Henrico officials hire 2 firms to analyze county’s water crisis management
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Henrico County officials have hired two outside firms to analyze the county’s response to the water crisis that impacted about 24,000 county water customers last week.
Whitman Requardt & Associates and Aqua Law will conduct analyses of the timeline of events that occurred and will evaluate the county’s infrastructure and water service agreements that it has with other localities, Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas said during a Henrico Board of Supervisors meeting Jan. 14. The firms also will provide recommendations about how Henrico can make its water system more resilient, particularly in Eastern Henrico, he said.
Separately, the county will conduct an internal review and present its findings to the board of supervisors during a Feb. 11 meeting, according to Vithoulkas.
“These reports, I want to assure the residents of the county, and actions will be the first of many,” he said.
At its peak Jan. 7 and 8, the water outage affected about 24,000 county water customers in Eastern and Northern Henrico who typically are served by the city of Richmond’s water supply, which was cut by a power outage at the city’s plant Jan. 6.
“This issue, I want to underscore and perhaps double and triple underscore, was not of our creation,” Vithoulkas said.
County officials immediately attempted to switch those affected customers over to water from Henrico’s water treatment facility off Three Chopt Road, but “that proved extremely difficult because the system was simply not designed to do that,” Vithoulkas said.
Those efforts, which worked to an extent for several hours, were hampered when a water main broke in Sandston overnight Jan. 7, sending water flowing back toward the city and forcing county crews to scramble in an attempt to close dozens of valves (many of which hadn’t been turned in years).
An underlying question from many Henrico citizens during the past week, Vithoulkas said, has been how the county can become more reliant upon its own water system.
“This question, quite frankly, cannot be sufficiently answered in 30 days,” he said. “So we are going to take a little more time in getting that answered, but I think that 30-day review is going to give us an early indication as to how that may be possible.
It will take many years and millions of dollars to put into place all of the components necessary to make our system more resilient.”
During the water crisis, Henrico officials distributed more than 153,000 cases of water to residents, made 120,000 gallons of potable water available through 20 tanker trucks and answered almost 8,000 calls through their call center, Vithoulkas said.