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Here’s a recap of the top stories on the morning of Feb. 12, 2025:
Henrico County reviews internal reports on January water outage
Reported by VPM News’ Lyndon German
Communication issues between the City of Richmond and Henrico County delayed the county’s ability to manage its response to January’s region wide water outage, independent reviewers concluded in a set of after-action reports released Tuesday.
AquaLaw, a Richmond-based utilities firm, examined the timeline of events at the city’s water treatment facility and the county’s response throughout the crisis — including initial observations from the Virginia Department of Health. AquaLaw President Christopher Pomeroy told the county’s board of supervisors Tuesday that the report aligns with VDH's findings.
“Communication was a challenge — that's a kind of an unavoidable conclusion — and the facts really speak for themselves,” Pomeroy told the board Tuesday. “Henrico would have lost water despite the information on this page, but the process obviously could have been much better.”
Richmond staff first notified county officials that its main water treatment facility was down around 7 a.m. on Jan. 6, but Henrico’s public utilities department was not made aware of the outage’s full severity until 2:34 p.m., more than seven hours later.
“I'm sure we can all appreciate that Richmond was managing a very difficult problem in terms of restoring operation of that facility,” Pomeroy said. “But the effect on our end was that the reports proved simply to be optimistic, and they repeatedly raised false hopes that we'd have water back in time to avoid an outage in Henrico.”
Virginia High School League bans trans students from girls’ sports
Reported by VPM News’ Whittney Evans
The Virginia High School League announced Monday a ban on student-athletes assigned male at birth from participating in girls’ sports.
The league’s executive committee voted to bring the organization into compliance with President Donald Trump’s Feb. 5 executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” — a reversal from the organization’s initially published stance.
Last month, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported that VHSL planned to keep its 2014 policy in place unless state or federal law changes. The president’s executive order stated that federal funding would be pulled from noncompliant schools, which VHSL executive director Billy Haun said Tuesday is a serious concern for schools.
“So we really felt like if we’re to be the governing body of the Virginia High School League, our policies need to be in compliance with the executive order so that our member schools and school divisions wouldn't have to choose between the league and the executive order,” Haun told VPM News.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin celebrated the decision Tuesday in a post on X: "Common sense wins! Today, the governing bodies for Virginia’s public and private high school athletics announced they would follow President Trump’s EO to protect girls sports."
News you might have missed from around the commonwealth
- Youngkin bans DeepSeek AI on state devices, networks (Richmond Times-Dispatch)*
- Overcoming doubts, Richmond Planning Commission OKs test of new type of bus platform (The Richmonder)
*This outlet utilizes a paywall.
