to institutions like the city jail and hospitals and will begin operating distribution locations where residents will be able to obtain drinkable water this morning.