City officials have begun outlining their response plans for future emergencies, as they continue to address the effects of an outage that left residents without running water for nearly a week.

A Tuesday afternoon meeting of the Public Safety Standing Committee focused on a presentation by Stephen Willoughby, director of the Department of Emergency Communications, Preparedness & Response, exploring the city’s response to the crisis and the post-disaster recovery plan. 

Building a “culture of preparedness” was a major focus, and a goal Willoughby said the city had been working toward for years before the outage. The initiatives include assessing the city’s emergency management process through a third-party review, implementing hazard mitigation measures and evaluating other potential threats to the city.

Improvements to the city’s emergency response are now being guided in large part by Hagerty Consulting, an emergency management firm based in Illinois.

“It was important for me to bring in a third party to do a comprehensive analysis and plan for us,” Willoughby said, “make sure we’re implementing best practices as we go forward and make sure that we’re involving the community and that feedback in how we develop that plan.”

Alongside supporting staff in the city’s Emergency Operations Center, the firm is performing an assessment of the city’s response to the water crisis, identifying strengths and weaknesses, and will recommend actions to improve future actions.

Hagerty is also helping develop a disaster recovery plan that will serve as a general framework and guidance for future responses, a recovery action plan for the winter storm that led to the outage and a cost recovery plan to better assess damages, collect information on costs and seek reimbursement.

Last week, the city announced it had hired two companies: Hagerty and the infrastructure design firm HNTB. While HNTB will focus on investigating the power outage and its cause, Hagerty will assess the crisis response and its aftermath.

The Public Safety standing commitee meeting followed several days of actions by city officials focused on Richmond’s water operations, as criticism and other responses from authorities and officials over the crisis have continued.

The Virginia Department of Health filed a Notice of Alleged Violation for Richmond’s main treatment water plant last week, following an assessment by staff at the Office of Drinking Water weeks earlier that found issues in training and violations of state water laws and regulations.

“ODW asserts that the water crisis should never have happened and was completely avoidable,” the VDH report reads.

The city has 30 days to respond to the notice and provide information on staff training, plans to ensure backup power systems are functioning properly and other details.

Criticism of the city’s response to the crisis also came from city officials, as 8th District council member Reva Trammell objected to Willoughby’s belief that city employees responded well given the circumstances.

She pointed to communications with her constituents during the crisis as evidence of the city’s failure to properly notify residents of the outage, leaving them unprepared and unable to access necessary resources, with some still facing ongoing issues.

“You let our people down in the city of Richmond,” Trammell said. “This is the worst disaster I have ever seen in our city.”

The post-disaster recovery plan begins this week, according to Willoughby.