At around 6am on January 6, 2025, staff at Richmond's main water treatment plant on Douglasdale Road watched a power failure flood the basement rooms that housed critical electrical equipment. The plant was running in what operators call winter mode, a configuration that draws power from a single source instead of the two used in summer mode, and that single point of failure took the whole system down during a winter storm. A boil water advisory covered the city for five days, until January 11. VCU Health, Bon Secours and HCA facilities all had to adjust operations. Henrico and Hanover counties, which buy some of their water from Richmond, felt it too.
A state investigation released that April did not describe this as bad luck. The Virginia Department of Health's Office of Drinking Water found "unaddressed systemic issues over decades," called the outcome "completely avoidable," and pointed to old backup batteries and a complacent, reactive culture inside the city's Department of Public Utilities. The director resigned, then rescinded the resignation, then was fired by the mayor. A year later, officials describe the equipment fixes as done: a new electrical substation, upgraded pumps, a transfer switch built to prevent exactly this kind of failure again. What is not settled is the money. Richmond wants $1.4 billion over the next decade to modernize the system, and the state did not fund an $80 million request in its most recent budget.
None of that is a story about old pipes breaking. It is a story about a functioning system going dark for everyone at once, and a year and a half later it still shapes how people in this city think about water. A caller asking whether a problem is "the city again" is describing something specific to Richmond that a plumber answering the phone here needs to be able to sort out fast, honestly, and correctly.
The housing underneath all of it complicates the diagnosis further. The Fan, developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s and now one of the largest intact collections of Victorian rowhouses in the country, and Church Hill, Richmond's oldest neighborhood with individual houses documented back to 1825, are both true party-wall construction with little or no crawlspace access. A leak in a house like this is rarely a visible, obvious repair. It is a diagnostic job first, often a camera inspection, before anyone can say what the actual repair even is.
And the sewer fight underneath the houses is still going. Richmond's combined system dates to the 1800s and still carries stormwater and sewage through the same pipes across the older core, discharging through 25 outfalls when it rains hard enough to overwhelm it. The city has spent roughly $780 million since 1970 cutting overflow volume by about 80 percent, with more projects landing through 2027 and full compliance not required until 2035. Grand Rapids finished this fight in 2015. Richmond has not.
A plumber answering the phone here is answering into a city that just spent a year rebuilding trust in its own water system, on top of housing stock that makes diagnosis its own job, on top of a sewer fight that is nowhere near over.
