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Henrico water service restoration taking longer than anticipated; 'We're doing everything we can'

Water valve issues delay process; Henrico could eventually stop purchasing water from Richmond; Henrico NAACP expresses frustration with county's response

Henrico officials helped distribute water to citizens at the Eastern Henrico Government Center Jan. 7, 2024. (Courtesy Henrico County)

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The restoration of water service to Eastern and Northern Henrico residents and businesses – originally anticipated by Henrico officials sometime Tuesday afternoon – hadn’t yet occurred as of 11:30 p.m. because Henrico Public Utilities officials ran into unforeseen water valve issues as they attempted to re-energize the county’s water system. 

Henrico officials told the Citizen late Tuesday night that they anticipated water service would be restored sometime overnight or by Wednesday morning for those county residents impacted.

Thousands of water customers in the two regions have had low water pressure or no water at all since late Monday or early Tuesday. Henrico officials had switched those customers – who typically receive their water from the city of Richmond – over to Henrico’s water supply Monday afternoon, after learning that the city’s water treatment facility had lost power.

But then an overnight water main break Monday night into Tuesday morning near the Antioch Recreational Community Pool in Sandston cut the county’s supply to the region, sending officials scrambling to repair it. They were able to do so Tuesday afternoon but shortly thereafter realized that they would need to close or reverse a number of valves within the county’s water pipelines, to account for a new directional flow of water, before they could re-energize the system and restore service.

That process had proven to be a time-consuming one, Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas told the Citizen Tuesday as he sat in a pickup truck with Varina District Supervisor Tyrone Nelson just after 10 p.m. along Laburnum Avenue near the Henrico-Richmond line, where Public Utilities officials were attempting to close one of the two remaining valves they had identified as needing adjustment.

“In order to close the valve, you have to be very careful, go very slow,” Vithoulkas said “because you have water running through that pipe at a high velocity. So literally they’ll take a turn, stop, take a turn, stop, take a turn, stop, take a turn, stop. One they closed earlier took 19 turns, and it probably took 30 minutes to make those 19 turns. If you go too fast, you could actually have the pipe explode.”

By late Tuesday evening, many of the DPU employees working on the water system had been on the job for 14 or 15 hours Vithoulkas said, working in freezing temperatures for much of that time. Vithoulkas said he had been awake since 4 a.m.

“We’ve been working all day,” he said. “We’re doing everything that we can to restore water, and at the same time, we are working regionally to help everyone in the region.”

Said Nelson, whose own house lost water at 6 a.m.: “We want that water to come back on.”

The need to reverse numerous water valves in short order to allow for a flow of water from a new location (Henrico’s water treatment plant on Three Chopt Road) was a new challenge for Henrico officials, Vithoulkas said.

“We’re doing something we’ve never done before,” he said. “We’re literally sitting in front of the ‘Welcome to Henrico County’ sign. We’ve got crews out here kicking snow to try to find manholes, trying to open manholes that probably haven’t been opened in 10 years or more.”

Henrico officials distribute bottled water to county residents at the Eastern Henrico Recreation Center Jan. 7, 2024. (Courtesy Henrico County)

Could Henrico stop purchasing water from Richmond?

For years, all of Henrico County was served by the Richmond water treatment facility. But then in 2004 Henrico opened its own treatment facility at the intersection of Three Chopt and Gaskins roads to produce water for about two-thirds of the county’s customers (primarily in its western half). 

During Fiscal year 2023 (which ended June 30, 2023), the facility produced an average of about 23 million gallons of water per day for Henrico customers, while the city’s facility provided an average of about 11 million gallons per day to county customers.

Although Henrico’s facility is equipped to produce as many as 80 million gallons per day, county officials have maintained service agreements with the city for the purchase of some water that run through the mid-2030s, Vithoulkas said. In part, those agreements stemmed from the county’s recognition that the cost to purchase water for Eastern and Northern Henrico from the city might be less expensive than pumping it a number of miles from the county’s West End facility.

But, Vithoulkas told the Citizen Tuesday night, county officials will hold a debriefing session after they’ve restored water service, and many things could be on the table.

