I want to start this message with a big thank you to the community. I don’t think anyone expected to start their Mother’s Day with an emergency directive to cut water use by 30%. And while I think we did a good job of communicating, unless you where at the Water Treatment Plant, looking at the disaster there, you all had to take it a bit on faith that we were serious about the need for reductions and we were going to get the problem fixed. The community stepped up with an almost exactly on point 30% reduction (nearly 4.2 million gallons). I can’t thank you all enough. This is also a key theme of our vision of a City government that is trusted and works in true partnership with the community. It is in this partnership that we will reach true excellence. A couple things on that. First, we have a lot of work to do. We know we are not where we need to be. But we are committed to getting there. We will continue to focus on building the team that will be able to achieve greatness. Second, we will make mistakes. We are not perfect and given where we are coming from, I’m very pleased with the ground we’ve already covered. That said, we have miles to go.

Now, some thank-you's for the team. First, thank you to Public Works Director Kyle Ochenduszko for his outstanding leadership. He won’t want me focusing on this, as he would like all the focus on the team. But it must be said, his leadership set the example for all who responded to this incident. Secondly, thank you to the entire Public Works team. We do not have a lot of staff, so we have to rely on the entire team for an incident of the magnitude, not matter their normal job. They all stepped up to the challenge, including for many, 20+ hour workdays until the problem resolved. This week marks National Public Works Week highlighting how important these individuals are to everyday life.

I would also like to thank the Fire Department who were there from the beginning. We asked them to act as our team safety officers, given the dangerous work occurring in confined spaces. They were creative and dedicated in their work and helped prevent any employees from being injured. Additionally, they provided assistance with coordinating with the Office of Emergency Services, as well as providing leadership support in the Emergency Operations Center.

A special Mother's Day thank you to our communications team, several of whom are mothers who left their celebrations in order to ensure our community was informed.

I want to thank the City of Vallejo. The City of Vallejo and the City of Benicia have an especially close relationship when it comes to the water departments. When Vallejo was asked for support, they sent nearly their entire team to come and assist…and stayed to help for the duration of the event. As Director Ochenduszko put it so clearly, “it’s like when your neighbor has a family emergency. You don’t ask, you just bring them a casserole.” Thank you to our friends in Vallejo.

Finally, I want to thank some of our contractors. Kerex Engineering Incorporated has helped us on several projects recently and dropped their current projects to come to our assistance. I would also like to thank Team Industrial Services and Coastland for stepping up to assist us without delay. Those relationships are so important to us, and we will be sending all three of them more formal thanks from City Council in the near future.

While this was certainly not an incident we hoped to have to deal with, it has served to make us stronger as a team. We will be conducting a compete After Action Review (AAR) which will include a forensic examination of what caused this event. One of the other things we will be doing is looking hard at our most critical infrastructure. That is, most of our infrastructure (pipes, pumps, valves, etc.) that we think of as ‘critical’, if it fails, we generally have time to work the problem, create workarounds, repair, etc. A much smaller amount of infrastructure, structure that is so critical that if it fails, we would only have hours before reaching critical failure (such as this pipe/backwash system) need to be more clearly identified and redundancy’s and immediate action plans created to ensure we do not find ourselves in this position again. We are committed to that work.

Thank you for your interest in the City of Benicia This Week!