Residents of Richmond, Virginia can safely drink the city’s water again after a city-wide boil water advisory was lifted late Thursday. It’s the third significant failure to impact the city’s drinking water this year.
The first-year Mayor Danny Avula announced at 2:30 pm that the Virginia Department of Health had successfully treated the contaminated water and that negative results from required compliance samples would allow officials to remove the advisory effective immediately.
“I’m deeply grateful to the residents and businesses for enduring this unexpected boil water advisory,” Avula said. “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.”
“Sorry, we’re closed” read business signs throughout the region this week as officials attempted to diagnose and then treat the city’s water supply after a sudden drop in water pressure produced by samples from the Ginter Park Tank led to emergency conservation measures and a boil advisory. Residents in numerous neighborhoods across the city were affected, with businesses in the Fan, Jackson Ward, Carytown, Oregon Hill, and parts of Southside Richmond being forced to close due to water issues.
The chaos began early Tuesday morning after an operational failure led to low or no pressure throughout the system. Richmond officials initially announced on Tuesday that they were addressing issues associated with “high turbidity” (murky or cloudy water) but that no further precautions were necessary. That directive had changed by the afternoon when city officials instituted a boil water advisory.
WTVR in Richmond reported that a May 12 maintenance request noted that plate settlers, which are filters used to remove sludge, needed to be cleaned. The engineering expert Joel Paulsen explained that, if the settlers are not cleaned, sediment overwhelms the system and clogs the filters, which is exactly what happened earlier this week.
The Department of Public Utilities (DPU) spokeswoman Rhonda Johnson said officials were focused on providing recovery efforts and that an investigation into the cause of the failure would begin once the situation was addressed.
“It really sounds like the plates themselves failed in this case, because they weren’t cleaned in a timely enough fashion,” said Paulsen.
In Richmond, the dirty water has renewed criticism of the Trump administration’s decision in April to cancel a $12 million FEMA grant intended to support Richmond’s aging infrastructure. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) called the administration’s decision to cut grant funding “the kind of penny-wise pound-foolishness that makes me crazy.”
“We have aging water and sewer systems all over Virginia,” Warner added. “If officials don’t invest in upgrading those systems, this kind of problem is going to happen everywhere around the commonwealth.”
But a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Public Utilities downplayed the cancelled funds, noting that the grant, approved in 2023, would not have addressed the problems this week. In its decision to revoke funding, the Trump administration deemed the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program as nothing more than “wasteful and ineffective” spending based on “political agendas.”
Though the water failures have forced some to question Avula’s performance as mayor so far, Reva Trammell, a Richmond city council member, wondered whether former mayor Levar Stoney, who is running for lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket, should have done more to address the city’s water infrastructure with the $155 million federal Covid-19 emergency aid package Richmond received between 2017 and 2024.
Stoney pushed back on the suggestion Wednesday, stating by phone that he couldn’t recall “any sort of document coming across my desk as mayor speaking directly to this grant.” Richmond’s water facility, which can treat more than 100 million gallons per day, supplies water to parts of neighboring counties such as Henrico, Chesterfield, Hanover, and Goochland.
“I put forward eight budgets,” Stoney said in a statement. “Seven of those budgets had adjustments to the water utility rate. By the time I left office, I saw a 21% increase in the rate. Those dollars went into investments in maintenance and capital upgrades. But we can’t burden our ratepayers with fixing a 100-year-old system alone. We need federal and state partners to make investments.”
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Attempts to access the grant online and learn whether the funding would have addressed water infrastructure efforts were unsuccessful after the Trump administration removed the site. The city’s boil advisory, which affected schools, restaurants, and civilian housing, was lifted Thursday afternoon.
Avula said on Friday morning that “delayed maintenance” of the sedimentation basins in the city’s water treatment plant was to blame for the facility’s failure.
In January, Richmond was without water for days after a blizzard caused distribution outages throughout the city. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) activated the National Guard to address the situation as residents in Central Virginia scrambled to find clean drinking water. Government officials were criticized at the time for failing to alert the public in a timely manner, an issue that reared its head again during this week’s advisory.
