The snow fell. The power failed. The plant flooded. The water stopped.
For more than 115 hours across six calendar days last January, the City of Richmond lost clean drinking water. For much of that time, its taps ran dry.
According to reporting from the Richmond Times-Dispatch, three inches of fallen snow and a resulting power outage led to a cascade of system failures at its sole water treatment plant early on January 6, 2025. Richmond couldn’t restore full pressure until early January 9. After time for required safety testing, the city declared its water once more safe to drink on January 11.
As the climate changes and storms intensify, as infrastructure ages, as the Charlottesville area’s population grows, could our own water supply face similar threats?
To answer that, you’ll need to understand where our water comes from, where it goes, and how it gets there.
The land
The water we drink begins as rain, falling straight into our waterways or filtered through the land. We call that land a watershed.
“A watershed is the whole system,” says Leon Szeptycki, a UVA law professor, water expert, and associate director of the university’s environmental institute. “It’s all the land that the water flows off of, and everything associated with the land.” The health of that area affects how well the land stores and filters water—and how it reacts to sudden severe weather.
Water that falls on roofs, streets, and parking lots can’t soak into the ground, Szeptycki notes. It’ll run into storm sewers and get dumped into rivers and streams, potentially worsening flooding. But rainfall on forests gets partially blocked by tree canopy, and absorbed by trees, other plants, and the ground, reducing the amount of surface water that can contribute to a damaging flood.
“The more intact your watershed is—and by intact, I mean the fewer impervious surfaces there are, the more trees there are, the more healthy landscapes there are—the more water the watershed is going to retain, and the less severe floods are going to be,” Szeptycki says.
Unfortunately for Charlottesville and Albemarle County, local forests appear to be shrinking. In the city, the percentage of land covered by trees has fallen from 45 percent in 2014 to 38 percent in 2023, according to the City of Charlottesville Tree Commission’s State of the Forest report from that year.
Numbers for the county are harder to pin down: A 2023 report from the Chesapeake Bay Program puts Albemarle’s tree coverage at 68.7 percent in 2017-18, with 1,427 acres of forest lost since 2013-14. The county’s website lists coverage at 72 percent forest, 24 percent open land, and 3 percent impervious surfaces, but doesn’t provide a date for those figures.
A changing climate could make water more precious and floods more frequent. “As the temperature gets warmer,” Szeptycki says, “it increases water demand by natural vegetation, people water their lawns more, farmers irrigate their crops more when it’s warmer, and depending on the particular river or stream, warmer temperatures can put more stress on aquatic ecosystems.”
Charlottesville’s 2023 climate risk and vulnerability assessment predicts that the city’s annual number of days with temperatures 95 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter could rise from 10 in 2020 to 25 in 2050—up from just three days per year in 1950. Heat waves, where those high temperatures exceed the historical average for five or more days, could rise from three to seven per year in the same period.
At the same time, the city’s expecting fiercer storms and floods. Its 2023 report forecasts one extra severe rain or snowstorm per year—rising from 12 to 13—in 2050, compared to 2020. “But in between those more intense storms, there’ll be longer, more intense dry periods,” Szeptycki says. “We have to make sure we have enough water during the longer drier periods. And the best way of dealing with that is storage.”