RWSA Board of Directors Meeting   6/25/2024

Good afternoon.

I would like to open the regular meeting of the board of directors of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

First item is the approval of the agenda.

We do have an amended agenda, Mr. Chairman, that we want to ask the board to consider.

We have 8F and I on the consent agenda.

We're going to be speaking about it.

Okay, so even though.

It's an agenda but I want to speak to it.

Okay.

I would move for approval of the amended agenda as outlined here.

Motion to second, all in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Okay, we have an approved agenda.

Minutes of the previous board meeting from May 28th.

We have a motion to approve and a second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Opposed?

Motion passes, Bill.

Bill, we have something that Brian would like to read.

This is a disclosure that I wanted to just announce.

So we'll make a disclosure to be recorded in the public record.

My adult daughter Florence Pinkston is currently serving as a paid intern if there's been water and sewer authority.

While she is my daughter she does not live with me in my household and she's not an immediate family member as that term is as defined by the Virginia State and Local Government Conflicts of Interest Act.

Furthermore none of our actions today involve any issue or transaction and providing benefit to me or any other immediate family member of mine as that term is defined.

Therefore it is my understanding that I do not have a conflict of interest under the Virginia State and Local Government.

Conflict of Interest Act, but out of an abundance of caution, I nevertheless wish to disclose my daughter's appointment at the authority and state that I am able to participate in this meeting fairly objectively in the public interest.

Thank you for your help in writing this.

For what it's worth, I cleared it with the Commonwealth's attorney as well.

I just saw my daughter in the parking lot and was going to give her a hug.

And she said, I work at a wastewater treatment plant.

Right.

Thank you.

And we're pleased to have Florence with us along with the other interns.

And we'll bring them to the board meeting next month and introduce them to you really on their way out next month, last month with us.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

So after we've had six good months doing budget, it's sort of a pleasure to talk about other things.

You know, we had a pretty set agenda coming into today until the state gave us a new statewide route map.

I guess it came out yesterday.

We saw it this morning.

So that came to the amended agenda.

We'll talk about that in just a minute.

But before we get to those items, we didn't want to celebrate employee development.

We had two employees get their commercial driver's license, David hinted to.

and Garrett Carver.

And the CDL is a state license that allows them to drive the large vehicles for us, trucks and tractors and things on the public highway.

We're also ready to celebrate the beginning of a new era in construction.

So we've talked a lot through the CIP through the years about major construction projects that we wanted to get done to support our community water supply plan as well as the facilities here at Moores Creek and other Rivanna and the solid waste facility also.

And so it's exciting to us that we have no less than eight projects

That's not me.

Lined up for bidding over the next six months totaling about $155 million.

That's going to include this brown line piping from the Ragged Mountain reservoir over to the Observatory Treatment Plant and construction of the new pump station off of Reservoir Road and the central water line to make its way through the city.

That was approved by the board in 2022.

as well as some other major projects in Crozet, pump stations, and building up fits here at Moores Creek.

So we're excited about that.

We have five more major projects that we'll have to add out to bid next year and two the following year.

So the 370 million CIP we've been telling you about is about to get started.

So we're very excited about that.

Of course, a big driver is increasing the community's water supply.

That's what a lot of this will provide.

One of the projects in Central Waterline, a brief update.

Back in 2022, the board approved going from the observatory treatment plant and the route goes down the JPA extended, as I call it, Cleveland Avenue and then along Cherry over to

Elliott, and then over 11th to East High Street and there we were hoping and planning to partner

with the City Utilities Department on a waterline project that it has, and we would both work in East High Street at the same time and gain some efficiency and less customer impact.

But as the details have come to the surface, that is the subsurface evaluation, what we've come up with and in working with Ms. Hildebrand and her staff, that instead of coming up over 11th Street to East High on our way to Long Street,

We will need to go down Little High Street and Meade Avenue and Fairfield, I believe that is, and then across city property near the Rivanna River.

So that is the intended alternate end of this route.

I guess that would be the east end that we were going to modify on the route for the central water line.

Well.

Or it's not perhaps your first choice.

It's not our first choice, but we're trying to move as far away from the river as we can, but we do have sewer lines that are in floodplains, so it's not uncommon.

Well, it'll fit in someone's backyard and they don't really care for to have it there.

So we look for the path of success for us.

So speaking of success, we did a lot of community outreach recently and Ms. Whitaker, our Director of Engineering and Maintenance has spoken at a number of community events

She spoke at the Places 29 Hydraulic Community Advisory Committee and she spoke to the Rotary Club and she also represented and participated at the Regional Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission as they're rewriting and updating the Regional Hazard Mitigation Plan.

Now you've seen some diagrams.

Now I'm getting ready to talk about drought.

But the primer is the urban area, the urban water system gets all of its water from the North Rivanna Water Treatment Plant near the North Rivanna River.

Most of its water from the South Rivanna Reservoir through the water treatment plant

and further from the Ragged Mountain Reservoir to the Observatory Treatment Plant.

So those three plants serve the urban water system.

Typically we get eight to 10 MGD from South Rivanna and one to two MGD from Ragged Mountain and really a small amount from the North Fork Rivanna Water Treatment Plant.

Sugar Hollow, as you know,

I think we have a pipe from Sugar Hollow that fills Ragged Mountain and that's the new pipe that maybe we just showed you that we're going to build over the next six or seven years and take water from the south.

Rivanna Reservoir to fill Ragged as opposed to directly, will not be directly from Sugar Hollow anymore.

Toadier Creek Reservoir and intake serve, Scottsville and Beaver Creek Reservoir and water treatment plants serve, pro se.

But the reservoir we keep our eye most closely on is the South Rivanna Reservoir.

Deborah.

So today, this shows the face of the dam at the South Rivanna Reservoir, and there is a fair trickle coming across the top of the reservoir.

And

So we have a whole flow strategy of seasonal that from May to November, we monitor South Rivanna.

And if it's overflowing, everything's great.

And we maximize use of the water in South Rivanna Reservoir through the South Rivanna Water Treatment Plant.

We're processing 8 to 10 MGD from South Rivanna and only one or two from observatory.

But when we get to the green, the red block here is when South Rivanna stops overflowing and really we let it get about a foot down below the top of the dam.

Then we switch our priorities and our operating production so that we maximize use of observatory treatment plant to the level of 45 million gallons per day.

But we still have to use water from the Rivanna Reservoir because until we get the pipeline from Ragged Mountain to Observatory built and the pipeline from Observatory to Prebridge built, we can't get the 10 million gallons a day that we can produce at Observatory.

We can't get it out of

the Observatory Treatment Plant into the urban system.

So we are still at a critical juncture with the South Rivanna Reservoir.

That's why we watch it most closely.

We save Ragged, the water in Ragged Mountain as long as we can.

But when South Rivanna stops overflowing, we switch our usage so that Observatory and through Ragged Mountain, we take more out of that reservoir and less

out of South Rivanna to try to maintain that level as high and as long as we can.

When we had the drought problems back in 2017, it was because South Rivanna Reservoir was going down rapidly.

I know Ms. Malek had called and said that she crossed one of the bridges and did I know how low the reservoir was?

So that was something that we monitor closely.

And

As of the end of last week, we thought, we were hearing about what's called a flash drought.

That's what's happening.

Extreme temperatures, low rainfall, creates what NOAA calls a flash drought.

Other literature says it starts and intensifies quickly and over periods of weeks and months, it would dissipate.

as opposed to a conventional drought that can last for years.

The drought of 2002 lasted for about 18 months.

So we thought and maybe we are still in a flash drought.

However, the state, we show you these statewide maps that DEQ does and in your board packet originally back from June 5th,

The state and everyone said all is good.

The whole state is green.

That means stream levels and precipitation and reservoir levels and groundwater levels for the most part are all good.

But as of Monday, late Monday, they came out with a new map, the State Drought Monitoring Committee, and they put the entire state into a watch category yellow with a warning

for this area in the northern and western part of the state.

So these four blocks, just as a reminder, this top left is for precipitation levels, groundwater, stream flow, and reservoir levels.

So they monitor those four criteria, and that's what these blocks represent.

So we're here, of course, at the Blue Star, and our area is in a drought watch,

with normal groundwater precipitation and reservoir levels, as they say, and a warning on stream flows.

So with that, we scurried around this morning, frankly, and looked at the drought management plan and with concern about this new map from the state and came up with a recommendation that we have with the board

on the consent agenda that based on the drought monitoring task force designation of our area as in a drought watch, in fact the whole state, and the fact that we are having flash drought conditions of extreme temperatures, a low precipitation, no precipitation really in the forecast,

that we want to recommend to the board that we officially declare a drought watch, which is essentially a voluntary measures to tell people that a drought could be in our future and they should conserve water where they can.

