This post has been updated

Talk about a news dump, huh?

A press release from Mayor Vince Gray’s office this afternoon said that City Administrator Allen Lew “dismissed” Christophe Tulou, the director of the D.C. Department of Environment. No reasons were cited for the dismissal.

“Mayor Gray and I thank Christophe for his service,” said Lew in a statement. “We will immediately commence a search for a strong, innovative leader of this vital agency to continue Mayor Gray’s Sustainable DC Initiative to transform the nation’s capital into the healthiest, greenest, most livable city in the world.”

Tulou was first hired by Mayor Adrian Fenty, and kept on after Gray’s 2010 victory. Keith Anderson, DDOE’s chief of staff, was appointed interim director of the agency, effective immediately.

The news certainly is sudden—so sudden, it seems, that Tulou’s bio was scrubbed off of the DDOE website—and removes the man responsible for Gray’s ambitious 20-year sustainability plan. We’ll have more once we get it, including why it happened. The Washington Business Journal’s Michael Neibaeur teases out why: “a fairly serious breach of protocol.”

UPDATE, 3:40 p.m.: Though his official bio was taken down, it’s still floating around on the Internet. So if you needed to know what Tulou did before coming to work for Gray, it’s below:

Prior to his position at DDOE, Director Tulou served as principal of Christophe Tulou Associates, an organization that advised clients on the implications and opportunities at the intersection of global change and public policy. There, he co-directed the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment/Ceres Resilient Coasts Initiative, a ground-breaking collaboration of private, public, scientific and nonprofit-sector leaders tasked with developing and implementing a “blueprint” to make coastal communities more resilient to existing hazards and avert the worst consequences of climate change.

In 2003, Director Tulou founded the non-profit Center for Sea Change to advance reform of US ocean laws and policies. Prior to that, as Executive Director of the Pew Oceans Commission, he guided a three-year, $6 million initiative to develop policies to restore and protect living marine resources in US waters, which culminated in publication of “America’s Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change.”

Between 1993 and 1998, Director Tulou served as cabinet secretary for Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, the state’s primary environmental protection, public lands preservation, and natural resources conservation agency. He spent over a decade working for the US Congress, serving in several capacities, including staff director to a subcommittee of the US House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs.

Director Tulou earned a bachelor’s of science degree from the College of William and Mary and two master’s degrees – one in Zoology and the other in Marine Affairs – from the University of Rhode Island. He also earned a law degree from Georgetown University. He is a member of the Virginia and District of Columbia Bars.

UPDATE, 4:00 p.m.: We’ve apparently got a rogue tweeter at the Department of Environment!

That was deleted shortly thereafter and followed up by an apology. Hey, we’ve all fired off a mis-tweet at some point in our lives.

UPDATE, 5:00 p.m.: The Post’s Mike DeBonis gets the details of the firing:

Two officials with knowledge of the firing said Gray and Lew were increasingly dismayed with Tulou acting without their knowledge or input.

One incident, one official said, concerned efforts by city agencies to seek a waiver from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and other parties allowing it to test “low-impact development” as a substitute for expensive tunnelling to prevent sewage from draining into the Potomac and Anacostia rivers.

According to the official, Tulou approached the EPA without Lew’s or Gray’s knowledge to discuss seeking the waiver to a 2003 court-enforced consent decree — something Gray has publicly endorsed but has received opposition from several environmental groups.