An Unsettling Start To The New Year

Two Crises On Two Different Coasts Reveal The Delicate State Of Our Infrastructure & Why Our Communication & Emergency Plans Are Insufficient

Photo by Joe Pregadio on Unsplash

Suzanne and I had hoped to start the year on a lighter note, but two different crises in our country—one in Richmond, Virginia, where she lives, and one in Los Angeles, California, where I live—offer a picture worth talking about.

Our hearts are with everyone who has been impacted. It’s scary, inconvenient, and challenging when you don’t have running water at home. It’s terrifying to flee from a wildfire and unimaginable to lose your home and everything in it. These kinds of events impact communities for years afterward and shut down schools, business, and more.

Nature is much more powerful than humans. Period.

That being said, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. When it comes to environmental issues from pollution to infrastructure, it’s so much easier to create and test emergency plans to help prevent disasters than to deal with them once they are already at your door.

Of course, we can’t plan for everything, but if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that we need to spend more time preparing for a changing world. We’ve got stronger, more unpredictable storms, wilder fires, unexpected weather events, more droughts, and more rain in more unlikely places. Meanwhile, most water systems in this country are 100 years old. Out infrastructure is outdated.

On both coasts, in two different disasters, people rely on their elected officials and city governments for information and guidance. But increasingly, people are upset with leadership and feel confused or out of the loop when it comes to emergency communication.

We have to do better.

I don’t think enough leaders are talking to the people. I’ve learned a lot about water issues just by talking to the people dealing with them. At every town hall I’ve attended, people ask good questions and have good instincts about solutions.

If more smart, empathetic people participated in local government and ran for office, I think we would be much further along in solving many of our most pressing issues.

Call It A Crisis, Richmond

Community members and business owners woke up to another morning with dry taps across many neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday, January 8. We still don’t know how many people have been impacted by the outage, but city officials continue to call it a “boil water advisory.”

Suzanne said it best here. Call it a crisis. Call it a water outage. Call it a huge misstep and inconvenience for everyone in Richmond. No one asks for their public utilities to suddenly stop working, and especially not the water. It’s not just for drinking and bathing. It’s what you use to make your morning coffee and oatmeal. It’s how you wash your dishes and flush your toilets. You need water to tackle those piles of laundry. Water fuels our lives in so many ways, and many people don’t realize how precious it is, until they lose access to it.

City officials say a power outage triggered the water issues. Winter weather in the South has certainly impacted antiquated and fragile water infrastructure before. We covered the crisis in Texas back in 2021 and subfreezing temps during the holidays of 2022 that also stifled water systems.

But most cities think it’s not gonna happen to them?! Let these events be a wake up call to everyone—not just those places directly impacted.

What’s most upsetting about the Richmond water crisis is that I imagine it was largely preventable. The state is now investigating backup failures and emergency preparedness and response plans as regulators try to figure out what led to these issues, according to local reporting.

ICYMI: A winter storm knocked out power to the local water plant at about 6:50 a.m. on Monday morning. Power was restored a few hours later.

Backup power devices were on hand, but they malfunctioned, and a room containing electronic equipment flooded, according to city officials. Unfortunately, the city didn’t inform residents about any of these issues until 5PM, when taps throughout the city were either dry or at a tiny dribble.

Panic buying of bottled water ensued, along with a string of questions to the city of Richmond’s social media account:

• How do Richmonders get alerts about emergency situations like the water issue?

• Residents have a lot of questions and no one seems to know anything. Where is more communication?

• I first find out about this a day late? Why wasn’t an “amber alert” like notice sent to our phones?

• Why did y'all wait 7 hours to warn us? How long did you know about the potential for a break in the system?

Newly elected Mayor Dr. Danny Avula initially told the public that water could be restored by 10 p.m. Monday night, but that didn't happen.

Then the city posted on Tuesday that water production had been restored and told residents that it would take several hours for pressure to build up. By Wednesday afternoon, businesses were still closed, and many parts of the city were still without any water. The city remains under a boil water advisory.

While water distribution centers have been set up but with limited hours and limited resources.

I’m not here to point fingers at any one person, and I want to acknowledge that behind the scenes a lot of water professionals and support staff are working around the clock to help get this system back online. It’s hard work!

Communications Is Key To Prevent Chaos

Let’s discuss how utilities can become better communicators, because Richmond is not alone in its communication failure. It’s a problem everywhere.

There’s a white paper called Communications & Water Management. Shout out to the expert contributors: Stephanie Corso, CEO at Rogue Water; Tom Freyberg, Environmental Journalist & GM of Atlantean Media; John Gonzalez, Communications and Social Media at Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD); and Paul Davison, CEO at Proteus Communications Group.

In the first section, we have some amazing advice: Trust is a long-game. Yes!! The encouragement is for utilities to shift from transactional communications to relationship building.

