Monica Meyer: The Mayor Who Drowned in a Sewage Tank

Being mayor of a small town comes with a certain number of unglamorous duties. There are budgets to approve, potholes to complain about, zoning disputes to endure, and ribbon-cuttings where everyone pretends a new parking lot is the most exciting thing that has happened all year.

For Monica Meyer, the mayor of Betterton, Maryland, the job included something considerably less ceremonial: inspecting the town’s sewage system.

In March 1980, Meyer went to check one of Betterton’s sewage treatment tanks. During the inspection, she fell into a tank containing approximately 15 feet of human waste.

There are sentences that begin badly and then somehow get worse. That was one of them.

Meyer was unable to climb out and drowned. An investigator at the scene explained that the material in the tank had the consistency of putty. “It’s just like putty, and she didn’t have a chance to get out,” he said. “It’s like quicksand.” A contemporary newspaper account reported the decidedly unpleasant details.

It was a particularly grim ending for a public official who appears to have been doing exactly what voters generally claim they want their elected officials to do: personally keeping an eye on how the town was being run. Unfortunately, there are some municipal operations where “hands-on leadership” is best interpreted figuratively.

History Has an Unfortunate Relationship With Latrines

Oddly enough, Meyer was hardly the first person in history to discover that human waste can become unexpectedly lethal. Eight centuries earlier, a gathering of medieval nobles in Germany ended in what became known as the Erfurt Latrine Disaster, when the floor beneath an assembly collapsed and sent many of those present plunging into the cesspit below.

Between medieval nobles falling through a floor into a latrine and a twentieth-century mayor disappearing into a sewage tank, history has provided more than enough evidence for one fairly sensible rule:

When dealing with large quantities of sewage, delegation is not merely a management technique.

Sometimes it is a survival skill.

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