Richmond officials failed to prepare the city’s water treatment plant for the winter storm that knocked the facility offline on Jan. 6, according to a new, fleshed-out report from the engineering firm the city hired to review the water crisis.

The updated report — which the city released Monday morning — says the city was slow to communicate with neighboring counties and state regulators and took “little proactive action” for a storm that was forecast far enough in advance that both Mayor Danny Avula and Gov. Glenn Youngkin had issued state of emergency declarations.

Other than management assigning snow removal duties, the preliminary report from the HNTB engineering firm found, “there was no discussion of storm preparation from leadership” at the water treatment plant.

“WTP staff were not adequately prepared for the incoming storm,” says the preliminary report from HNTB. “Management should have alerted all staff working during the storm about the potentially disruptive nature of the incoming storm and reminded staff of emergency operating procedures.”

The latest report from HNTB, which comes in between an initial report released on Feb. 13 and a final report expected in a few weeks, adds more detail to the timeline of events and the extent of the damage caused by flooding after the plant lost power. But it doesn’t provide definitive answers on several key questions, such as why backup generators were never turned on and why the city didn’t beef up its emergency response plans for the water plant after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency flagged the lack of emergency planning as a concern in 2022.

The new details in the report include:

• Some amount of flooding in the plant’s basement was a "common occurrence" prior to Jan. 6 and previously caused the plant to stop producing treated water for a period of six hours.
• Not all plant employees had radios when they were troubleshooting the outage, creating a lack of communication HNTB representatives called “dangerous” due to the lack of awareness of where workers were. There was also no notification to workers prior to power being restored, raising more safety concerns about equipment restarting unexpectedly.
• Virginia Department of Health regulators didn’t know what was happening until that afternoon, when a state health official reached out to the city after hearing about the problem from a “third party.” When a VDH representative arrived at the plant around 5:30 p.m., they couldn’t get past the facility’s gate and couldn’t make contact with anyone there. The state agency gained access to the plant more than an hour later, around 6:50 p.m.
• Despite Mayor Danny Avula’s defenses of the city’s efforts to notify Henrico County and other neighboring jurisdictions there was an issue at the water plant, the HNTB report concluded the city’s wholesale water customers “should have been notified about the severity of the situation much sooner.” The report says nearby counties weren’t notified until 2 p.m., but Avula has stressed there was some initial communication around 9 a.m. However, that morning notification only conveyed that a power outage was temporarily disrupting the facility's water production and was not a clear warning the situation was dire enough it could knock out the water supply for a prolonged period of time.

Though the report provides more information, it also raises new questions without answering them.

Staff at the facility told investigators that during previous storms, specialized personnel with expertise in electrical and control systems had been at the facility for overnight shifts. That “was not the case” for the storm in January, the report says without elaborating on why.

The report says the city’s Department of Public Utilities lacks an “asset management plan” to keep tabs on the status of water equipment. There “could be many reasons” for delays of water infrastructure projects, the report says, without clarifying why the city had not yet followed through on plans to upgrade the piece of electrical equipment that failed on Jan. 6.

The water treatment plant is usually powered by two feeds from Dominion Energy. If the primary feed goes out, switching equipment is supposed to transfer the plant to the secondary feed. That switch failed due to a faulty coil, the HNTB report found.

Around 5:50 a.m., staff at the plant called an electrical supervisor to come in and help. That supervisor arrived around 6:30 a.m. and, after assessing the situation, manually switched the plant to the secondary power source from Dominion. That switch was successful and power was restored around 7:05 a.m., about an hour and 20 minutes after it went out.

Because supervision of the water treatment plant is divided among operational staff and maintenance staff, there were also “communication issues” within the facility itself, according to the report. Some operations staff felt they “did not know what to do or how to help” and felt the response would be handled by maintenance staff.

Two mechanical staffers were scheduled to be at the plant that night to help with snow and ice removal, the report says, but one “went home early.”

When the power loss occurred around 5:45 a.m., no one with electrical expertise was on site.

“Only the electrical staff are trained and able to perform the transfer to generator power, so there was not a qualified individual on site to switch to diesel-fueled generator power in the event of a power outage,” the report says.

However, a plant electrician arrived “early for their shift” at 6 a.m., shortly after the power went out, according to the report.

At a news conference Monday afternoon, officials said they weren’t sure if that electrician could have manually started the generators, saying they’d have to review training records before speaking to what the electrician was capable of doing. The report also says it’s “unclear” if that electrician was trained to manually switch the plant from the primary Dominion feed to the secondary feed.

The report appears to justify the decision to focus on restoring power from Dominion instead of using the generators once employees learned the secondary Dominion source was still available.

“This would seem to be the prudent course of action because had the transfer been made in a timely fashion, by having trained staff on site to react accordingly, then the length of time without power would have been minimized and shorter than the time required to manually transfer to backup generator power,” the report says.

There seems to be some guesswork in that determination. The report says plant staff gave HNTB a “wide variety of times” for how long it takes to activate the generators, “ranging from 5 minutes to 45 minutes.”

The City Council received a presentation on the report Monday afternoon.

After getting two reports from HNTB with a third on the way, several members said they’re still unsure on whether the water outage was primarily an operational failure or a reflection of aging infrastructure. With the city’s budget season fast-approaching, council members have repeatedly asked for information on the financial impact of the water crisis. There have been few hard numbers offered so far, but officials have said they’re working on providing more information.

Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) said the final HNTB report may not have all the answers the council wants if it focuses largely on technical analysis of what happened on Jan. 6 as opposed to a full investigation into everything that preceded the plant failure.

“I do think it seems like more work will need to be done to kind of tell the full story,” Gibson said.

After hearing the worker safety concerns raised by HNTB, Councilor Katherine Jordan (2nd District) expressed thanks to plant employees for working “exhaustedly” to fix the plant.

“It seemed very chaotic,” Jordan said. “And we’re incredibly lucky no one was hurt.”