The localities are not asked to implement any water conservation measures that occurs at the next stage, which is a warning.

When we go to a warning, we would send a letter to the city and the county and ask them to implement your ordinances

about the water conservation measures.

So hopefully we won't get to that, but the way it's going now, the streams are dropping and the reservoir is dropping.

So we have five reservoirs.

Three are not spilling.

South Rivanna is almost not spilling until your creek down in Scottsville is in the same barely spilling category.

So soon if we don't have rain, all five of our reservoirs are

not gonna be spilling.

Now we have good news too.

We've been telling you we prepare and we do prepare.

Our three urban reservoirs, Ragged Mountain, Sugar Hollow and South Rivanna are 98% full.

So we're about in as good a condition as we can be.

But as I mentioned, South Rivanna is the key to this whole puzzle.

And if it would start to drop and continue to drop and we saw in 2017, it dropped pretty quickly.

that that would give us great pause and concern.

So our recommendation, my recommendation is that the board declare a drought watch and we will issue it to the media and ask people to be conservative with their water usage.

It also asks for authorization to move forward with a drought warning or a drought emergency should those conditions

Last year when the Rivanna stopped overflowing within 13 days, it was down a foot.

so and you know geometrically these are like that so the more they go down the less water you have we have what they call stage storage curves that tell us really how much volume is there but when they start going down that we lose a lot of volume so this is trying to be proactive and get us positioned to encourage the community to conserve water and

and authorizes to go further should we have a sudden drop in the streams and the reservoirs.

I don't think we have slides ever, but the Mormons River flows from Sugar Hollow into South Rivanna.

And today there was about 8 million gallons a day coming down the Mormons River.

Now in 2002, when there was the major drought, there was 1 million gallons coming through the river.

And in 1995, I guess probably during the rain, the highest recorded flow was 150 million, certainly 200 eroded down in the hundreds.

So we are way down near the bottom of the flow.

1 million was a severe drought, 8 million is about where we are now.

So we've got about 8 million gallons theoretically coming into South Rivanna Reservoir.

And the community used 12.6, about 12.6 million gallons yesterday.

That is, we made that much.

That's not a direct correlation of how much the community used because we're putting water in tanks.

So Bill, we approve, I'm sure we will, what you've suggested.

It sounds like the first thing is more like first step is

Yes.

You would.

Yes, sir.

And say that we're in a drought watch.

If we have the ground... Is it the governor that would say, look, we have a regional drought.

response and contingency plan that was developed a decade or more ago.

It's being updated, but there are criteria in that plan of how we assess our water supplies, the water reservoir levels.

We have a consultant that runs a model and it predicts based on historical precipitation over the last hundred years, how much rain are we going to get in the next few months and how low will the reservoirs go.

We're going to ask that consultant to run that model for us.

We have a drought monitoring committee that includes city, county, service authority, and us on the committee.

We're going to activate that committee and get them into the discussion.

And when the criteria that are outlined in the drought management plan are met or in our judgment that we would want to

activate a drought warning.

Then we would send a letter to the city and to the county and say we declared a drought warning and we're asking you to activate your ordinances for water conservation.

That's the way that works.

2017 we had to have a call a special meeting of this board the only time in my tenure.

So we didn't want to have to do that again if we really saw the reservoir start to tank over the next two weeks.

When we act on the consent agenda, it will cover that.

Thank you, Bill.

Any other questions?

So thank you for hitting that because that was the top of my list.

And I did I think it's really easy for people to be avoid being worried about this.

But where that star was in the state map, that's northwest part of the county where I live.

We're on the eastern slope.

We are absolutely as dry as they are in the northern valley.

The streams are dry and there's not been one drop.

I did all of my

brain tallies and things like that.

We are six inches below what we're supposed to have in the first half of 2024 on top of the six inches below where we were supposed to be at the end of 2023.

The only reason we're then that high is because there was almost seven inches of rain in January.

Without that one storm in January, we'd be 12 inches.

So this is incredibly serious.

And I really grind my teeth when I hear people watering lawns in a situation like this.

Everybody in the country who has it well, their lawn is long gone.

It's just dust and turf and dry crunchy stuff out there now because nobody can risk what they cook and wash with to put on some grass.

So I am very glad you're asking for the pre-authorization.

I hope you don't wait a day.

I will remember back, you will remember 2003, we were nine days away from sending the university home

because the reservoir was losing two and three feet a day after the kids came back that August.

So it takes weeks and months for the general public to get their brains wrapped around the fact that this is real.

So I would beg you to start early and

I've been at every board meeting for the last several months about this because I do keep track and will certainly do my part on the radio but it's somehow we have to get people's attention and please remember that the urban water may be well suited because all that water is coming from the rural area and it's all interconnected the surface water all the visible streams that are dry means that the water is going deeper deeper deeper

It's also not recharging any of the rivers.

So when you get a rain, a lot of that first loss is going to be to rehydrate all those stream beds and things.

So not everything is going to make it to South Fork when it comes.

If we're very lucky, the first one will be soft and gentle and soften the ground enough so things will maybe sink in.

So I'm having lots of nightmares at my house about this.

And I want to share those with all of you so you all take it seriously too.

Thank you.

Only one follow up on that is

On behalf of the service authority in the city, water main flushing is a normal and appropriate water system management technique.

And even when we're in water conservation times, it's somewhat ironic, but the water gets warmer

The bacteria in the lines grow faster, they consume the chlorine quicker, and so it makes it even more difficult, particularly towards the end of our systems, to maintain appropriate water quality.

And when we take the chlorine residuals and look at other chemistry factors there, and they're not good, one of the best solutions is you open the fire hydrant and you flush it out to get fresh water in.

So people will say, holy cow, it's water conservation, and you just dump it in on the ground.

You will let me irrigate.

That's right.

But it is an appropriate tool that the two retailers have to use.

So I'm sorry, just for clarification, what came to us here is a revised drought report, amended.

And we're voting on the consent agenda.

Yes, sir.

That is the drought management report that you had.

and what we added was the recommendation for a declaration of a drought watch.

Thank you.

Okay.

At this time, I'd like to open the meeting to items from the public.

And is there anyone in the room that would like to speak at this time?

Yes, sir.

We have a question from DeeDee Smith.

OK.

Thank you, DeeDee Smith.

I live in the city.

Just a minute, DeeDee.

Can you turn up the volume?

Oh, yes.

Oh, not me.

Okay, we're good.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

Just a couple things that I heard in the director's report.

One about the changes to the central water line.

As you know, I was not happy that the board chose to go through residential areas of the city.

Mr. Sanders, your predecessor was anxious to do this along with Mr. Pinkston.

You both just sort of jumped up to call for the motion to take it through the city, which I thought was really inappropriate.

And if you look at the picture that was shown, you can see just how windy it is.

And it's just, it was always a bad route, but now you've changed it again.

And you've changed it to go through even more residential neighborhoods.

So my question to you is what outreach have you taken to those new neighborhoods?

Do they know what's coming at them?

Because this is a huge, huge deal for city residents.

So that's my question to you.

My second was in response to the comments about water flow, which I totally agree with.

I have no problem with you going into a drought watch.

But you talked only about the Mormons, which is a much smaller contributor to the Rivanna than the Meachums is.

And maybe I missed it that you didn't talk about the flow in the Meachum.

and the average flow in the Mormons, which is about 10 million gallons in a normal area.

It's 100 to 200 million in the Rivanna.

So I don't really quite get that.

And the urban system is that sort of way downstream from that.

And Miss Malek, I've total sympathies with the Wells folks up in the Northwest part.

But again, that's much higher up in the watershed.

And it could be a Rivanna thing.

I don't know.

But it's really not necessarily relevant to the urban.

It is and it isn't.

I get it.

And the other, my third thing, and then I'll be done, is if the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir is not providing drought water, and it was a little hard to tell whether any of what's being held in the Rivanna

is being used but you say as you know once it stops flowing over the dam then you switch over to Ragged Mountain the reservoir is only for drought otherwise it's flow of the river so why are we keeping a reservoir that doesn't doesn't help us in a drought for more than x number of days and I'd be curious to know what that x number of days is you know uh you know how many days does it take us because it doesn't sound like it takes us very you know helps us very long

once we get into these dry periods.

So I'm sorry, that's probably confusing, but thank you.

Thank you, Dee Dee.

Okay, we will close the items from the public.

Any responses to public comments from Bill or the board?

Yes, sir.

So we have not talked to the neighborhoods along Little High Street yet about the change in the Central Waterline route, but we clearly will.

We're still doing the engineering and the subsurface investigation to confirm that that is going to be the final route.

But we're going to run back through the entire route from observatory to free bridge.

After we get this out to bid and get a contractor and then we can definitively answer questions that the neighborhoods would have of when are you going to be working in my neighborhood especially.

