Henrico County Manager (name not specified in the transcript) updated the Board of Supervisors on Jan. 14 about last week’s water disruptions, said the county formally affirmed a local emergency and announced it had retained outside consultants to analyze infrastructure and response.

The county manager told the board that the county’s emergency operations center opened Jan. 5 for winter-storm response and remained active through Jan. 11 as a separate, region-wide water-treatment outage affected Henrico customers. “At its peak, we had more than 24,000 of our customers without water,” the county manager said, and the county distributed more than 153,000 cases of bottled water, made available about 120,000 gallons of potable water via 20 tanker trucks, and delivered water to 48 day-care centers, about 900 residences and 11 assisted-living facilities.

The manager said Henrico proactively disconnected from Richmond’s water system and attempted to route water from its treatment plant on Three Chopt Road, restoring roughly 6,000 homes by reconfiguring valves. The response was further complicated by a water main break in Sandston and by low pressure that prompted a boil-water advisory issued by the Virginia Department of Health for eastern Henrico and later extended countywide. By late Thursday the county reported restored service and sufficient pressure to begin water-quality testing; test results cleared the system on Saturday and the advisory was lifted.

County officials told the board they engaged two outside firms—Whitman, Requardt & Associates (WRA) and AquaLaw—to conduct independent analyses of the utility system, the timeline of events, infrastructure vulnerabilities (with emphasis on eastern Henrico), contractual agreements with other local governments and recommendations to improve resilience. The county manager said an after-action report on operations and public communications will be presented at a Feb. 11 board meeting, described in his remarks as “the 30-day briefing.”

Rob Rowley, Henrico’s chief of emergency management and workplace safety, recommended the board approve the county manager’s declaration; Terrell Hughes, director of public works, and Bentley Chan, director of public utilities, were thanked in the manager’s remarks for directing crews during the storm and the water outage.

The board voted to affirm the local emergency declaration; the motion was offered and seconded and the chair called for the ayes, after which the resolution passed.

Why it matters: the outage reflected a failure in interconnected, regional infrastructure that left thousands without potable water, prompted a boil-water advisory, and required large-scale distribution of bottled and tanker water. Henrico has signaled a multi-month and multi-year review that will include consultant reports and internal after-action reviews to inform resilience investments.

What’s next: the board will receive reports from the contracted firms and the county’s after-action review at the Feb. 11 meeting. Further operational changes or capital projects were not adopted Jan. 14; consultants’ recommendations and staff analyses will come back to the board for consideration.