Henrico officials lift boil water advisory

Henrico County officials have lifted the county’s boil water advisory after nearly three days.

The end of the advisory came Saturday just after 11:30 a.m., after the second of two bacteriological tests conducted at seven different locations within the county’s water system – six in Eastern Henrico and one in the West End – came back clean.

All county residents now should have running water and can drink it and use it for cooking without boiling it. Customers may want to flush their faucets to remove trapped air and particles, discard any leftover ice, clean their ice-makers and replace water treatment filter cartridges, according to Virginia Department of Health guidance.

“These results confirm that Henrico County’s water is clean and safe for consumption and use,” Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas said during a noon press conference at the Fairfield Area Library. “We understand he inconvenience frustration concern and fear that you faced. As a county we must do better, and we will do better. That’s my commitment to you and it’s shared by everyone from our board of supervisors to our staff.”

Vithoulkas promised that the county would employ a third-party company with expertise in utility to review the county's response and provide analysis about how it can improve.

"We will begin our own analysis on Monday of what happened on our end in our county and what we can do from an infrastructure standpoint to increase resiliency in the eastern portion of the county," Vithoulkas said.

Residents may notice that their water is slightly cloudy or has a smell of chlorine; county officials said those are normal and not a reason for concern.

Timeline of Henrico water crisis

In order for the advisory to be lifted, the county’s water had to pass a chlorine test, which it did late Thursday, and two separate bacteriological tests conducted 16 hours apart (one Thursday and the second Friday at 10 a.m.). Results from the latter two tests each took 24 hours to return.

A boil water advisory had been established Wednesday afternoon by the Virginia Department of Health for a portion of Eastern Henrico whose water comes from the city of Richmond, since the city’s water supply was just beginning to come back online after an outage of several days.

But out of precaution, county officials extended the advisory to all Henrico water customers, since it couldn’t guarantee that potentially contaminated water would not travel to other parts of the county’s water system. The risk to residents in most of the West End, however, was very minimal.

At the height of the water crisis earlier this week, about 24,000 Henrico water customers in Eastern and Northern Henrico – those served through the city’s water supply – were without water, following an outage at Richmond’s water treatment facility Monday that also cut water to city customers.

Initially, Henrico officials attempted to push water from the county’s water treatment facility in the West End through its water system to reach the affected customers in Eastern and Northern Henrico.

Their efforts were successful for a period of time, even though many customers had reduced water pressure, but then a water main break in Sandston Monday night effectively created a leak in the system, sending water flowing back through open valves toward the city and cutting Eastern and Northern Henrico customers off. 

County officials spent more than 24 hours – into Wednesday morning – closing valves to prevent the county’s water from backflowing into Richmond and other parts of Henrico so that the system could gradually fill with the county’s water again.

Shortly thereafter, the city’s water treatment facility began slowly returning to a functional state, and by Thursday, nearly all county residents who had been affected were beginning to see at least some water service restored. That service returned essentially to full strength countywide Friday.

With water restored, Henrico officials ended their free water distribution efforts Friday at 8 p.m. at the six locations that had been providing it this week. At the same time, they also closed the facilities that had been offering free shower opportunities for residents.

According to a social media post from Brookland District Supervisor Dan Schmitt Saturday morning, the county distributed more than 140,000 cases of bottled water during the week and more than 120,000 gallons of potable water from tanker trucks. County officials also answered more than 7,000 calls through their 24-hour call center hotline, which now has closed with the end of the boil water advisory.

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