Posted on July 16, 2025
On Tuesday outside city hall, Petersburg officials said yet another night of intense, dangerous rainfall led to major flooding for the third time in a week in the city. While providing updates on the safety concerns and the additional storms rolling in, city leaders explained how the Appomattox River is playing a role in the ongoing overflows. Meanwhile, legislators are touting state-level solutions to manage the recurrent flooding.
“We had Saturday and Sunday, probably what I would venture to say would be 100 year storms, both days leading into last night,” said Petersburg City Manager John “March” Altman. “Last night, we probably received … probably about 10 inches of rain last night. So this is overwhelming the system.”
The National Weather Service reported that the city has received nearly 8 inches of rain since Saturday morning. On Monday night, rain inundated the region and triggered multiple flash flooding warnings. WRIC reported that some Central Virginia residents had over a foot of water in their backyards and some emergencies required water rescues.
Petersburg Mayor Samuel Parham placed blame not only on the heavy rains, but also on aged water systems that can’t keep up with demand, and lack of dredging in the Appomattox River that allows water to pool in portions of the city.
The silt filling the river has been an issue for decades. The last time the river was partially dredged was in the 1990s, but the process had to stop partway through near Petersburg once contaminates were found.
“What we are seeing now are definitely the horrific effects of the many decades of neglect of Petersburg not being able to get the necessary funding to dredge the Appomattox River to prevent a lot of this flooding that you’ve seen pictures of down on Bank in Bollingbrook Street,” Parham said.
Parham said the silt buildup in the harbor area forces water to rush in from the surrounding creeks during these rain events, preventing them from flowing out into the river as they should. There is less movement in the river in these silty spots that makes more parts of town prone to flooding, the mayor suggested.
“So regardless of what we do internally until we can get that water to flow out of that into the Appomattox, it’s going to be a continuous problem here,” Parham said. “So we’re looking at bringing on some public and private partners to hopefully work with the (Army Corps of Engineers) in order to get some funding there to get this dredging done.”
Altman said between the dredging and the water drainage needs, it could take 10-20 years to fully catch up on projects, if they had all the money and resources readily available. There has not been a line in the state budget directly dealing with dredging the river in over 20 years, when an amendment failed to make it into the final draft in 2005.
However, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation this month awarded the city of Petersburg over $2 million to study sediment dredging impacts on the harbor. The city is working to engage the Army Corp of Engineers to finish the 1990s dredging project that left off the critical portions of the river that could help stem the flooding in Petersburg.
“More recently, DCR has invested an additional $4 million to remove silt and replace infrastructure around the stream gates – work that is essential to improving water flow from the Petersburg Harbor into the Appomattox River, thus mitigating flood risk,” said state Sen. Lashrecse Aird, D-Petersburg, in a statement.
City officials reiterated Tuesday that removing some of the harbor silt will help, but the major Army Corps of Engineers project needs to be finished to see even more significant flood mitigation.
“It is decades worth of projects that have built up over time, and now we’re in a position where we need to address those, and we’re going to move forward with a positive plan to address those coming into the future,” Altman said.
The city has declared a state of emergency as more rain is anticipated Tuesday afternoon.