So after we get a contractor under contract, then we'll have the details and we will go back through all the neighborhoods that we talked to, Fry Springs, et cetera, and meet with them and then give them the real information that's going to be correct at that time.

So we talked to them a couple years ago.

And as you can see, it's taking years for us to get this ready to go to bid.

I think next year would be a time for construction.

So we're going to give it a reality check when we have contractor, and then we'll talk to the communities.

I do not have any information about the flow in the Meacham's River.

Deborah, can you pull up the schematic again, please?

That flows out of Beaver Creek Reservoir.

Beaver Creek Reservoir is not overflowing right now.

That's the sole source of water for Crozet, but it's substantially full.

Did you have any information?

No, I'm sorry.

You're right.

Here it is.

Next page right here.

Okay.

So the dimensions had between June 9th and 25th had about 30 million gallons in flow.

And we'll have to check that like for today to see what the decline is.

But 29.8 million gallons in emissions and what

May I?

Yes.

Come on up, Bethany, please.

Thank you.

I think you're right.

So all the Meachums, the Mormons, the North Fork and the South Fork Rivanna are all in the 25th percentile.

So that's that's a really low flow conditions that we're in right now.

And so you're looking at

For the Meacham's River it would be 9.6 million gallons per day and that's the rolling average over the last seven days.

The Mormons is at 6.5 million gallons a day, North Fork is at 10.3 and then South Rivanna is at 16.8 and that's the last seven days.

Maybe we misled Ms. Smith about use of South Rivanna Reservoir.

We still use South Rivanna Reservoir as our majority attributed water supply to the urban area, even when we look back to the red and green slide, even when we go into

Optimization strategy of using Ragged Mountain more, we're still using South Rivanna at five to seven or five to seven mgd, which is more than we're getting out of Ragged Mountain.

So the majority of the water always comes from South Rivanna records under normal conditions.

Any other comments, questions from the board?

All right, we'll move on to the consent agenda.

We've already pulled F&I for discussion.

I have a question about one.

Anything else?

Thank you.

So number 14.

Oh, I lost my page.

On page 40.

Can you give any more information about what current status means as far as the Shanks branch?

Yes, ma'am.

OK. And we need to have another meeting with them,

But that's on our agenda to do.

The city, Ms. Hildebrand mentioned that they were interested in moving forward with their section of the bike.

And so this has been a long standing project.

You're right.

Well, it depends what you're asking for.

I'm not going to guarantee I'm going to help with anything.

I think we have a route proposed and he's been drafted and

and all the paperwork ready to go.

Well, somebody must need to be getting more information, so I will find out.

Okay.

Okay.

Anything else on the consent agenda?

We have a motion and a second to approve.

We can move the packet as amended.

Second.

Aye.

Opposed?

Hi, I'm Vicki Court.

I'm just going to give a brief update on where things stand after the November Crestgate malfunction should follow in January and where we are on alarm system implementation there.

So on my agenda, I'll give an overview of just what the growth of Crestgate is and what the industry functions.

I'll talk about the incident on January 17th, some of the post-event actions our staff has undertaken, and then we'll get into the assignment system discussion and any questions.

So the Sugar Hollow Dam is equipped with a five foot tall inflatable press gate.

We also refer to it as a rubber bladder.

So it's an air filled five foot tall gate that allows us to control the water level in the reservoir.

So you can see in the picture there.

This is the five foot tall rubber gate.

You can see the concrete section.

So here's the rubber gate.

This is the concrete section underneath.

That is what it's mounted on.

So right here, the water level is about five feet down from what we consider normal pool, which is the top of the gate.

The original bladder was installed in 1999, and that was after the original press gates, which were a series of eight metal gates across the surface that had been manually operated.

Those were damaged in a 1995 storm.

and replaced with that rubber gate system.

That system was then replaced again in 2021 with an in-kind system based on the same thing that we put in initially in 2021.

One that is inflated, the gate impounds about 69 of the 367 million gallons of water that are stored in the reservoir, so just under 20% of the reservoir is behind that five foot target.

And that is operated via automated controls on site and it is monitored remotely 24-7 by our staff.

On January 27th of this year, around 7 a.m., the Crest Gate malfunctioned and began to rapidly deflate and release about 70 million gallons of water downstream in just under an hour.

Our staff arrived on site right about the same time that emergency services did, around 8.25, to determine what the cause of the issue was, see if we could get it back online, and to determine if there were any remaining hazards to the public.

We were quickly able to determine that the cause was an air coupling on the airline that supplies the bladder that had become detached, likely due to the very cold temperatures overnight.

Repairs were made within a few minutes and the bladder was took back in operation by about 9 a.m.

The picture on the right, take the back real quick.

You can see this is during the event.

So we have a camera that is trained on the bladder at all times.

We were able to see footage from during the event.

You can see there's snow on the ground so we've got a few inches of snow in the days preceding and I think the overnight temperatures were down in the teens which is why we feel that was an interesting factor.

So in the days and months that followed we've taken

Our staff has made a lot of efforts to understand events and to take measures to prevent it from happening.

So first with documenting everything that took place during the event and putting all of that into an after action report.

So that includes all the photos of the area downstream.

We took some drone surveillance.

We did a physical recon of the area downstream.

We kept logs of all of our internal and external communications, all of the communications with emergency services and that piece of coordination.

and with members of the public.

And that's all in a report that was completed in April.

We also did a number of improvements to our mechanical system that are continuing.

So immediately after the event, we made the repair.

So you can see on the right here, this is the air coupling that came apart.

This is the air deflate line and it has these pressure fittings with these pipe lamps.

So that is where it blew apart and this is our repair.

We added some additional pipe supports and clamps to keep those in place.

We also had our engineering consult come out and do an inspection on February 2nd to determine whether the system was safe to continue operation, which they determined it was, and whether there were any modifications that we could make to the air piping to add a level of security and resiliency to that system.

So we are now going into

We expect those to be completed either late this summer or more likely into the fall of this year.

And that would be just basically a change out of couplings realignment pipe with a flange system as opposed to pressure couplings.

On that same sort of topic, we were asked by members of the public to evaluate whether that bladder can be decommissioned either for months of the year or permanently.

We've determined this time just due to the amount of storage that the bladder contributes.

We are not at a point where we feel like we can risk the water supply by doing so, but we will be completing that South Rivanna to Ragged Mountain pipe over the next several years.

That'll give us another opportunity to revisit the issue of whether it makes sense to keep bladder in operation year-round or permanently, and then as well when the bladder reaches the end of its service life around 2040.

That's another sort of decision point where we need to evaluate that, so I wanted to make mention of that.

On the alarms and programming front, we replaced our camera for improved nighttime visibility, improved surveillance,

We also reviewed the existing SCADA alarms that we have on the system to see what alarms we already have in place, what activated during the event, and what additional alarms might help us to detect an event well before it would occur and obviously as it's in progress.

So we've enabled some additional alarms.

We've also enabled the ability to get text alerts to a number of staff, myself included, if certain alarms related to the bladder are triggered.

And then lastly, I'm working on installing a tailwater sensor, which basically will tell us what's happening on the downstream side of the dam.

We have a lot of instrumentation that tells us what's happening in the reservoir and with the ladder, but this will give us a sense of how much water is going downstream as well.

And I'm hoping to get that installed sometime this fall.

We've also done a lot of work with emergency response and public notification.

So we've had meetings with the Charlottesville University Albemarle Emergency Communication Center, also the Albemarle County Fire Rescue staff, and had discussions with National Weather Service so that we could understand sort of what transpired during the event, what the emergency response was, what are our regional and also the National Weather Service, what are the capabilities to notify the public

in an emergency like this in the future, or hopefully not, but a more catastrophic event.

We have a tabletop exercise planned for this fall in October, which will include emergency services, some local administrators, our regulators through DCR, internal staff, and some other folks, which will allow us to train on our emergency action plan related to a couple of our dams and also run through an exercise.

We have been doing outreach to residents in the area to push them to opt into the CUA 911 emergency notification system.

We'll go to CUA ECC here.

I'll talk more about this in a moment, but we are working on developing an audible warning system or siren system to immediately notify areas downstream with the Sugar Hollow Dam.

We are coordinating with BDOT on potentially installing some high water flashing signs at roads and bridges downstream of the dam that are prone to flooding.

And we are looking at some educational opportunities, including signage for the valley down below to alert both residents, but then also visitors who may not be familiar with the fact that there's a dam and some associated residents.

And then lastly, we've done quite a bit of community engagement since the event.

So we had public meetings at the Whitehall Road Tin Club on February 1st and March 14th where we shared information.

shared information, answered questions, and took some feedback from community members downstream of the dam.

We also met with a smaller group of representatives that we put together.

It's all downstream residents, but it's just a small working group.

