Richmond interim water director attributes 36-hour outage to switchgear and backup power failures

Scott Morris, interim director of the City of Richmond Department of Public Utilities, told the Virginia Water Commission that a combination of an electrical switchgear failure and undersized backup power systems caused a nearly 36-hour outage at the city27s water treatment plant.

Morris said the plant was operating in “winter mode,” which routes distribution through only one switchgear, and that a failure in switchgear 6 prevented the automatic transfer of power between main feeds. "The power did not automatically transfer from main feed 1 to main feed 2, and that was due to equipment failure in SG 6," Morris said. He said an undersized uninterruptible power supply (UPS) could not fully close filter effluent valves when the power blip occurred; valves remained open, clear-well water levels rose and flooded basements, submerging electrical equipment and pumps.

Morris described immediate and planned corrective actions: operating the plant in summer mode to preserve dual redundancy; upsizing UPS units and testing them under load; integrating a tertiary backup generator connection to the substation; standardizing valve-closure sequences in the SCADA system; buying and advancing valve actuators and visual indicators; revising and expanding 58 standard operating procedures including annual UPS drawdown tests and annual training; post-event inspections and a renewed preventative-maintenance program; and moving sensitive electrical equipment out of basements where feasible.

Morris also outlined staffing and organizational changes, including hiring five professional engineers and filling additional operator positions, and previewed a 10-year capital plan that will include critical infrastructure upgrades, SCADA enhancements, distribution-main replacement and automation. He said Bird Park Reservoir capacity was reduced for rehabilitation work at the time of the outage, which worsened response capacity.

On public-health testing, Morris said the city27s E. coli samples taken after the event did not show contamination and that the department is negotiating corrective actions with the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) and reporting to VDH quarterly under a consent order.

Commission members asked about the speed of basement flooding (Morris said equipment became submerged within minutes, roughly five to 15 minutes), the reasons for the winter/summer mode choice (a decades-old cost-saving measure that Morris said saves roughly $65,000 annually) and why practical UPS drawdown tests had not been performed previously. Morris said UPS drawdown tests were not done before the event but have since been added to preventive-maintenance tasks.

Morris told the commission the city will present a revised capital improvement program in July and expects substantial completion of some generator integration work by November 2025. He said long-term distribution replacement targets discussed in the plan include increasing mains replaced from roughly 10 miles per year to 15–20 miles per year as funding and affordability allow.

The presentation concluded with commission members thanking Morris and asking staff to circulate his contact and presentation materials to commissioners.