CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The City of Stuanton, which is approximately 40 miles from Charlottesville was placed under a boiled water advisory due to a water main break that occurred early Friday morning.  The water main break caused officials to place the city under a mandatory 48 hour boiled water advisory because they had to shut the entire system down to repair the issue.  Rocktownnow.com’s Jacquelyn Dobrin reported the following:

“Officials say that early Friday morning, Staunton Public Works was notified of a watermain break behind Stocker Street. Utility crews were immediately dispatched and found significant damage to a large, 16-inch water main. To complete the repair, water service had to be shut off. Initial efforts to limit the outage to a small area were unsuccessful, making it necessary to expand the shut-off. This caused low water pressure throughout much of the city and required service interruptions in higher-elevation areas.”

The water main break has since been repaired but water samples must be tested for contaminants before the advisory can be lifted.  Events like this as well as the water situation in Richmond that shut down the opening of the General Assembly session in Richmond back in January has underscored the importance of localities examining their water infrastructure.  Both Charlottesville and Albemarle County are examining these issues in strategic planning and the City approved a plan during this month’s first city council meeting to overhaul its water system.  Councilor Natalie Oschirin outlined the plan on a recent appearance on WINA Morning News.  “It’s a huge project, they’re adding about 5 miles of drinking water in large pipes, 24-to-36-inch pipes that are going to go throughout the city.  It’s going to have some benefits of redundancy so if one of our water sources gets contaminated it has access to the other water treatment plants so, you know you hear about other cities in the state with boiled water advisories and that sort of thing.  This is going to kind of help prevent the need for that, it’s going to increase our capacity.  There were 3 point something billion gallons per day of capacity, I don’t know if it was capacity per day but just in general but a lot of that is kind of the point, just making sure we have enough capacity, making sure we have redundancies.” said Oschirin.  She went on to describe the scope of the project and potential disruptions of traffic in the city.

” It is going to be a big construction project, so its going to dig up some roads, they said it’s going to be in hundred-foot segments when it goes through the neighborhoods so they’ll do a hundred feet patch it up, do the next hundred feet patch it up and it will take about 5 days per 100 feet.  So, the idea is that it is not month and months and months affecting a single street or a single neighborhood, but it is gonna be about a four-year project total.”  Charlottesville is hoping to avoid what other localities have experienced recently, to get ahead of a problem that is becoming more prevalent with local water infrastructure.  You can hear the full interview with Oschirin regarding a number of other city topics below.