“Historically, water utilities have been a silent industry, doing their work under the radar to deliver water and wastewater services,” Stephanie Corso writes.

She goes on to explain how most water utilities operate on a deficit of trust with their customers.

“The problem with a trust deficit in the utility-customer relationship is it makes it difficult for utilities and their communities to take action on today’s water challenges,” she writes. “As a water utility, you need support from the people you serve to secure funding, approve operational changes and new infrastructure, and influence sustainable behaviors in the face of environmental and water-related challenges.”

The solution she presents is to build a “trust bank” by putting small, meaningful deposits in more often.

“Utilities need to prioritize and devote more time to non-transactional communications with their customers over the long term,” she writes. “You can do this by building awareness about what your organization does, sharing stories of staff and community heroes, and connecting with people in a genuine, empathetic, and honest way, in person and online.”

She also discusses the importance of transparency when it comes to making mistakes.

“Transparency is also reflected in an organization’s willingness to acknowledge and admit mistakes, and how available it is to respond to customer conversations, questions, and concerns through different online and face-to-face channels,” she writes.

In Richmond, acknowledging people’s pain would have gone a long way in beginning to build a relationship with residents.

John Gonzalez and his incredible work in social media for Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD)’s Twitter account is another one to watch.

He talks about the success of that account as “the result of years of building trust internally and externally so that the communications team has the freedom to experiment with content and use social media channels as they’re meant to be used: with humor, humility, and humanity.”

One of his guiding priniciples is to be “responsive and transparent.”

“Interestingly, we found the comment sections of our local newspaper’s online articles proved a good channel to demonstrate our responsiveness and transparency with customers,” he writes. “We began to actively respond to media requests and we watched for online articles where we could answer questions, provide more detail and context, clarify misunderstandings, and correct information. The tone of the comment sections and news articles began to change, and we noticed less hostility in the conversations.”

These are just a few examples of how water utilities can work on their communication plans and build trust within their communities. Read the full report here.

Los Angeles is Burning

The National Weather Service issued a Red Flag Warning in Southern California earlier this week, meaning that a combination of strong winds, low relative humidity, and warm temperatures can contribute to extreme fire behavior.

The region has been experiencing drought conditions, with close to zero rainfall since July.

Wildfires began breaking out in Southern California Tuesday morning as a life-threatening, widespread windstorm that could be one of the most destructive to hit the region in over a decade roars to life and creates extremely dangerous fire weather conditions.

~as reported at CNN.com

As the wildfires raged, a second issue erupted. The crews working to put out the fires found that the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had little to no water, according to reporting in the LA Times.

By 3 a.m. Wednesday, all water storage tanks in the Palisades area “went dry,” diminishing the flow of water from hydrants in higher elevations, said Janisse Quiñones, chief executive and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the city’s utility.

It brings up another issue—chronic under-investment in public infrastructure. In addition, a 2022 audit showed that utilities aren’t doing enough to prevent fires.

And wildfires aren’t just destructive to people’s homes and livelihoods and put firefighters and other emergency workers at risk of serious injury or death. They also draw on huge amounts of water resources and impact the future quality of drinking water.

Water supplies can be adversely affected during the active burning of a wildfire and for years afterwards. As fires burn, ash and contaminants associated with ash settle on streams, lakes and water reservoirs.

Due to the unpredictable nature of wildfires, drinking-water utilities face considerable challenges to develop plans and strategies for managing floods and treating polluted water. Information and tools are needed to help water storage and treatment managers better prepare for wildfire impacts.

Again, we have to keep pushing from a prevention standpoint. Utilities are required to prepare wildfire mitigation plans that describe what they are doing to prevent, combat and respond to wildfires, but a state audit found that some of the wildfire plans were “seriously deficient” and concluded that state officials are failing to hold California’s electric utilities accountable for preventing fires caused by their equipment.

The report to the California Legislature found that the new Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety approved utility companies’ wildfire prevention plans even when they were “seriously deficient.”

Communication is also a big issue when it comes to wildfires. The LA Times reported challenges that county officials in California encountered when trying to send evacuation alerts in 2020. Some messages were delivered to too many people, others to too few, and still others failed to send at all.

All the wildfires burning are at zero percent containment, according to the Dept. of Forestry and Fire Protection. This story is serious and ongoing.

I know in the days to come there will be a lot of discourse. Now is not the time to fight against one another; it’s a time to come together for a greater good. Sharing information and working together is our only hope.

The solution lies with people in their communities, and at the local and state level, working for change throughout our country. We don’t need to wait for anyone else to come save us. We can start small, start in our neighborhoods, and work to make significant changes that will impact generations to come.

Check on your neighbors, start going to city council meetings, use your voice to speak up about these issues and more. The more that citizens drive the conversation locally, the more elected leaders will know where to put more resources.

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Let me know in the comments what ideas you have for better communication and crisis prevention.