“Absolutely we’ll be looking at all of that as we go forward,” he said. “As we go forward, we are obviously going to look at how water is distributed through the county. One of the lessons for me is that we’ve done it a certain way for many many years, and is there something that we need to do differently?

“My early answer to that based on where we are now is, Yeah, we need to do something different. At some point. . . I think it’s time that the county just relies upon the county [for water] once we get past those contractual obligations.”

Just two months ago, Vithoulkas and other Henrico officials celebrated a long-anticipated water achievement: the substantial completion of the Virgil R. Hazelett Reservoir at Cobbs Creek in Cumberland County, a 1,117-acre site that will be able to hold nearly 15 billion gallons of water and provide all of Henrico with enough water for 100 years or more. The reservoir will permit Henrico to capture water upstream along the James, then release it as needed to be captured again downstream at the county’s treatment facility.

The reservoir, though, is not fully online yet and wouldn’t have factored into this week’s issues anyway, since the issue has been the delivery of water from treatment facilities to customers, not the availability of water from the river.

On Tuesday, Vithoulkas and other county officials held a press conference to update citizens about the water issue, during which they said they anticipated restoring service by Tuesday afternoon or early evening. They also announced that they’d declared a local state of emergency, allowing the county to purchase water and other supplies immediately, without having to go through the typical government purchasing procedures.

On Tuesday afternoon, county officials began offering free cases of bottled water to residents at the Eastern Henrico Government Center (3820 Nine Mile Road) and the Eastern Henrico Recreation Center (1440 North Laburnum Avenue), as well as potable water at both locations and at the Henrico Area Mental Health and Developmental Services East Center (3908 Nine Mile Road). Those efforts were continuing on a 24-hour basis until water service had been restored.

Officials also established a hotline for residents (804-501-4275, Option 2) to call with questions about water service.

Officials used a hose to fill a citizen's cooler and pitcher with potable water from a tanker truck at the Eastern Henrico Government Center Jan. 7, 2024. (Courtesy Henrico County)

Henrico NAACP expresses frustration, concern

But those efforts were not sufficient, according to the Henrico NAACP, which on Tuesday night unanimously passed an emergency resolution (see below) expressing “deep concern for yet another example of the racial disparity gap in Henrico County that seems to be historically rooted in disregard for equitable outcomes for the Black community and other vulnerable communities in the county.” 

In its resolution, the organization called the county’s response to the situation “insufficient to meet the scale of the crisis, with residents experiencing long delays, including over two-hour wait times on the designated hotline for water-related concerns.” 

It also called for an independent investigation into the Richmond water treatment facility’s operational failure and “the circumstances that led to Henrico County’s reliance on Richmond’s water supply rather than its own Henrico-operated treatment facilities.”

“The crisis has left many residents, particularly in African-American neighborhoods, without clean water, creating a public health emergency with racial disparities,” the organization wrote in a statement.

“This crisis has highlighted severe infrastructure failures that disproportionately affect Black communities in Henrico County,” Henrico NAACP President Monica Hutchinson said. “We demand immediate action, full transparency, and greater accountability in managing water resources.”

Told of the resolution, Nelson said that county officials had done everything within their power to address the issues as quickly as possible.

“I’m sorry that organizations feel outraged,” he told the Citizen. “We’re doing everything that we can. This is my first time in 13 years [in office] that we’ve ever dealt with something like this.

“We wholeheartedly believed that we could get [the water] back on this afternoon. I am sitting in a pickup truck with the county manager at 10:07 [p.m.] with Public Utilities workers outside working their butts off so that we can get this taken care of tonight. I want the water on as desperately as every other citizen that does not have water. Our staff, the workers who are part of DPU, some of these folks are past 12 hours, they’re on their second shifts, they’re giving everything they have.”


In addition to bottled water available at the Eastern Henrico Government Center, county officials were planning to distribute bottled water at the Sandston and Varina libraries Wednesday until 9 p.m.

Additionally, Sentara Health and Newviews Connects were planning a joint bottled water distribution event Wednesday from 10 a.m. to noon, or while supplies last, at the Sentara Community Care Center, 5116 Richmond Henrico Turnpike.