Richmond, VA, Ran Dry and They Can’t Fix It

This is so shockingly a repeat of the Jackson, Mississippi water debacle that I had to look twice at the city names to see if I’d confused them.

I hadn’t – the news stories definitely said ‘Richmond, VA.’ The same Richmond that was wrapped around the statues axle a couple of years ago.

The city of Richmond — the capital of the Confederacy for most of the Civil War — has removed its last public Confederate statue.

Richmond removed its other Confederate monuments amid the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in 2020. But efforts to remove the statue of Confederate General A.P. Hill, which sits in the middle of a busy intersection near a school where traffic accidents are frequent, were more complicated because the general’s remains were interred beneath it.

Spent the money, got rid of those offensive eyesores no one had noticed until St George Floyd died and the Summer of Love commenced (They’re all sitting in an open-air statue graveyard if anyone needs a little something next to St Francis in their backyard.).

This is also the same Richmond, VA, that committed $110M this past spring to building a brand spanking new baseball stadium for their ‘Flying Squirrels’ minor league team.

Oh, yay, said a councilwoman – LET’S PLAY BALL!

Construction of a new baseball stadium in Richmond is closer to the reality than it has been in decades after Richmond City Council passed a new funding structure for the Diamond District project. The $110 million stadium project would bring a state-of-the-art baseball stadium to the area near the existing, dilapidated Diamond, where the Flying Squirrels currently play.

The City of Richmond will issue/back $170 million in general obligation bonds to fund a new baseball stadium and the immediate infrastructure around the ballpark. Richmond will issue the bonds to pay for the new stadium, and a newly formed Community Development Authority (CDA) will issue $40 million in bonds with the city’s backing for infrastructure costs.

“Let’s play ball,” said council member Ann-Frances Lambert just before the vote.

Everyone is all hep for the stadium so don’t worry about those bonds. This is a priority and it will all work out just great.

…However, if the project doesn’t live up to financial projections, city taxpayers could eventually be on the hook for paying off the bonds.

Critics say in a city with so many generational needs — from schools to roads to housing — exposing the city to a financial risk of this magnitude should be put to voters directly — not just the city council.

Darn wet blankets in every crowd, they are always ruining the good times.

‘Generational needs’ – who needs ’em when you have a shiny new base-ah-bah-roo stadium?

Be real.

You know what else is wet?

Snow. And that’s when Richmond, a city whose metropolitan area has a population of about 1.3M people, ran dry.

During the first snowstorm of 2025.

Granted, Richmond is considered to be a subtropical region with generally mild winters, so ‘snow’ comes rarely, but outbreaks of frozen precipitation aren’t completely unknown.

But like most city residents, you expect utilities to be available.

The water suddenly stopped running for many residents in the greater Richmond area on 6 January.

Richmond residents are being asked to limit their water use after city officials say a power outage at Richmond’s water reservoir system caused a malfunction on Monday.

The afternoon of Monday, Jan. 6, city officials announced that an immediate boil water advisory was in effect across Richmond. Residents should not only conserve water, but if they must use it, they should boil it.

“Some customers may experience a total loss of water service, while others may experience varying degrees of loss in water pressure,” the city said in its release.

This advisory will be in effect until further notice.

“This advisory comes after a winter weather storm-related loss of power today impacted the City’s water reservoir system, causing the system to temporarily malfunction,” the city said in its release. “Capacity restoration services are currently underway.”

boiling snow on the stove in order to flush the toilet bc the entire city of richmond has no running water pic.twitter.com/Mn32ODcssp

— CC (@ccmariecee) January 7, 2025

‘Temporarily malfunction’ turned out to be an optimistic appraisal.

In some areas, it was up to five days without potable water or no water at all.

Richmond, Hanover and Henrico lifted their boil water advisories on Saturday afternoon.

Why it matters: That means the city has drinkable water for the first time in nearly five days. Parts of Hanover have gone three days without it. It’s been four for Henrico.

Catch up quick: Before this could happen, the Virginia Department of Health had to test the water for bacteria after full pressure came back Thursday.

• For Richmond, the first test sample was done around 3pm that day and incubated for 24 hours to determine whether bacteria was detected.
• Officials confirmed it wasn’t around 3pm Friday.
• The second test was already underway by 1pm Friday, per the city. By Saturday afternoon, VDH gave the all-clear that it’s safe to drink from the tap again.

And the cascade of events causing the outages after a switch blew (for a still yet-to-be-determined reason) sounds like something out of an implausible, impossible bad movie.

…The plant lost power before 6 a.m. on Monday. Avula said that the automatic switch — which has worked without issue for over two decades, ever since a similar failure during Hurricane Isabel in 2003 — did not occur.

…The plant then has backup batteries — however, as they are meant to be a short-term power solution, their charge only lasted about 45 minutes. Avula specified that they are capable of supporting 50 million gallons of water service a day — the city’s average consumption during winter — when fully functional.

…In the window between the backup batteries running out of power and the electrician manually switching to the second power source, the plant was without electricity. Avula said it was then that the computer system that controls water operations, which he called “SCADA,” failed.

…While the SCADA was immediately turned back on once power was restored, Avula said there was a subsequent issue of getting it to reconnect to servers. The SCADA is handled by an IT contractor, who Avula said was called to the plant. After arriving early Monday afternoon, they worked for hours to restore that connection.