We met with them first on May 8th, and we will be meeting with them probably every handful of months as we work through additional improvements at the dam.

and then we've done some coordinating with other beauty groups including Trout Unlimited and Camp Sugar Hollow on what happened during the event and some potential additional opportunities for education.

All right, so on an audible warning system, we determined that this is probably in the event of a catastrophic failure of the dam or a malfunction such as the bladder malfunction.

This is one of the

The best ways to notify people, particularly in heavily used recreational areas, that there is something wrong with the dam.

So the first thing we've done is do some information gathering.

So we met in May with Fairfax Water in Howard County, Maryland at separate meetings to discuss their implementation of siren systems within their communities.

So Fairfax Water has a siren system that they use to warn residents of a sunny day breach of the Occoquan Dam.

It's a high hazard dam for water supply in Fairfax County.

They specifically use it for a sunny day breach.

They do not use it for wet weather events.

And that was coordinated with the town of Aquapon downstream.

And Ellicott City is part of Howard County, Maryland.

And there were some pretty high profile fatal flood events in 2016 and 2018.

And since then, they've developed a comprehensive flood warning and resiliency plan for Ellicott City specifically.

And they had some really interesting and great feedback for us on some ideas for developing a system

So we're taking that feedback from them and working on gathering some class information and a schedule and stuff.

Still very much in progress, but we're working on pulling together what a project there looks like.

We've got a number of operational parameters that we'll have to come up with and work through, and I'll touch on those in my next slide here.

But this may also serve as a good model for rolling out siren systems if we wish at Ragged Mountain, South Urbana Dam,

Beaver Creek Dance, which are also high hazard facilities.

So right now we're looking at potentially doing more study and design work in the second half of this year and implementation would likely be into 2025.

So my last slide here is just some of the considerations that we'll have to work through as we work

Do the design of the system, but you know under what scenarios would a siren system be employed?

For example, like off the pond, would we only look at a sunny day failure malfunction?

Would we also want to include a failure during a heavy rain event?

Will the siren be triggered automatically, which doesn't seem to be preferred by the municipalities that we spoke to because of the possibility of false alarms?

Or would you require manual trigger by operation staff, which then obviously could contribute some delay as you work through, you know, the deciding matrix on whether or not it

your emergency reaches the level of meeting your warning system.

So there's some considerations there.

How much the inundation area would we expect to cover with these audible alarms?

So are we talking about areas minutes downstream of the dam or are we talking about the entire inundation area?

And obviously that's gonna affect cost, how many siren holes we need and some things like that.

How would this affect the community?

How do we educate them to understand what the appropriate actions are in the event that the siren sounds?

How do we teach them where to go for more information on what they need to do?

Should these systems be installed at all of our high hazard facilities and what would that look like?

And then lastly, and importantly, how would we fund these efforts?

Is there grant funding available?

So these are things that are still very much in the works, but I just wanted to provide an update on where that stands and this will obviously be coming for you again as we continue to work through the process.

So the first bridge, which, and by that I mean the closest bridge to the dam did over top, I don't know by how much, because we don't have a gauge that close, the closest gauge is at Reunion Road, but we do know that water overtopped the bridge for a short period of time.

It was amazing where the lawn chairs and other things went from people's yards up eight feet onto the roadway.

Yeah, and one of the reasons we did some of the downstream recon that we did afterwards, and one thing that was helpful was there was snow because you could actually see where the water level had gotten to prior to the snow melting.

So we have drone footage going all the way down there.

and that's quite a ways.

Yeah, so it's very interesting.

So some municipalities, what's the distinction, I understand the difference between a sunny day versus the wet weather, but why would someone opt to just have one or the other?

If that question makes sense.

But in other words, if you're going to have a sunny day when

One and also have one that triggers for a wet weather alarm.

Yeah, so in a wet weather event, likely you've had some warning that a large storm system is coming through.

In some cases, you can take some preemptive action at your reservoir if you know that a really large storm system is coming through.

So there are other mechanisms of warning folks.

You're also not going to have folks fishing, swimming,

you know doing those activities if you're getting 10 inches spraying and so the the immediate hazard particularly at Sugar Hollow too downstream would you wouldn't have the people there that you would be worried about not having a cell signal of being in the river at the time of a sunny day failure if that makes sense yeah so you would still obviously be employing um you know your CUA 911 system if it started to look as though and obviously media and everything else if it looks like your dam was

You'd have a little more sort of forewarning to that.

You'd have more forewarning and then you'd have other mechanisms of getting a warning out.

I was there I just happened to be up at Sugar Hollow a few days prior to this meeting our regional engineer with DCR

and he's like, did you see the kayakers on the river?

And I said, it's January.

He's like, yeah, there's kayakers on the river, man.

They're crazy.

Cause like we had just gotten rain in the days past.

People are using that river for recreation year round.

So those, those unexpected sunny day failures or malfunctions are really the biggest concern, but definitely something to consider whether we want to include any type of failure.

The other challenge, and we heard this from Allicott City is

When it's raining, it's noisy.

And so if you have an audible warning system, people may not be able to hear it in the same way that they would during bright sunny day.

So one of the, I guess, bright spots of this whole thing was that you all have taken the initiative to look at other dams that we have in the system and seeing what might be appropriate there.

Yeah, that's interesting.

But do you have any sense for authorities this size or authorities that have these sort of number of dams?

Is there something with the Water Works Association or someone who'd say that

What's sort of standard in terms of enunciations like this?

I think it's case by case because you're designing for different typography.

The contours of the Valley below Sugar Hollow is going to vary drastically from what is downstream of Occoquan and what you're seeing in Howard County.

So you need to design a system for where you are.

So this would be beyond what the state or really the feds are requiring for a high hazard facility.

Yeah.

As you look back, you think, wow, we should have had this.

We need this everywhere.

Well, I do appreciate whenever we have something like this happen, you all have an immediate response of, OK, let's learn from this and let's apply it more broadly across our system.

So thank you.

Yeah, the risk aversion is really important in this case.

And we were all very, very lucky, that's for sure.

My question is, do you all already have a script that you provide to ECC?

Because that I think would be someplace where when people were calling, they were freaking out.

And when you're freaking out on the phone, it's not always easy to hear what the person at ECC is saying.

So I'm not positive that they were told that couldn't possibly happen.

But that was what they heard.

And so I think it's really important training wise for your message to get accurately into the script so that they

Sure.

Yeah.

So to answer your question, we do have prewritten scripts for our operations staff to use that are written into the emergency action plan.

So under the various scenarios, there is a script that gives them the right wording and the right amount of information.

We are working now with ECC to develop the

You know, message area templates of where those messages should go so that we have those polygons ready to go.

We're also working on some standard scripts for those CUA 911 messages to go out so that we have those sort of drafted.

They do have templates for all kinds of scenarios within ECC, within their system.

But I don't know that they have anything that is damn specific.

So we are working with them on that.

Wanted to just make sure you were on board with that.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

I'm going to try to navigate the or thread the needle here between really highly technical, lots of detail.

And what I believe we all want to know, which is why the Rev.

Anacom station had the emergency event that it had earlier this year.

So if I'm going too high or too low, please feel free to raise your hand and ask me to

to change, but I'm going to try to thread the needle here.

So just as a quick reminder, if we could.

Thank you.

The Rivanna pump station is constructed here on Moores Creek's plant site.

It was built in 2017.

It has a wet side and a dry side.

In the dry side rooms, there's two pump rooms and each pump room has three pumps, two large pumps and one small pump for a total of six pumps.

We have a total pumping capacity of 53 million gallons per day.

This receives wastewater from about 66% of the urban area.

So pretty large facility for red anaconda.

We lift water with this pump station about approximately 110 feet to bring it into the headworks of the plant, which is just outside of this building.

So I'm going to start today with just sort of summarizing the events of January 9th as we knew them in real time.

And as we go through this presentation, I'm going to sort of pull back the curtain, if you will, and let you know what we now know caused some of these events.

But at the time, this is what we saw.

We had rain starting at about 6 a.m. that day.

By about 10 a.m. the rain had been pretty significant and we were starting to see pumping increases to meet rising wastewater flows.

I'm sorry, what is the collection system?

We have very large diameter pipes that come to the plant.

And normally we have about 10 MGD of flow that comes day in and day out.

Well, the pipes that come to this facility are designed to carry wet weather flow.

So they're designed to carry much higher flow rates.

And so there's typically an excess capacity in those pipes.

And as it rains and the flows pick up, that capacity gets consumed.

And what you'll see is that really important issue here as these events unfolded.

So between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. that was normal stormwater drop inlets into the wastewater?

No.

So three and a half inches of rain is a two to five year storm.

The river behaved as if it was a 10 year storm.

Due to location of the rain or something.

Right.

Yes.

But no, not a direct connection to the stormwater system.

