This past Monday night, a car struck a utility pole at Idlewood and S. Harrison (Was the car stolen or was the driver drunk? Where is the police report and followup?), resulting in power outages in the neighborhood and other parts of the City, including at the City’s Byrd Park water pumping station. Unfortunately, this did impact the utility’s water pressure in many areas of the city, effecting residents and businesses (restaurants open at this time did have to shoo patrons out and close early).
Thankfully, the City ‘s auxiliary (diesel, I presume) generator at the water pumping station kicked in (unlike January 2025), and the water pressure issues slowly ameliorated. Dominion was able to return power relatively quickly, although street lights in Oregon Hill were still off as of last night.
It’s understandable that things happen- at one point recently, four eastbound lanes on the Downtown Expressway were closed following two vehicle crashes. But there’s a lot here that is still cause for concern.
The City got incredibly lucky in that this happened on a Monday night after a busy weekend- most people were at home, not at restaurants or other public places -the economic and social impact could have been much larger. The communication was also really off- the manager of the establishment that I was visiting during the crisis stated it was getting more timely information from social media sites like Reddit, which was interesting, given that the City of Richmond’s Office of Emergency Management announced it was activating its Emergency Operations Center (EOC) for the next day, Election Day.
While the outage probably did not directly affect Tuesday’s Election Day’s ultimate outcomes, the polling location at Clark Springs Elementary School may have seen some reduced voting due to the closure of nearby streets for repair crews. What if the races and decisions on the ballot had more close and competitive? It did not help that other City polling stations had been receiving shooting threats. What if this had been a serious attempt at interfering with the election?
The real question is how the City is handling things in the long term after the much bigger, potentially catastrophic January 2025 crisis. No matter how you look at this, it is remarkable that City’s utility infrastructure is still so vulnerable to one, 1-car accident (This could have resulted from a minor thunder storm!). Have Richmond leaders really learned lessons about the importance of maintenance and disaster recovery, even as they obnoxiously push for more development and growth?
Citizens have asked repeatedly for more backup systems, ones that include renewable energy, independent of increasingly expensive diesel fuel. What has been done in this regard? At this point, citizens are still left wondering if muni-solar will ever be allowed to happen, or will it continue be drowned by Richmond’s ‘murky water’ (“He went on to say “a lot of larger forces at play” have wanted to “kill” the project, from lobbying efforts to individual officials to “senior parts” of the city’s government.”)
After all, citizens see what other city governments are doing to make their citizens safer and better served…we know what is possible… Cities across the United States are increasingly pairing solar energy with battery storage and microgrids to make municipal utilities and critical infrastructure more resilient against power outages and extreme weather..
From previous editorial:
IT’S EXTREMELY IMPORTANT THAT CITIZENS KEEP THE PRESSURE ON GOING FORWARD. Everything should be on the table for close examination, not just technical matters, but City priorities, budgeting, personnel, contracts, ACCOUNTABILITY. Some right-wingers want to blame one administrator and DEI policies, which is dumb, given the breadth of the matter. Officials and reporters may purposely dive into the technical minutia, and some of that is absolutely necessary, but as with the schools, as with the homeless, as with far too many other issues, citizens are wise to keep the bigger picture in mind – understanding that our government is putting PRIVATE, corporate priorities over PUBLIC, citizen priorities. Will new Richmond leadership change the pattern? There are ways to do this, there are even ways to codify this…so…
KEEP THE PRESSURE ON (and watch the money!).
And to look at the bigger picture of American politics today…will there be a change in national priorities now that the Democrats have won legislative superiority? What will they do to challenge fossil fuel fascism? Or will they remain part of it?