Everything Here Runs on the Wells

Editorial

Every glass of water poured in Middleburg, every shower, every restaurant kitchen and every fire hydrant draws on a handful of wells. There is no reservoir behind them, no river and no pipe from somewhere else. The water under the town is the town's water supply, all of it.

That is easy to forget, because most of the time it works. The tap runs and the bill comes. But the last three summers have shown how thin the margin is.

In July 2024, two of the Town's main wells, L and 4, came within about ten feet of their pumps. Council banned the garden hose. Councilmember Bud Jacobs said it as plainly as anyone has: "Everybody in this town knows that if our wells suffer or go away, this town dries up and goes away as well." The next year brought the driest start to a year in Loudoun in 131 years of records. In September 2025, Well 4, freshly rebuilt and deepened, began dropping as much as 220 feet while it pumped. By October the Town had to ease off it because it couldn't keep up. "This is the first time we've seen this stress like this," Mayor Bridge Littleton said. This summer Northern Virginia's groundwater sat at emergency level, and on July 24 conservation became mandatory for the second time in three years.

The reason is not a mystery. Water in the ground is slow money. It builds up through wet winters and springs, and it doesn't come back with one good storm. The Town's operator told Council in July that the recharge for its aquifer comes from "over 100 miles away." Dry ground sheds the rain that does fall. "We have a finite number of wells. It has a finite amount of water," the Mayor said in June. Both halves of that sentence are true.

The neighbors share the same water

The Town's wells are not alone in the rock. Every house, farm, winery and inn in the countryside around Middleburg has its own well, drawing on the same groundwater. The Loudoun County Preservation and Conservation Coalition's groundwater study, presented to the county's mayors last year, found that water levels across western Loudoun have dropped 10 to 40 feet since the 1980s. Drillers have hit 760 dry holes since 2000. About 3,200 wells have been abandoned. A former County hydrologist told the mayors that three in four wells in western Loudoun sit within 250 feet of a neighbor's, where they should be about a thousand feet apart.

Dean Fjelstul, who lives just outside town on Chase Hollow Lane, told Council in June what that looks like at home: "I try to water those trees to keep them alive and my well goes dry." When a town well struggles, there is a staff, an operator and a budget to respond. When a family's well fails, they handle it alone: a deeper well, a new pump, water hauled in jugs.

Councilmember Kevin Daly put the shared problem into one picture in May 2025: "If we are all sharing the same cup of water and we have a thousand straws going into it, we can control the straws here in town but what happens if we have new development on Foxcroft Road?"

None of this is unique to Middleburg. This summer the Roanoke region reached drought emergency, with some of its groundwater wells at record lows, and Gordonsville declared a water emergency. Virginia Tech's extension service reported more private wells running dry; about one in five Virginians depend on one.

What it looks like without care

No one should read this as a prediction that the taps will run dry next year. They probably won't. The point is what slowly happens to a town that stops paying attention. Middleburg has already had small previews of most of it:

• Restrictions become the normal summer. Hand watering only, no topped-off pools, and a rationing rule waiting on the books. The Town wrote that rule in 2025, with a household cap in gallons a day, and hopes never to use it.
• The aquifer decides growth, not Council. A town that can't promise water can't add homes, shops or restaurants, however much it might want them.
• Upkeep gets deferred. In the fall of 2025 the Town skipped routine hydrant flushing and water tank maintenance to save water.
• Costs climb. A new well costs about half a million dollars, and the Town is told to allow six months of study just to choose where to drill. Treating Well 3's water is estimated at about $1 million.
• The last resort changes the town. Piping river water west from Loudoun Water would end the shortage. The Mayor has argued it would also bring the dense building that central water and sewer make possible, and with it a different Middleburg than the one the town has worked for decades to keep.
• The countryside pays first. Long before the Town runs short, the shallow private wells around it do.

What is working

There is good news, and it is mostly the result of people paying attention. Residents cut their water use by about a fifth this summer under mandatory conservation, and the wells noticed: Well L came back 85 feet after a month of rest. Well 3 turned out to draw on a different aquifer than the Town's other wells, which means a second source if it is treated. Well 2, out of service last summer, has a new pump and pipe and showing good yield in its tests. Well 4's pump now sits more than 500 feet down. A repaired reuse system at the sewer plant saves 8,000 to 9,000 gallons of drinking water a day. Council now hears a water report at nearly every meeting, and the state's study of western Loudoun's groundwater is due December 31.

What we ask

Of everyone who lives and works here: treat water as the shared thing it is, in wet years too. Lawn irrigation is the biggest single use in a dry summer. Water the garden by hand, fix the drip, put out a rain barrel, serve water on request. Businesses use half or more of the Town's water, so their habits count the most.

Of the Town, one concrete step. In May 2025, Council agreed to a yearly public review of the whole water system. Make it a written report, published every year and mailed to every customer. It should say where each well stands against prior years, how much the town used and lost, what new supply is planned and what it will cost, and what the state study says when it arrives. Residents conserve best when they can see what they are protecting.

And of the County, with the state study in hand: weigh groundwater in every decision about building in western Loudoun. The Town can manage its own wells. It cannot manage the thousands around it, and neither can the families who own them.

At the Town's water meeting in May 2025, former Councilmember Kathyjo Shea recalled raising the town's water supply when she served and being told "that was never going to be an issue." It is an issue now. It doesn't have to become a crisis.