So wastewater systems have what's called infiltration, inflow and infiltration.

OK. Because of cracks in pipes or manholes, it gets in.

We don't want it there, but it gets in.

So we have to account for it.

Next event at about 3.45, several pumps fault out and alarms go to the operators.

So the operators go to the pump station, go down in the dry well and actually reset the pumps.

They look in the dry well side and as a reminder, I'm sorry, the wet well side, and as a reminder, there's covers.

We put covers on for odor control.

So when they look over the rail, down into the wet well, they see the covers.

So there's no water above the covers.

They had just gone down into the pump station and reset the pumps.

Yes, it's raining.

Yes, there were high flows, but it seemed as if things were normal.

By about 4.58, 5 p.m., a sump pump high level alarm goes off in pump room number one.

This did not get acknowledged immediately, in part because there are many alarms that kind of go off in a wastewater plant during a storm event saying, hey, we're gonna turn this pump off, turn this pump off this level, and it's a very large facility.

And so that sump pump high alarm is something we found sort of after the fact, if you will.

Okay.

Right.

So what that tells us that at least at that time period, water was in the dry side of the pump station.

We didn't know that at the time, but retrospectively we know that now.

We also believe that pressure right about this time was probably high enough in the collection sewer system that it lifted several manhole lids off of the sewer line.

And they were locked down, can lock manhole lids, but they did, there was enough pressure to discharge them from their normal location.

About 5.37 that day, so just before the evening, because it was wintertime, so starting it dark pretty early, SCADA alarms starts prompting some odd things going on at the pump stations.

By now, flows had increased pretty significantly, and the operators started rounding to all of the key pump stations on the plant.

And by 6 p.m., they discovered 16 feet of water above the covers,

on the wet side and five feet of water in the pump rooms and water rising rapidly in the stairways and in the pump rooms.

By about 6.10, additional staff were notified and we started mobilizing crews here to address the issue and it wasn't until almost midnight that we sent staff out into Riverview Park from here to just get an idea of what was going on in the river and the river was well flooded into the park and up to the playground within Riverview Park.

So that's, gosh, excuse me, I'm sorry.

So that's what happened that day.

And I promise you, we're gonna talk about all of it in a fair amount of detail.

So if we go to the next slide.

I'm gonna talk about the events in four phases.

I'm gonna just touch on the first two phases.

We've talked fairly extensively about the work that's been done to date.

Phase one is constructing that initial bypass, just trying to sort of get things dried out, get into the station, get some of the flow handled,

So that we could stop the overflows in Riverview Park specifically.

So we installed a force main connection.

We constructed multiple bypass pumps.

We diverted flow partially through the plant over to the other side of the plant to the Moores Creek pump station.

We were able to get

Give a handle on and address the sewer system overflows out in the in the community.

We were able to gain access to the wet well covers which took took several weeks and more importantly below those wet well covers.

We were able to remove a broken valve here at the headworks that stopped our ability to respond.

We constructed a 10 million gallon a day bypass operation

And during that same time, we also began construction of the full 55 million gallons a day bypass.

And all of these photos were all the things that were kind of going on during that time period.

You can see it was very cold.

We had several storm events, rain, snow, et cetera.

And with that.

The second phase that we've talked about a little bit before is the construction of the 55 million gallon a day bypass.

You can see here this is larger pumps, larger pipes, pretty tight orchestration of fitting everything

into the facility.

So we installed the two 36 inch force main headers.

We modified the connection structure again.

We added a extensive amount of worksite fall protection.

This facility is, you work from the ground and it's very deep.

And so we had a lot of concerns about staff safety as we worked with cranes and all that sort of thing.

So we did construct a extensive number of pick points to ensure worker safety.

We also installed seven bypass pumps and constructed the full 55 million gallons a day, and that was completed on February 14th.

So phase three investigation, I don't necessarily need to read the whole list to you, but what I wanted to convey with this slide is we didn't sit and wait for things to sort of fix themselves or to

Be content with our knowledge of what had happened.

And so right from the get go, as soon as we were able to get the flow under control, we began investigations.

And so from January to June, we did a whole variety of things.

And you can see some photographs here.

We had to make the facility safe for people to enter.

So our first entry was with scuba air, self-contained air inspection.

We eventually brought in a cleaning team and disinfected the whole facility to make it safe for people to go down inside.

and do investigative work.

We brought in contractors, you can see in that middle picture there.

We had folks sort of crawling all over the facility, really trying to look at what was happening under the covers.

You can see our electrical investigation and controls investigation team in the bottom picture there, trying to recreate all the different scenarios that might have led to a problem.

and we did a fair amount of interviews of staff internally as well as we modeled the sewer system as well as the river system and we did a detailed root cause analysis with workshops and eventually by early June we were able to submit that to our insurance carrier.

And the last phase is this phase four restoration and this phase we will be talking about a lot I'm sure in the coming months and hopefully not years but certainly the coming months.

We did during the last few months begin

The work to restore the station while we were simultaneously doing investigations.

Everything's been removed, marked, tagged, labeled.

We've hired MEB out of Chesapeake to come and be our emergency construction contractor.

They've been fantastic.

They photograph everything.

They wire tag every bolt, nut, and screw.

Put everything aside for us, all of the demolition debris, everything for our insurance carrier to review.

So there's again a list of some of the activities that have gone into our investigation and our restoration work.

So sort of the star of the show today, if you will, is the root cause analysis and what actually happened.

We're gonna talk about four different sort of items that we believe contributed to this happening.

The first, and there's sort of sub parts to this, is that we had a complex pump control system failure.

And when that system failed, it then allowed opportunity for other factors to come into play.

And we'll talk about those in a little bit.

So the complex pumps control system malfunction was the first domino to fall, so to speak.

The second item is that the water levels in the wet well and the collection system grows very quickly.

And the reason this matters to your point, Mr. Pinkston, is that when we have capacity in the collection system, things happen slowly, right?

You have time to react.

You have time to realize there's an issue going on.

When they happen very quickly, you have very little time to react.

And so that certainly played a factor here.

We also believe that the wastewater entered pump room number two

through an HVAC opening that connected the wet side of the pump station to the dry side of the pump station up at elevation where there is normally not wastewater.

But in this case, as the wastewater rose, it did spill over into the other side of the station.

And last but not least, the pump station is not designed to be submerged.

Jennifer, you want to mention what those pictures show?

So top left picture here is the, we're going to talk a little bit about transducers, probably more than you ever wanted to know.

But that on the left side is during investigations they did find our transducer in the flood debris.

and that's a picture of it on the left hand side there.

You'll see it's a device that normally hangs above and out of the water and sends a signal down and can determine the level of the water.

On the right hand side top picture, all of those wires that hang down are a series of float trees and each pump has a secondary backup control system and it has three pumps and they're individual wires and they hang down into the wastewater.

And what we'll talk about is how each of those systems behave and how they perhaps behave poorly together.

And at the bottom is the, once we de-watered the pump station, what you were able to see remaining in that photograph.

If we could.

So the pump systems are controlled by two separate but overlapping systems.

One system and the primary system is controlled by our SCADA software and it is told what to do by this level transducer that we saw in the previous picture.

Normally that level transducer is mounted above the water and it again sends a signal down to the water surface, it bounces back up and it can tell the water's rising, the water's dropping.

So the second system is the series of floats that we talked about.

So the first thing with this complex pump system malfunction is that the ultrasonic transducer that we saw in the previous picture, inaccurately measured the wet well level.

And what that means is you normally, if this table is the water surface elevation, you normally want that transducer to sit above that water surface elevation.

Because those types of devices have something called a blanking range.

And once the water surface gets into that range, and you can see in the photograph here, or in the diagram here, it can be inches to sometimes feet.

Once the water level gets into that blanking range, it sends crazy signals.

and what we saw here at Rivanna Pump Station in this graph on the right.

So this line right here is the water surface measurement, essentially just shy of the covers.

And as the water level rose and we got into that blanking range, the transducers started telling the pump station that the water level is actually dropping when in fact it was rising.

This red line going up, up, up, up, up is exactly what was happening as the station was flooding.

And what it thought was happening, you can see these transducers thinking and eventually one drops out.

We believe it flooded and broke or failed.

So what was happening is the pumps were being told to turn on and off based on these transducer levels when in fact the water level had risen into that blanking range and then above the

the control device, the transducer itself.

So eventually it submerged the transducer.

It's waterproof, but once you get beyond that blanking range, it does not activate at all.

and unfortunately that is one of the first things that happened.

It was when it said, oh, my water level is going down.

I turned down the number of pumps that I run.

We have several compounding things that unfortunately the set point for all of them is almost identical.

And so we have two different operating systems, control systems,

Right, and there are many, many, we are having

Tremendous number of workshops to have this exact conversation.

