RICHMOND, Va. — Richmond restaurants and residents rushed to make adjustments Tuesday after the city issued a boil water advisory for multiple neighborhoods, the second water crisis to hit the area this year.
The advisory, which went into effect at 11:30 a.m., caught many business owners by surprise as they were opening for the day.
"I was putting the sign out as we opened and this lady came up to me on the street and she was like we're under a boil water advisory again and I was like 'What?!' I thought she was making it up," said Michael Whitty, manager of Lolita's Restaurant in Carytown. "We're just making sure that everything is in place, we have all of our precautionary measures."
The sudden announcement sent many scrambling to secure safe drinking water.
"We had to go out and buy some bottled water from Kroger, it was a madhouse in there," Whitty said.
While some businesses like Lolita's remained open with precautions in place, others chose to close for the day, disappointing visitors to the area.
"I was coming down to have lunch at Can Can to meet a dear old friend who drove in from the Washington area to meet for lunch, and I looked at the door to find there was a boil water advisory," one disappointed visitor said.
Whitty expressed frustration about facing another water system issue so soon after January's multi-day water outage.
"Businesses, households, families it affects everybody so for this to happen again relatively close to the last time it happened, it's a bit disappointing and we need to figure out what's going on and maybe build a better system for our water," he said.
He also criticized the city's communication regarding what businesses should do during the advisory.
"A lot of the information that the City of Richmond has provided has been slim to none and it's only available to people in households where it leaves a business kind of scratching their heads a little bit like what are we supposed to do," he said. "Richmond's a big city, it's growing a lot. If we're growing we've got to keep up with that growth, so does our water system."
During a Tuesday afternoon update, Richmond Mayor Danny Avula stated that restaurants could remain open as long as they followed boil water advisory guidelines.
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