City acknowledges lack of communication to Southside residents who lost water on Wednesday night
Chief Administrative Officer Odie Donald II said the city’s internal communication protocols “were not fully followed” during a water outage on Richmond’s Southside late Wednesday.
Some residents of Stratford Hills were without water for about 18 hours as a result of the situation. DPU spokesperson Rhonda Johnson told The Richmonder that 100 customers were impacted.
Donald wrote an email Thursday afternoon to City Council, in part addressing the concerns of Councilor Sarah Abubaker (4th District), who represents the area.
“I was disappointed by the breakdown in communication from City administration — both to me as the elected representative for this district and more so, to residents,” Abubaker wrote in her weekly email to residents. “Timely, proactive communication during service disruptions is not optional. It is essential.”
The city’s first public communication about the outage came at noon on Thursday, four hours after Southampton Elementary School announced it would be closed for the day as a result of the situation.
Stratford Hills resident Katie Jenkins said she called DPU's emergency line on Thursday morning and was told the neighborhood's water was out, but never received any communication from the city.
"They were out there all night, and I'm appreciative of that," she said. "But if the school was notified, they should have at least put it on Facebook or social media, at a minimum.
"They could have got in front of this very easily."
Repair work had been taking place along Chippenham Parkway all week.
In its Thursday press release, the city attributed the issue to an “unplanned repair of a water valve in the late evening around 11 p.m. on Wednesday, February 18.”
Donald’s email said two valves were repaired in the area, the first without incident on Tuesday, and the second on Wednesday, which led to the issue.
Jenkins said she was particularly bothered that the press release only referred to residents experiencing "low pressure," not the outage that she said she and her neighbors experienced.
After the 2025 Richmond water crisis, the city paid an estimated $400,000 to an outside consulting firm to examine how it communicated to residents during that time, and offer recommendations to the city moving forward.
In Donald’s email to Council on Thursday, he said that notification to the public was delayed because “internal communication protocols were not fully followed.”
“In this incident, service repairs have been completed, and corrective steps are being implemented to strengthen both operational and communication procedures moving forward,” Donald wrote.
He listed four improvements that will be made:
- "Update mapping to clearly identify critical facilities (schools, hospitals, childcare centers, etc.) for proactive notification
- "Updated protocols will also provide a standard of key thresholds (e.g. extended water service interruptions, critical sites, etc.) to include the impacted elected official(s)
- "Require direct coordination with the DPU PIO and the Office of Strategic Communications when critical customers are impacted
- "Reinforce public notification protocols through additional staff training and job aids to ensure timely communication."
In an emailed statement Friday afternoon, Johnson said that DPU is "committed to improving our business process."
She wrote: "DPU remains focused on ensuring our systems remain operational and reducing the impacts to our customers. To ensure our system stays operational, repairs are needed and sometime these repairs don’t occur under optimum conditions or the perfect time.
"While this repair did not get completed as quickly as we would have liked, DPU crews stayed on site and made a lot of real-time decisions to ensure the repairs were completed safely and as quick as possible to restore services.
"We apologize for the inconveniences to the impacted customers and remain committed to improving our business process to minimize service interruptions while also keeping the public informed."
Contact Michael Phillips at mphillips@richmonder.org.