I believe, and we'll talk about this as we go, we put covers on this pump station as an over control method.

There are several complications with that.

Does the system understand or does that know?

So we've actually run into this very recently on our South Havana water treatment plant construction.

because the contractor goes, okay, I'm gonna install this device.

I needed to read the water level.

I'm gonna mount it about here.

It'll be out of the way.

And if it's too close to the water, there's actually manufacturer's literature that says it needs, it cannot be this close to the water.

And it is a, it's a common, I wouldn't say common, it's not the right word, but it is a something you have to be aware of when you're installing that instrument.

And normally the water level should not have been this high.

So it would have been fine.

So as the water level went abnormally high, it then created this scenario.

So B and C here on this

The same graph.

I'm going to try to do my best to try to explain this.

So we have this transducer control of all the pumps, right?

So water level rises, it says turn on more pumps, turn on more pumps, turn on more pumps.

At the top of this graph, you'll see a red line, sort of faint red line.

That's 53 million gallons per day.

That is the full capacity of this pump station.

I'm sorry.

Thank you.

So as the water level rose,

It should have been turning on more and more pumps, right?

So what happened is as that water level rose from the previous graph we saw, the pumps stayed steady.

More pumps did not come on.

And what we see here

is a system is designed that if the transducer system fails, or we hit this 15 feet of water in the wet well, it should automatically switch this control of these pumps over those floats.

All the pumps convert over.

Unfortunately, again, that tiny little range we've been talking about, all of the pumps tried to switch over at the exact, I wouldn't say exact same time, but a very, very short time period.

And because the water was rising very rapidly, it tried to switch these pumps to flow control all at the same time, or within a few minutes of each other.

In addition, we found that there was a programmed set point for two of the pumps that limited two of the pumps to a 75% output.

Totally unrelated.

When all five pumps come on, all the high flow event, right, you're trying to get 53 million gallons a day out of the station, you turn five pumps on.

When you only have four pumps on, pumps are programmed to run at 100% capacity.

For whatever reason, and we don't know to this day know why, when that fifth pump comes on, the program was rewritten to set the maximum capacity for five pumps at 75%.

Which means even if all five pumps had transitioned successfully and run, they still only would have run at about 75% of their speed.

So you take the fact that we had this transducer issue, right?

The blanking range, it wasn't giving us good information.

We also had pumps try to switch from being controlled by a transducer to a float system.

Just two of them.

Yes, sir.

So pump three was running through this whole event.

Pumps one, two, and five shut down.

So earlier when I said the operators got an alarm that pumps had folded out during that transition period, one, two, and five shut down.

Pumps two and five restarted.

Pump one never alarmed and it never restarted.

We do not know why.

So we didn't even know that it had shut down and it shut down.

Pumps four and six slowed down because of this 75% setting.

So when all of that happened simultaneously, we get what you see on the graph here.

So we were pumping about 39 million gallons a day

and it dropped down to about 20 million gallons a day.

And over the course of about 15 minutes, we lost this capacity within the pump station.

And the flow never returned higher than about 40, 35 to 40 million gallons a day.

So the issue with when it went from transducer to backup float,

Yes and no, it was a control power issue.

So when it switches, I'm going to go deep here for a second.

When it switches over, the VFD that was controlling that pump has some energy in it.

And what it has to do is de-energize, switch systems, pulls the relay in and out, switches systems and says, okay, now I am locked in and controlled over here.

and what we believe happened and we don't know why exactly so we're going to dive in in the design is it didn't fully de-energize so it couldn't switch over and it faulted the pump out and said oh wait a minute we got a problem here and it did that with three three of those so your VFD is actually for the the VFD corporate or the pull the logic circuit in and that circuit is what trips this out so we've got to work on that the minutia there so

Go back up to a little higher level, if that's okay.

One did not.

They were restarted by the operator.

Correct, because it never faulted, it never alarmed.

Typically we have six pumps in the station, you typically run five at a time, five were running, so nothing said, hey, we've got this issue where one pump did not restart.

Sorry, the item D on this list, and I promise this is the most complicated part of this whole thing.

is the collection system filled at almost the exact same time that the pump station reduced.

So we had all of our capacity in the collection system absorbed.

The water level rose very, very rapidly.

That rise of water level sent us into the blanking range on the transducer, tripped out three pumps, sent two pumps into reduced capacity at all the same time while the water level was rising.

So the dynamics of that, I guess you all are still looking at this, but the dynamics, the hydrodynamics of your whole water collection system, it's very interesting that it filled up, you lost that capacity so quickly, I guess, right?

Particularly given it wasn't that rainy,

It was a five-year storm, two-year storm.

Because it seems like that was, in other words, it's like your system was, clearly there were some things that happened that were, clearly there were some technical glitches or things that happened in terms of the logic that, but if you hadn't had, if your collection system had had more capacity or bandwidth in it, you wouldn't have gotten to this accelerating water

High water elevation, which ended up overtaking the river.

And that's strange, right?

It's not.

So we looked at the capacity and the wet weather flows coming in thinking maybe initially that

We had an extreme wet weather flow event that maybe caused an in-rush of flow.

And we believe that while the flows did go up from wet weather, they didn't go up extraordinarily high.

and that really this is not that unusual that the collection system after a rainy event would be full and had the pumps been operating appropriately, it would have pumped down that last section of the collection system and we would have been able to work pacing the pumps on and off.

It was this sort of sudden failure

that happened at the same time the collection system was full.

And the other piece of this puzzle is our pumps are set to go on and off at about half foot apart from each other on the rise.

And so that is one of the things we're gonna be looking at is do we need to have pumps coming on earlier?

Do we need to have pumps with a greater separation?

Do we need to separate that hydraulically from the elevation of the collection system?

And really look at that in some level of detail.

So the number two item that we we've talked about here that kind of came out of our findings is there was a real question of whether the river went into the manholes first or the manholes or the sewer came out of the manholes first and we believe that the collection system did fill but that in fact the manholes coming off of their their frames and covers was caused by the hydraulic pressure internally and so it wasn't until the river then later that night rose out of its banks

that it became connected to the sewer system.

Yes, and at that point it was completely, you had the infinite water coming at you,

and we had to wait till the river drops to be able to dewater and isolate the pump station.

So it didn't cause the issue, but it compounded the immediate response in the few days afterwards.

So, if we could.

And I think you've seen these diagrams before.

So we have a diagram here, the wet side of the pump station, the wet well is highlighted,

Wet well is here.

This is the wet side.

There's a stairway going down the dry side.

The pump room is about the same elevation as the wet well.

And what happened normally water stays within the wet well.

And as we rose and rose and rose, you can see here we came through this elevation, this penetration in the wall and flooded the pump room.

We could go ahead and go forward.

So we have the alarm at just shy of 5 p.m. that there was water in pump room number one.

So we believe, and I'll go through this here in a second, that water may have been in the building as much as a half hour before that.

And the reason is the water went out of the covers, out of the wet well.

Number one here is this door.

So that door was completely, it's out in the wet well area, it's to the stairways.

So that not only was that door destroyed, the frame was twisted and pulled out of the concrete.

So there were some pretty massive hydraulic forces going on.

So that door did its job as best it could to hold that water pack.

But at some point it gave up the ghost and became unmoored from the concrete.

So then the water rose in the stairway, and you can see right here, number two, is a picture of the air intake underneath that bottom landing of the stairs.

And we believe the water entered through that grating.

And then inside the pump room, that grating is right here on this picture.

And the water flowed down the HVAC ductwork, and there's a register right here, right over one of the pumps.

that then proceeded to fill this room.

Yes.

And in this picture, you'll see that here's that same register.

And so from the floor level, if you're standing at the floor level, there's the pumps, there's the register, there's the penetration.

No one really thought water could get that high.

I'm sure when they were designing this facility, obviously it did.

And then you can see here, this is the door that goes from the pump room number two, which was the first one to get wet into pump room number one.

And you can see it actually bent the door.

This is a steel frame door.

The water was enough force to actually bend the door inward to dislodge the latch to then flood the other pump station.

So that's why we think that it's possible

Could you go back my screen?

Sure.

Yes, sir.

It would have been in the wet well and the stairwell that would have failed, but not in the... Not in the dry, mechanical...

Places for more alarms to be put.

And there, we've actually, since this time, there's three penetrations that go from the dry, the wet side to the dry side.

We're using temporary ventilation and we're treating it like a confined space so we have the doors propped open on both ends so it acts like a chimney and then we wear gas monitors going down through that side.

They're the electrical disconnect boxes for some of the equipment that was down in the facility.

Obviously getting the

Instrumentation getting wet is a problem.

Wastewater is corrosive is a problem.

And then it took us almost two and a half weeks to get water out of the facility and wash down.

At some rate, there's a lot of words and I apologize.

