Katie Meeker, Opinions and Humor Editor

Maya Sunderraj, Assistant Opinions Editor

When we read the news that there was a new boil water advisory issued in Richmond, we couldn’t even say we were surprised. 

Breaking into water bottle stashes to make dinner earlier this week, we wondered what others were doing in the face of the city’s second crisis of the year. How many people counted their coins to afford a case of water? How many workers missed out on shifts as businesses across the city scrambled to stay operational? 

Costs and losses, everywhere you turn. More and more of Richmond’s dollars fall down the muck-coated drain. 

When such an essential utility becomes consistently unreliable, we find ourselves wondering: what’s the cost Richmonders have to pay? 

As most of us know, the over-100-year-old water treatment plant is in dire need of updates, which former Mayor Levar Stoney neglected. 

Two years before Richmond’s first water crisis in January — when a winter storm broke the plant and left people without clean water for nearly a week — the city was awarded a $12 million grant through an infrastructure development program by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. Plans included expensive repairs to the facility’s feeder channel, concrete walls and berms, according to an archived press release.

This week’s boil water advisory – the third major issue this year considering last month’s excess fluoride incident — came just a month after the Trump administration dissolved that program. This action effectively voided Richmond’s water grant as well as other vital infrastructure projects across Virginia. While the administration called it “wasteful and ineffective,” Richmonders have been left quite literally high and dry.

With the city watching closely, Mayor Danny Avula is attempting to rectify his predecessor’s mistakes with a five-year plan to rehabilitate the plant. Before the cut in federal funding, he proposed a budget that saw a rise in utility costs as early as this summer, with an almost $13-per-month average increase by the household. 

The loss will not impact immediate operations or delay improvements, but it could shift significant costs onto us residents and ratepayers, Avula stated in a Reddit post.

With federal funding gone and water utilities more fickle than ever, Avula faces the difficult task of balancing reliability with affordability. 

We’re a bit bitter about the increasing utility costs, but have to admit to their necessity as we look back on all the pots of water we had to boil just to wash dishes. While things weren’t as dire this time as they were in January — we could at least flush our toilets — the situation had us hyperaware of how past administrations’ inattentiveness directly hurt Richmonders. 

The loss of FEMA funds has left many residents, ourselves included, feeling disheartened by federal officials’ lack of concern for the safety and well-being of our community. Especially astonishing is the fact that our Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin is complicit, having recently joined the FEMA council for a president who is weighing eliminating the agency entirely. 

Considering the ever-growing price of groceries, the city’s eviction rates and rent inflation, it begs the question of how long Richmonders can sustain rising costs. We love Richmond but we’re on edge, forced to stay hypervigilant over a human right. Neglected by administrations on all levels, sometimes we can’t help but feel a little hopeless. 

Yet when that feeling of hopelessness and feral abandonment perpetuated by the state starts to take over, a new sentiment emerges in our peripheries, as if to challenge the government-induced nihilism: community. 

This comes from a connection between the people; from local businesses and nonprofits that helped distribute water and information throughout both crises such as MAD RVA, RVA Community Fridges and Southside ReLeaf. 

We felt that warmth when we saw people encouraging restaurants to stay open and continue to serve customers. We felt it when friends embraced us for bringing them desperately-needed bottled water. 

Knowing our community has the ability to stand together during crises is bittersweet, but at the end of the day we wish we didn’t have to discover that in the first place. 

Should another crisis occur, we hope people continue to organize. But mainly, we wish the government would accept the increasing chance of outages and disasters, and plan to support the community in the moment by making clean water distribution and information more accessible, and keeping costs affordable for all citizens.