Richmond lifts boil-water advisory after 2 days

On Thursday afternoon, Richmond Mayor Danny Avula announced that the Virginia Department of Health has lifted the city’s boil-water advisory in place over the past two days in large parts of Richmond.

This was the city’s second boil-water advisory this year, following a much more severe water outage in January that caused most of the city’s 230,000 residents to lose all water for about six days, as well as closing down schools, doctors’ offices, restaurants and other businesses. This time, most residents in the affected areas maintained enough water pressure to flush toilets and run showers, but tap water was not considered safe to consume without boiling.

Just after midnight Tuesday, the city’s water treatment plant experienced an operational hiccup that clogged some of the plant’s filters. Tuesday morning, the water system had been restored to full production, but reclogged roughly an hour later. This led to the city’s boil-water announcement at 11:30 a.m. Tuesday for a wide swath of neighborhoods from the city’s West End to the downtown State Capitol grounds, as well as North Side neighborhoods. Later Tuesday, the city placed some communities on the South Side under the advisory.

In the early hours of Tuesday, the Richmond Department of Public Utilities contacted officials in Henrico, Hanover and Chesterfield counties, which are customers of the city’s water system, and advised them about the clog in the Ginter Park water tank. Chesterfield and Henrico temporarily disconnected from the water system, they announced Tuesday.

Some residents who had signed up for text alerts for emergencies facing the city complained that they did not receive a message Tuesday about the advisory, and the mayor said that he would investigate.

On Thursday at 2:30 p.m., the city announced that VDH had tested two sets of water samples, and both came back negative for contaminants, allowing the health department to lift the boil-water advisory. Residents and businesses can safely resume using tap water, the city’s announcement said.

Thursday evening, the city said that the clogged filters were caused by “maintenance not occurring in a timely fashion” on plate settlers in sedimentation basins, which caused a buildup of alum sludge, which was then released into the city’s water supply. That, along with “poor raw water quality coming into the system,” caused several filters to clog. Officials say that plate settlers in the water system will be cleaned on a “routine, recurring schedule” and will be included in regular status update reports.

“I’m deeply grateful to the residents and businesses for enduring this unexpected boil-water advisory,” Avula said in a statement. “Residents and businesses expect better, and I am as committed as ever to finding the problems and fixing them. Doing this work requires being honest about what’s working and what’s not and I pledge my ongoing commitment to doing just that.”

The situation was familiar to Richmonders who lived through the Jan. 6 water crisis, when a power failure caused an electrical malfunction at the water treatment facility and flooding. In April, a state report called the crisis “completely avoidable.”

Avula, who took office Jan. 1, was faced with the emergency five days into his four-year term, and the VDH report said that the city’s Department of Public Utilities erred when it was operating in a “winter mode” where the plant relies solely on overhead main power during the winter months, as well as not maintaining backup systems and featuring poor communication between DPU leadership, City Hall and the counties affected by the outage.

April Bingham, director of public utilities for Richmond during the crisis, first resigned and later retracted her resignation, and she was subsequently fired. Bingham was replaced by Scott Morris, who was formerly the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s director of water.