Henrico report on water outage faults Richmond for not communicating ‘severity’ of situation sooner

A third-party report on how Henrico County handled the Richmond region’s water crisis last month faults the city of Richmond for failing to communicate the seriousness of the problems it was having at the city-run water treatment plant that provides water to residents in both localities.

Those early communication troubles included former Richmond DPU Director April Bingham attempting to send text messages to the landline phone of Henrico DPU Director Bentley Chan, according to the report released Tuesday.

The city also gave Henrico overly optimistic estimates of when water production would be restored, according to the report, after a snow-induced power outage on Jan. 6 caused widespread equipment damage that knocked the facility offline. The report says those rosy estimates created “false hopes” about how quickly the system would return to normal. 

“Henrico DPU’s response appears to have been materially delayed and hindered by poor communications from Richmond DPU about the severity of the problem at the Richmond [water treatment facility] and the time when water production and distribution would resume,” the report from the AquaLaw consulting firm says. As a shorthand for Richmond water facility, the report refers to the city plant as “Richmond WTF.”

Though Henrico officials initially said the county would be spared any impacts from the Richmond plant failure, that turned out not to be the case. The eastern part of the county lost water pressure shortly after Richmond did, and the county eventually had to issue its own boil water advisory two days after the city did.

The release of the Henrico-initiated report and subsequent conversation by Henrico board members was perhaps the most detailed public analysis of the water crisis released yet. At the same board meeting Tuesday morning — held as another snowstorm was arriving in the region — Henrico officials discussed their big-picture options for responding to the water crisis, including the possibility of severing ties with the city and handling its own water supply or pursuing a closer partnership with the city in the form of a regional water authority that could oversee shared infrastructure.

AquaLaw's Chris Pomeroy stressed that his company was given “full editorial license” over the contents of the report, which included detailed communication records and phone logs outlining what steps the county took and when. The consultant also said he and the county agreed he would have full access to and cooperation from county employees while working on the report. A letter Henrico County Attorney Andrew Newby sent to Pomeroy said county staff could review a draft of the report “to comment on its factual accuracy” but would grant AquaLaw “full control over the content of the final report.”

An initial report from the engineering firm the city hired for its own review is expected later this week. But it’s unclear what kind of editorial independence and investigative authority the city has granted to its consultant, HNTB. At two public meetings, city officials have attempted to shut down questions about the water crisis. In response to public records requests, city officials have redacted portions of emails and text messages that contain specific information about the city water system, apparently due to infrastructure security concerns.

The scope of the Henrico report was limited due to its focus on the county’s response to events that unfolded primarily in the city. Pomeroy noted his report was not meant to be a full account of what happened at the Richmond plant and was based only on information from Henrico documents and staffers.

However, because Henrico was in communication with the city for the duration of the water outages that lasted nearly a week, the report contains several insights about how city officials interacted with their Henrico counterparts.

Perhaps most importantly, Pomeroy told the Henrico Board of Supervisors as he presented his findings, the county wasn’t told until mid-afternoon on Jan. 6 that water production might not be restored that day at all.

“That’s the critical information,” said Pomeroy, an attorney who specializes in water and utility issues. “The timeline is everything.”

The report said Chan — the utilities director for one of Richmond’s largest water customers —  wasn’t fully aware of the Richmond plant failure until Bingham returned a phone call from Chan at 2:34 p.m.

“Bingham informed Chan that the Richmond WTF was down and, critically, that it might not even be able to restart that day,” the report says. “The 2:34 PM phone call appears to be the first disclosure by Richmond DPU to Henrico DPU that the Richmond WTF might not actually be back in service on Monday.” 

As the situation unfolded, the estimated timelines Henrico was getting about water restoration were “almost always wrong,” Pomeroy said.

Pomeroy said that even if the city had told Henrico about the extent of the problem sooner that day, the disruptions to water service in Henrico could not have been avoided. However, he said, the county could have potentially started its own response several hours earlier.

For Henrico supervisors, the takeaway of the report was clear.

