Tuesday night, crews closed two large valves to attempt to push water from western Henrico to eastern Henrico. While this process did work, it proved insufficient to fix the issue.
Wednesday morning, crews blocked off any remaining interconnects that were leading to the City of Richmond water system. While Henrico’s access to city water was cut off efficiently on Monday, there were some valves that were not closed as there was no risk of any contaminated water coming into the Henrico water system from those valves. However, now that we are attempting to restore pressure in our own water system, we have been losing water through those valves into the city. As of this update, all of these valves have been fully closed.
Now that those valves are closed, Public Utilities crews are attempting to fill up the Laburnum/Azalea pressure zone. The county’s water system is divided into multiple pressure zones, and this zone was the most severely impacted by the City of Richmond shutoff and the water main break in Sandston yesterday. This zone is now being fed from the Greater Hermitage zone in western Henrico. The Greater Hermitage zone receives its water directly from Henrico’s Water Treatment Facility from a 42-inch pipe, keeping it well-supplied. We have opened all connecting lines from the Greater Hermitage zone into the Laburnum/Azalea zone.
Crews will be monitoring the pressure from different points as this process gets started to ensure things are operating as expected. Once the Laburnum/Azalea zone has sufficient water pressure, we will then be feeding from that zone into the Greater Eubank zone, which encompasses most of the Varina district.
To be clear, this part of the process may be lengthy. There is one 16-inch pipe that feeds between these two zones in the Henrico water system, and it will take time for all of the water to make its way through into the zone to come up to pressure.
Under normal circumstances, the Laburnum/Azalea and Greater Eubank zones are fed from the City of Richmond’s water treatment plant. There are large pipes that normally supply water to these zones, and Henrico supplements additional water to these zones every three days. However, there has never been a need to send this level of water from western Henrico to eastern Henrico. It will take time to make it all the way through our water system into the affected zones.
Crews are continuing to work around the clock to fully restore water service as quickly as possible. The county’s emergency operations center is active and moving resources around the county to meet as many needs as possible.
A new webpage is now live and will be updated when any new information is available. We will also keep it updated with the current resources of where to get water, our call center number (804-501-4275, option 2) and other resources as they are established.
