Henrico’s water treatment facility could be equipped to serve all of the county within 5-10 years ‘or sooner’
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Although it is contractually obligated to purchase an average of about 12 million gallons of water per day from the City of Richmond until midway through 2040, Henrico County should have the infrastructure in place to supply all county customers with water from its own treatment facility well before then, according to a top county official.
Even before last week’s water crisis, which began when the city’s water treatment facility suffered a power outage and then a flood that forced it offline for several days – cutting off water for about 24,000 of Henrico's 104,000 water customers (mostly those in Eastern and Northern Henrico County whose water comes from the city) – county officials had started making upgrades to Henrico’s water system, Henrico Public Utilities Director Bentley Chan told the Citizen.
The goal of those enhancements and future ones, he said, always has been to give Henrico a countywide backup option in the event something like last week’s incident ever occurred.
Tom Lappas, Citizen Publisher
“We have it in our long-range plans to build a large diameter transmission main from the west to the east to provide some of that water, as well as stations to move some of that water,” Chan told the Citizen. “We don’t believe it’s necessary to build a drinking water plant in the East End. What we would need is more like storage and pumping facilities. Work has already been planned, pieces of it have been implemented.
“Our original design, our strategic intent, was just to have resiliency for us and then the region. We’ve always thought that we would want the ability to serve ourselves and to have that added layer of resiliency and sustainability to our system.”
The county’s water treatment facility on Three Chopt Road near Gaskins Road has supplied water to Western Henrico and some other portions of the county since it opened in early 2004. (The county also sells some of its water to Hanover and Goochland counties; during Fiscal Year 2023, it was paid $1.5 million from Goochland and $23,000 from Hanover, Chan said.)
But customers in Eastern and Northern Henrico, although billed by the county, since then have continued to receive water that Henrico purchases each year from the city, as part of a 30-year-old agreement (see below).
During Fiscal Year 2023, which ended June 30 that year, Henrico spent about $12.9 million to purchase water from the city, Chan said.
Henrico’s water system, which during calendar year 2023 provided about 23 million gallons of water per day to county customers, was not originally designed to serve the entire county, according to Chan and Henrico County Manager John Vithoulkas. But eventually upgrading it to be able to do so has been a goal of county officials for years.
In order to make that happen, the county must install about 11 miles of 54- or 60-inch water transmission lines, generally along a northern, inverted-U arc from its water treatment facility on Three Chopt Road toward the Hanover County line and then southeast through Northern Henrico into Eastern Henrico, Chan said. Those larger lines will allow larger amounts of water to move quickly to those regions – something that wasn’t possible last week because the existing lines are too small to adequately supply county water to all of Henrico.
To effectively pump that water miles through the county’s system, several new pumping stations are necessary as well, Chan said, and a few already are in the works.
“We have several projects we are doing as part of development efforts in the eastern part of the county to put in water pumping and sewer pumping stations to provide more service,” Chan said, referencing a project at the White Oak Technology Park in Sandston and another at the intersection of I-295 and I-64 in Eastern Henrico, where a developer is planning a data center complex.
‘We know that it will be expensive’
In addition, Public Utilities officials are working with their counterparts in the Henrico Public Works department to upsize some existing water pipes as Public Works officials complete road projects, Chan said. For instance, a current Public Works project to widen Richmond-Henrico Turnpike will provide a chance for Chan’s department to replace existing 16-inch water pipes beneath the road with much larger ones that can carry more water, he said.
Chan couldn’t estimate how much it might cost the county to complete all necessary system upgrades to allow Henrico to pump its water countywide, but he said it wouldn’t be as costly as the $280 million the county spent building its Virgil R. Hazlett Reservoir at Cobbs Creek in Cumberland County, which will come online this year.
“But,” he said, “we know that it will be expensive to do all of it and move it up (chronologically) – and kind of move it up quickly. But we understand the need to do it, and we will leverage every resource.”
Chan is confident that the county will be able to identify the funding sources necessary to complete the projects quickly as possible. And, he said, most of the land through which the water transmission lines will run is publicly owned, so the county likely won’t have to purchase a significant amount of right-of-way from private landowners, a process that occasionally can become lengthy.
Before that process can begin, officials will need to solidify funding, design the scope of the project, then put it out for construction bids, select a bid and award it, Chan said.
Uncertainty about agreement with city
Although the project could be completed as soon as 2030 or thereabouts, the county may have to wait another decade beyond that time before using its own water to serve all county water customers.
The agreement signed by Hazelett (then Henrico County’s manager) and Richmond Mayor Leonidas Young in September 1994 obligating Henrico to purchase almost 12 million gallons of water per day from the city until July 1, 2040 doesn’t appear to offer any clear out-clauses to the county, and it’s unknown whether county officials would seek to end the agreement early even if they could. (Ending the contract beyond that date requires written notice of that intent five years in advance.)
Whether the county has any recourse for the failure of Richmond’s water treatment plant last week also remains unclear.
The Richmond facility lost power because of the winter storm that hit the region, then flooded after its system failed to automatically switch over to a secondary power source, a backup battery failed sooner than expected, two other backup batteries apparently were unavailable because they were out of service, and employees didn’t know how to manually close water valves to prevent the facility from flooding, according to city officials.
In addition, Henrico Citizen partner WTVR reported that the city knew as far back as 2012 that the plant’s electrical equipment was deteriorating and had “decreasing reliability” but that work to address some of those issues was happening only this week.
The 20-page agreement between Henrico and Richmond absolves both of them from liabilities related to number of scenarios: “acts of God, strikes, lockouts, acts of the public enemies, wars, blockades, insurrections, riots, epidemics, landslides, lightning, earthquakes, fires, storms, floods, washouts, arrests and restrains of rules and people, civil disturbances, explosions, breakage or accident to machinery or lines of pipe, the binding order of any court or governmental authority which has been resisted in good faith by all reasonable legal means, and an other cause. . . not reasonably within the control of the party claiming suspension.”
But it also says that neither locality will be absolved of liability “in the event of its concurring negligence or in the event of its failure to use due diligence to remedy the situation and to remove the cause in an adequate manner and with all reasonable dispatch.”
In addition, the agreement indicates that should any particular provision of the agreement become invalid or unenforceable, the rest of the agreement will continue unaffected, which suggests that the county would lack the ability to terminate the arrangement early.
Henrico officials are conducting a month-long internal review of last week’s water crisis and the county’s response to it and also have hired two firms – Whitman Requardt & Associates and Aqua Law – to conduct third-party reviews of the timeline of events that occurred and the county’s infrastructure and water service agreements with other localities.
County officials will present their internal review to the board of supervisors Feb. 11.
“I would say we will see what the next steps are after the after-action reports,” Chan told the Citizen.