“We were clearly getting bad information from the city,” said Supervisor Jody Rogish (Tuckahoe District).

Supervisor Misty Roundtree (Three Chopt District) said there appeared to be some initial “hesitation” on the city’s part about keeping Henrico informed.

“Whether because it was a good-faith belief that things were under control or whether it was an attempt to mask some of that, there was an initial hesitation to share with Henrico what was going on,” Roundtree said. 

Supervisor Tyrone Nelson (Varina District) inquired about the misfired text messages Bingham tried to send Chan, asking how the city’s DPU director wouldn’t have known how to reach Chan via text.

Chan said both he and officials in Chesterfield County pointed out to Bingham that some messages didn’t seem to be getting through due the erroneous phone number.

“We had to remind the previous Richmond director, ‘Hey, here are our numbers.’ We were told ‘Oh we didn't have those.’ It was like ‘No no, you’ve had those, it’s just that they haven’t been used,’” Chan said.

Nelson seemed particularly frustrated by the revelation about Henrico being left off some text messages.

“I don’t understand how you can go through three days with a group chat with something so significant, and the biggest person that gets the water from you is not responding in the group chat,” he told reporters after the meeting.

The Henrico report says cross-government communication during the water crisis wasn’t all bad. When the power loss occurred at the plant early in the morning on Jan. 6, the report says, there was effective communication among plant operators that allowed Henrico to stop drawing as much water from Richmond as it normally does in order to ease the strain on the city system. And once the seriousness of the plant’s problems were known, there was productive city-county collaboration on fixing them.

In a statement issued Tuesday after the Henrico report was released, Richmond Mayor Danny Avula’s office said the city “was in regular communication with local, state, and regional partners about the situation.”

“The city and other agencies continue to evaluate the circumstances surrounding the water outage with the assistance of firms that specialize in that kind of analysis,” said Avula interim press secretary Julian Walker. “Henrico County has issued the findings of one such investigation, which is largely focused on its locality-specific response.”

Avula announced last month that Bingham had stepped down from her role leading the city’s utilities department. The new mayor replaced her with Anthony “Scott” Morris, who previously worked as director of water at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.

Avula’s office has acknowledged communication missteps on the day the water plant failed. When asked to respond to reporting by The Richmonder that indicated DPU officials mistakenly believed backup generators were on at the plant, Walker said earlier this month that some early information coming from DPU “may have been inaccurate or incomplete.”

It’s also increasingly clear the city’s internal communications about the incident didn’t go particularly smoothly.

Walker acknowledged last week that WebEOC, the communications platform the city uses to coordinate its response to emergencies such as winter storms, wasn’t used on Jan. 6 to coordinate the city’s handling of the water plant failure. According to records The Richmonder obtained through a public-records request, Bingham at one point a little after 7 a.m. instructed a staffer not to post a message about the plant situation to WebEOC, saying “please do not post to anything yet.”

Walker said there was no water-related post to WebEOC — which city documents describe as a “system of record” in emergencies meant to enable faster responses and keep key leaders aware of emerging problems — until the city issued its boil water advisory around 4:30 p.m. Monday afternoon.

Prior to that, the last WebEOC post related to the water plant was on Sunday afternoon, Walker said, when a WebEOC entry was made “indicating that the arriving snowstorm had not caused any issues at the water treatment plant at that time.”

“It is our anticipation that the after-action report may contain observations about the use of the WebEOC platform during the water crisis,” Walker said.

The Henrico report notes that in a 2:45 p.m. virtual meeting where officials from Henrico, Chesterfield and Hanover counties were told the city’s water plant might not be restored at all on Monday, the county representatives “encouraged Richmond to inform the public of the situation immediately.”

Henrico Board Chairman Dan Schmitt (Brookland District) said he felt both the city and county are attuned to the need for better communication in the future.

“I’ll never speak for our neighbors, but I would say they learned the same lesson in this too,” he said. “The sooner we can all communicate, the better.”

This article has been updated to correct the spelling of Supervisor Jody Rogish‘s name.