Hanover confirms local emergency after multiday water outage, pledges after-action review

Hanover County confirmed a local emergency on Jan. 7 after a failure at the City of Richmond water treatment plant cut supplies to parts of Hanover and neighboring jurisdictions, county officials said.

County Administrator John Badeski told the Board of Supervisors the outage began Monday morning when the Richmond plant flooded and experienced equipment and computer control failures; Hanover was notified at 2 p.m. that day and moved immediately to emergency operations. "I want to be very clear. That was an event that was preventable," Badeski said during his briefing to the board.

The county said it stood up water distribution sites starting Tuesday and ran multiple distribution operations through the week, bringing in staff and equipment (including staff sent to Richmond to assist) and deploying tankers at courthouse and shopping complex sites. Pumps were turned back on for Hanover's system on Wednesday night; the county maintained a boil water advisory while testing for contamination and lifted that advisory after two negative tests late Saturday (county staff said the…