I was trying to give a narrative.

If you ever wanted to ask, somebody asked you what happened, here's a slide you can give to me.

So it rained.

It rained a fair amount.

It rained three and a half inches in over 14 hours.

It was a two to five year storm event.

The river acted like it was a 10 year storm event, which is kind of interesting and we'll figure that out later.

At the time of pump station failure, we believe based on flow meters out in the system that we had about 43 million gallons a day coming at us.

The pump station is capable of pumping 53, so it should have been capable of handling the flow that was coming at us.

Once the excess capacity of the collection system was full, that wet well level rose very rapidly.

and that reduced the reaction time.

The rapid rise triggered a series of nearly simultaneous pump control changes, both on the transducer side and on the float control system side.

And that resulted in a bunch of pumps faulting.

Once one of the pumps never did restart, it never faulted, it never restarted, it just shut down.

After the operators restarted the pumps, some of them started back up.

Others did not.

Others ran at reduced capacity.

And that output after that startup was between 20 and 41 million gallons a day.

We know we have 53 coming in.

We know we were only able to get 20 to 41 going out the door.

That caused surcharging in the system.

And when that low pump output and high end flow resulted in the wet well rising, going through the HVAC penetrations

doorways, stairwells, all of those things and flooded the station which then caused the surcharging within the flushing system and the manholes to come off.

One thing to note here that I haven't mentioned previously, the operators did attempt to close and influence sluice gate at the head of the pump station and we were not able to close that due to corrosion in the traction, the gate being seized.

Subsequently, the river came up out of its banks and connected to the pump station and we were not able to then dewater the pump station until the river receded.

This table I'm not going over, but I just want, I put it in here as a reference point of the 500 page investigative document.

This is sort of, if you ever really want to know sort of every detail of everything that happened this summer table,

kind of walks you through what happened in the river, what happened with the rainfall, the pump station and the staff all in a sequence time chart.

So it's here if you want it, but I just wanted to let you know it's available.

So next steps, we're working with our insurance carrier over the next few months to talk about coverage, reimbursements and the investigations.

We're doing design workshops to address not only rehabilitating the pump station as it was, but making resiliency improvements as we go.

That includes flood proofing, HVAC load relocation, pump room isolation.

So to, I forget whose point it was,

if it were to flood again for whatever reason, keeping the dry side dry and the wet side wet.

Looking at emergency bypass pumping connections, that was one of the things we learned those first couple of weeks is how challenging this punctuation is to hook up an emergency to or an emergency pumping setup.

Obviously controls, level sensing and programming modifications will be in the mix for rehabilitation.

So we're working on the design now where we've ordered some materials.

We're sort of doing a design build process and parts and pieces are being pulled and ordered and rebuilt as we go here over the next few months.

And we're hoping by January of 2025 to be able to remove the bypass pumping system and then completely close out and return the pump station to normal operation by May of 2025.

Okay, this is the last slide in here.

We have budget estimate.

I think we've talked a little bit in the consent agenda today and we talked about authorizing a capital improvement project and here's where the funding for that estimate came from and just maybe point out the obvious.

One of the bigger costs in this whole process is the bypass pumping.

Yeah, is there any responsibility or not thinking of monetary value, not necessarily, but is there something that the people that designed this should have known better or clearly it was a very complicated failure in the way that it happened?

And I'm not here to assign you blame.

I'm just wondering, is there a process

Well, hopefully they're going to just say, they're going to give us a check for the whole amount.

But realistically, I'm sure they're going to look at the coverage of the policy, what's covered.

And one of their first responses was about, well, we only cover 100,000 for water damage.

and I think we would go back and say well this wasn't water this was wastewater you know water is defined in the policy as coming from a faucet or a stream or a pipe of water and so we've recruited Valerie and her expert to help us should we get into this type of debate of what the coverages are but we don't at this point okay we've not gotten any response from them yet

about wanting to meet with us and talk about what happened.

That correct.

And then they have, what do they call this?

Sub insurer.

They have another insurance company that I guess they've paid to provide.

But I mean, the system has been up and operational for how many years?

Yeah, I know that a system like this isn't warranted for the whole thing, given how, I mean, I've never seen a complex like this warranted.

At the same time, the design engineer usually has some

The complexity lies, if I'm being perfectly honest, is that there are many contributing factors here.

And while, yes, I think all of us really wish that HVAC penetration wasn't there, we walk by it every day.

And never once did any of us say, boy, I wish that wasn't there.

So

There's controls issues, there's operational issues, there's questions about the isolation gate at the front.

We weren't able to operate.

And so I think if I were asking questions, some of those questions are, I would ask questions of the design engineer.

I would ask questions of the operators.

I would ask questions of the project management team.

Well, it's a complicated and a failure that it's not like there will ever be a sort of smoking gun that like this explains all of it.

Yeah, and again, I'm not I'm not trying to engage in that.

But what I am trying to be responsive to is we have a public behind us.

That is like this is a newer system.

I think at this level,

I feel like I have a lot of confidence that you all have, you know, have a sense, a good idea of what happened.

I also think that it is, you know, there are enough sort of, if you look at probability theory, one over X times one over Y times one over Z, what that probability becomes is very, very small, and that's what seemed to happen.

So I don't know, I don't know how we explain to the public

You know, if it was reported, I mean, that's the thing.

We do have two engineering firms involved in our restoration work.

One is the firm that did design this pump station.

In part because they are familiar with the design intent and at every turn we can ask, well, why was this put together this way?

And in some cases it's for reasons that maybe they were trying to prevent catastrophe under a different mechanism, right?

So we put this delay in for this reason.

And in fact, that ended up being part of the problem for this particular case.

So we've got them working on it.

another firm that did the root cause analysis.

They have highly skilled instrumentation and controls folks that we're bringing into the mix.

And the other piece of the puzzle, and perhaps Bill wants to talk about this.

We've done a lot of introspection with all of our divisions and we're instituting our lessons learned from here into other designs and policies and procedures as we go forward.

Can I ask one question?

If the isolation gate doesn't have more

Would that have limited some of the damage or not really?

It depends on when that gate would have been closed.

I think what we know now about the timeline is that the time that we tried to close that gate, most likely the water was in the facility.

Potentially, you know, what if, what if, what if, if we had known that water was penetrating the facility and had caught it before it completely submerged everything and been able to close that gate,

What it would have done is pushed more of the wastewater into the collection system and into the park system.

In fact, it would have pushed all of the wastewater.

So while there's benefits to the station for the water not coming in, it also limits our ability to divert some of the flow through the rest of the plant.

And it would have all gone to the collection system in the park and the river.

The company that designed this, I assume they do projects like this all over the place.

Yes, they do.

They've probably been doing this work for a very long time.

Yes, sir.

I guess it's also the case that every one of these is sort of bespoke or tailored or one-off, as opposed to like widgets that you produced.

different size, capacity, topography, but we will work through all the aspects of the findings and whatever the insurance company engineers have to offer and take a look at is the designer responsible for any of it as well as our operating procedures and our maintenance procedures, the information, the lessons learned.

We have a long list of items that we've thought of and we're going to work through how not only we just think of it, but how we

Yeah, and one of the things I know we spoke about this after the primary clarifier issue, rotating and reverse.

We have

We do not, we haven't historically used commissioning agents.

We have, even before this event, talked about using them for, for instance, when we, when we rebuild this building, because we don't normally do office building construction.

We usually do industrial construction.

Bringing in somebody who really knows how to run a building through its paces.

We talk about that from this building reconstruction.

I think we're revisiting how we start up projects, particularly complex ones.

Historically, we've done most of the work with our consulting engineer.

Sometimes we'll bring in third party inspectors for specialty inspection, and then our own staff.

So we're we're having conversations about them.

The commissioning piece can

The mission for a building like this is obviously different than the commission you do for a water plant or something like what you have here, but I know there are companies that do that and it sounds like you all have most of those skills in house and start up your equipment working with your contractors.

It's just something to think about.

I mean, maybe given how complicated these systems are, I mean, this is a complicated, what you described as switching back and forth with the VFD.

We've been having conversations.

Picking on the control side, where we don't have as much as deep a historical bench.

We have great people who are working for us now, but they can't be everywhere.

Yeah, that whole sector has, I think, gotten so complicated.

All the things, the bells and whistles that you can deploy with these systems make them super complicated and I think, you know, could have contributed to what happened here.

I just want to say thank you.

I know that I've been in situations like this before and it's like, well,

particularly the public wants some sort of explanation.

Why did this happen or what it could have been?

And clearly it's complicated.

And I think that y'all have demonstrated real transparency from the very beginning with this and the efforts to get this back up on operational were just heroic.

Staff has been fantastic.

I cannot begin to compliment how far

And high risk work that they're doing also in this little repair thing.