The plant also experienced flooding during this time, with the DPU staff on-site bringing in sub-pumps to try and pump the water out. However, Avula said the basement well where this flooding was taking place was filling too fast for the pumps to keep up with.

He said he witnessed the speed of this flooding during the second malfunction at the plant on Tuesday. While it was a lesser incident compared to Monday’s, Avula was still surprised at how quickly the water rose.

Not good. And they most assuredly had a flood on their hands.

It got even worse yesterday. 

#BREAKING: VDH says Richmond is not capable of reliably providing citizens with water https://t.co/aggL3AiQV1 #RVA #Virginia

— 8News WRIC Richmond (@8NEWS) January 23, 2025

State inspectors, the Virginia Department of Health (VDH, not that other guy), hammered the city over the failure as something that was ‘completely avoidable.’

…“The water crisis should never have happened and was completely avoidable,” wrote an official with the Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Drinking Water in a notice of alleged violation issued Thursday. “The City of Richmond could have prevented the crisis with better preparation.”

That preparation could have included “verifying critical equipment was functional before the storm event, ensuring sufficient staffing was physically present at the [water treatment plant] in the event of a power outage, and making sure staff present at the WTP during the storm event had appropriate training to effectively respond to the temporary power outage,” the notice continued.

According to the VDH, staff had no clue how to handle a plant shutdown or what to do in an emergency. No one knew who needed to be where during an emergency or what anyone’s role was if something happened. Critical engineers weren’t on hand when the plant shut down and the state wasn’t notified immediately.

…The second regulation the city is accused of violating states, in part, that owners of waterworks must “provide and maintain conditions throughout the entirety of the waterworks in a manner that will assure a high degree of capability and reliability.” It goes on to say that owners should identify any issues that could affect water quality and quickly implement “preventative control measures” to “protect public health.”

According to the VDH, the city reportedly violated this regulation due to the “multiple failures at [Richmond’s water treatment plant” that led to loss of water pressure and boil water advisories.

The office, in a statement included in the notice, claimed that preventable issues across the board contributed to this crisis, making it “completely avoidable.”

“As a matter of routine practice, waterworks owners must anticipate, prepare for, practice and train staff to overcome a temporary power outage,” the ODW said. “The City of Richmond waterworks experienced a complete loss of pressure in the distribution system and had inadequate pressure for more than three days in the distribution system. Multiple, redundant, backup, fail-safe power systems did not function properly, or, in certain cases, were not operational, did not function long enough, or took too long to become operational. Not enough staff were present at the [plant] by ODW’s observations to effectively respond to the power outage. [Plant] staff did not adequately respond to the power outage, possibly because of a lack of awareness of what needed to happen quickly, ineffective training, or other reasons as might be identified through the ongoing investigation.”

So the situation appears to be that, had there been a single engineer aware enough to flip the switch to power on the backup generators during the hour that the battery backup was providing emergency power, the Richmond water crisis would not have happened.

— Your Waifu is Trash (@ProjectVirginia) January 9, 2025

Richmond has smartened up and gotten someone with an engineering degree and some decades of water utility experience to replace the woman who had been the head of the utility. She stepped down on the 15th.

The EPA called out her department for corroded pumps, cracked filters, and outdated emergency response plans.

Meanwhile, Bingham volunteers as a DEI committee member for an NGO and says that she wants to make the water industry more inclusive of women. pic.twitter.com/2ZinrJEng2

— Spencer Lindquist 🇺🇸 (@SpencerLndqst) January 10, 2025

Remember those ‘generational needs’?

Yeah. Nobody in Richmond did.

…April Bingham was named Richmond’s utilities chief by former Democrat Mayor Levar Stoney in December 2021, after 1 year and 11 months as deputy director of the department’s customer service division. Since taking the post, Bingham has dedicated herself to advancing the DEI agenda and is a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee for the Virginia branch of the American Water Works Association (AWWA), a professional organization for water management officials.

While Bingham has dedicated herself to advancing the DEI agenda, Richmond’s water facilities appear to have fallen into a state of disrepair. Under Bingham, The Environmental Protection Agency cited Richmond in 2022 for various violations, including insufficient maintenance, corroded pumps, cracked filters, and perhaps worst of all, outdated emergency response plans.

They had statues to take down, baseball stadiums to fund, and lots of DEI doohickies to print up.

Folks are getting their first water bills since the shutdown, too and those are a little baffling. I mean, water was out for almost a week in some places.

Some Richmonders are starting to get their first utility bills since the RVA water crisis.

While the city has not confirmed if the crisis impacts the latest charges, people are already raising questions about the amount they owe and asking for credit.

Cruz Sherman lives on the city’s south side. He says everything in his home has been updated in the last ten years, including his meter, which he says is not leaking. His most recent water bill was $441 when it is typically closer to $150.

Sherman says this does not make sense, considering he could not even use water for about a week.

“You get that sticker shock right away,” Sherman said.

I see two Republican mayors in that city’s history since 1853.

TWO.

Hmm.

WHY DID DONALD TRUMP DO THIS TO THEM?

Or schmaybe, just schmaybe…

They could have sold them, which was the original argument on removal.. relocate. But no.

Keep in mind the statues were dumped at the wastewater plant…

— Six Sigma Thicc Supply Chain Specialist 🦃 (@sigmathicc) January 24, 2025

I’d move those statues when they get some extra coin.