Wow.

Thanks, Jennifer.

Yeah, and I think Brian sums up, you know, I think maybe how the rest of the board feels what's happened over the last six months and

The work that's been done, I thought, put into it, the risk, and it has been pretty heroic.

Next item, the PFAS regulatory and class action litigation update.

Yes, thanks.

Trying to make this quick for everyone.

I know we're running kind of late, so I want to give an update on the PFAS regulation, the tax action.

The PFAS regulations and the class action litigation.

So there's some new PFAS regulations that were established on April 10th.

They regulated five PFAS compounds and then there is a

There's a sixth regulation which relates to a combination of various PFAS components.

So again, we're talking about parts per trillion.

This is the lowest MCL has been proposed.

That's essentially one inch and 16 million miles or one penny and $10 billion.

Go ahead.

So to come back on something already today, South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, Sugar Hollow Reservoir, the Ragged Mountain Reservoir, all the water supplies for our urban water system.

Yes, we're going to get into that later.

We'll break down through that.

And then, again, our five surface water treatment plants, South Urbana, Observatory, North Urbana, plant in Scottsville, Rose system, and then we have a groundwater system in Redhill.

Those are our six water treatment plants.

So we talked about maximum contaminant level.

The MCL is the highest level of a contaminant that's allowed in drinking water.

Maximum contaminant levels are set as close to MCL goals as feasible using the best available treatment technology and taking into cost, taking cost into consideration.

MCL are enforceable standards.

These are levels that we cannot exceed.

The MCL goal is a level of a contaminant below which there is no known or expected health risk

They allow for a margin of safety of non-enforceable public health norms.

So we've all seen these, we're probably all wearing clothes that have these PFOS chemicals in them.

We see these on the news, the BOA, PFOS, PFHXS, the GenX chemicals, which was a

So PFOC, where is it?

Well, there's been a lot of places.

It's in consumer products, stain, water resistant products, the food packaging,

Fire extinguishing foam, waste sites, it is found in drinking water.

Most people in the United States have been exposed to some PFAS.

People can be expected, can be exposed to PFAS by touching, drinking, eating, breathing in materials containing PFAS.

More important, this is directed from the EPA's website.

Very little PFAS in the water can get into your body through your skin, to showering, bathing, and washing dishes in water containing PFAS.

Go ahead.

PFAS, this is, there are four, and there are eight carbon atoms, and there are adjoining fluorides, so it's the carbon-fluoride bond.

That is the, that's the root of the PFAS chemical, and there's certain variations that change the compounds themselves.

So talk a little bit about our sampling history, his sampling history at Rivanna.

We're very proud of this.

In 2014, the first PFAS samples were collected as part of the UCMR3.

There were minimum detections at very low levels.

Rivanna's continued to collect PFAS samples more than 20 times at the five surface water treatment plants and 16 times at the Redhill treatment.

Water Treatment Plan.

The reason for that is we became in possession of the Redhill Treatment System in 2018.

An important component to the left here, this is actually a sample kit for PFAS.

Each sample kit requires the sample to fill approximately 20 containers for each sample location and approximately $395 per sample.

So when we collect these samples, we collect them

of the water that's coming into the plant and the water going out of the plant.

Why is that?

Because there could be a difference.

We have these chemicals in the treatment plant.

$3.95 per kit.

Per location.

Per location.

So if you take a raw and finished sample at a water treatment plant, that's almost $100 for a sample of raw and finished.

So we'd have minimal detections in our raw and treated water and in our Rivanna system.

And so we've talked a little bit about our sampling event in May of 2020, May 24th, 2023 at the North Rivanna Treatment Plant.

So we had a PFOA detection of 23 parts per thousand, parts per trillion, I'm sorry, May 24th,

People's detection, as you can see, our highest detections in our system happened on this particular event in North Rivanna.

We have yet to detect GenX chemicals in our system or PFNA.

The GenX chemical is what Western Virginia Water Authority, the issue they had with one of their people.

And then I'll discuss here in a minute this hazard index calculation, but again, the highest hazard index calculation that we've had in our system was again on May 10th.

My next slide will talk about the hazard index.

And so the denominators, this is the GenX compound PFDS, PFNA, and PFHXS.

These are the MCLs as the denominators and for the concentration.

So you add them together and you have to be less than one.

So that's how it works.

So we'll talk about prevention.

Let's talk about the steps that we took in 2012.

We talked a lot about the decision for the community to go with GAC.

So again, currently in the south of the manufacturing plant, we have eight contractors with granular activated carbon and granular activated carbon is one of the best management techniques available to remove PFAS compounds.

It doesn't remove all of them, but it removes the majority.

And so just the details.

Currently we have six now at observatory where we had two at one point.

and then one at North, two smaller contactors at Crozet, which will soon be four.

And then we have two contactors at Scottsville.

We'll have an ongoing project now to put a AGAC contactor at Red Hill.

So the PFAS compliance timeline.

So

Our EPA rules require initial quarterly monitoring must be conducted at all entry points in the distributions into the distribution system by 2027.

So believe it or not, there are water utilities in this country that have not yet sampled for PFAS.

So they're required to at least do quarterly sampling by 2027.

Starting in 2027,

They are required to monitor the reports in the CCR.

That's Lauren's staff and Quinn's staff makes the consumer confidence reports when you report that information anyway.

And the compliance with new regulation, it is a running annual average, which I'll get into here in a minute, with a quarterly compliance sample start in 2028 for a running annual average reporting in 2029.

So let's move to the next page.

So this is how the calculations are

Done.

So if the PFAS concentration is less than the MCL,

And zero is used for the running annual average calculation.

I mean, that's a big deal here.

So in quarter one, in this example, we had a people concentration of two, three, quarter three was five and quarter four was two.

So running annual average calculation would be zero, zero, five and zero because the MCL is four.

That is how EPA has required us to calculate the running annual average.

So the EPA estimates that over many years the PFAS MCL can prevent PFAS exposure in drinking water for approximately 100 million people, prevent thousands of deaths, and reduce tens of thousands of PFAS attributable illnesses.

That's from the EPA's website.

And I would be remiss to not mention that the American Water Works Association and the American Metropolitan Water Agency has filed a petition to appeal or repeal the MCO goals that were established by EPA.

So there are currently four class action lawsuits, 3M, DuPont, Tyco, and BASF.

BASF was just announced last week, I guess two weeks ago now.

The next slide, please.

Payments made to each class member who has not excluded itself or we have not excluded ourselves.

We are in the class action lawsuit.

It will be based on allocation tables.

Detailed in the estimated allocation range tables that have been provided for DuPont and DAS, DuPont and 3M, the Tyco and DASF tables have not been released yet.

The allocation will be collected on factors such as what it would take to design a treatment system and the volume of water and the debris.

from a concentration.

So the next slide.

We've all seen this before.

This is an estimate of the money that we would receive based on the concentration of 3M and 2.7.

So roughly a million dollars.

The settlement tables have not yet been made available yet for TICO and BASF.

And on the earlier slides, the TICO and BASF class action amounts were lower than 3M and 2.7.

And has that been no detection?

Because I think across the Commonwealth, there's great concern about what's really going on in the wells that you know, those of us and so I will send you separately a question of who's that testing person that will do your $395?

Well, I already tested through the Virginia Tech thing, but they don't do this yet.

And so hopefully they will.

There's a large backlog, obviously, with the UCMR5 and the requirements.

And then now with this class action lawsuit and people testing, we have two or three different labs that we use.

One of the things for EPA's budget is to really jam in a whole lot more funding to expand the testing capability.

It's been quite a discussion of late because you don't actually destroy PFAS necessarily.

It takes significantly high temperatures.

We talked about paralysis of the biosolids.

GAC outside.

We do not recycle.

So are we using recycled GAC?

Yes.

It can only be ours.

Part of the rules is Rivanna.

Originally, they said CROS, they had to stay in CROS, they had to stay in South.

It's Rivanna system GAC.

That's right.

So Gary and Lauren and I agreed that we

We would file, we get the awards, should we get any.

Part of the class action lawsuit is to be able to certify that we are the treatment provider for the city and the county and that they don't have any treatment costs.

And is there any legislation anyone knows about where they're going to actually eliminate the manufacture of all these chemicals?

It's coming.

They've said that for sure.

Yeah.

But they always run and hide when a lot of people fuss at them about we'll stop production for God's sake first before we do anything else.

And that's the legislative thing.

So we all need to write to our Congress people and say, turn off the busset, folks, or do you expect us to do all this work?

All right.

Thank you, Dave.

Thanks, Dave.

All right.

No, sir.

But we'll have one next month.

OK. Can I have a motion and a second to adjourn?

So moved.

We're adjourned.

And a second.

All in favor?

Aye.

OK. Meeting adjourned.

Second.