1965: A Death Under the Richmond Streets.

Visitors to Richmond’s Shockoe Valley have only a hint of what lies beneath the paving and cobblestones, the vacant lots, and the industrial wastelands north of Broad Street. The only indication is a series of large square drains on the floor of the valley. Many years ago, when this was a meadow between two hills, the rushing water of Shockoe Creek dominated the vista. Later, the creek was a constant problem for manufacturing and warehouses in the valley, flooding out of its banks and into basements and stores. Where Shockoe Creek once simply drained the watershed that splits the city, its path was finally channeled into a massive concrete tunnel that remains the central artery of Richmond’s wastewater system.

Sixty years ago, James Messner’s last day began fifteen feet below this manhole at the intersection of Patterson Avenue and Belmont Avenue.

That enormous channel under Shockoe Valley was to play an important part of what happened on July 15, 1965, although the weather forecast for the afternoon gave no hint of the horror to come. “Variable cloudiness with 30 percent chance of showers. High around 90,” reported the Times-Dispatch. The three Richmond City employees who stood in the middle of Patterson Avenue knew the hazard of sudden flooding in the sewers where they worked. Nevertheless, there didn’t seem to be much danger in either the forecast or the slightly cloudy sky above on that Thursday. Unknown to the three men, a violent summer rainstorm was building several miles away in the West End. James Messner, age 35, and Benny Whitlock, 47, descended on ropes to work on a new sewer connection to a nearby home. Leroy Tyler, 28, stayed at street level at Patterson and Belmont to keep an eye on traffic while passing down tools to the men fifteen feet below the surface in the sewer.

Installation of the sewer line under Patterson Avenue. This is the same 6’ pipeline where city workers were overtaken by water from a flash flood 41 years after this photo was taken. Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 10, 1924.

 A rush of air from the manhole at Patterson and Belmont was probably the first indication that something was going terribly wrong. Tyler could hear an increasingly loud roaring noise followed by a wall of water that surged east down the sewer line under Patterson Avenue. Fifteen feet below where Tyler stood, Benny Whitlock was suddenly hit by the filthy water and managed to grab a rope dangling from the opening above. The force of the rushing water battered him against the curving walls, he lost his grip, and he was suddenly borne along down the concrete tube, now filled three-fourths to the ceiling. “The water was right up on them before they knew what hit them,” said the shocked supervisor of sewer maintenance. “This is the first time that anything like this has happened in the 40 years I’ve been here."

Whitlock was carried off in the darkness until he glimpsed another manhole opening in the ceiling of the sewer pipe and grabbed at it, managing a handhold. He was shocked by feeling Messner crash into him as he washed by in the darkness, almost causing Whitlock to lose his grip. He said he could hear Messner shouting as he was carried off into the terrifying, roaring, dark water, his voice growing more and more faint in the distance. Tyler, seeing everyone swept away by the water, ran to a nearby store and called the Richmond Fire Department. Firemen arrived and managed to get a thoroughly shaken Whitlock onto a ladder, out of the sewer, and up to the street. James Messner, however, was nowhere to be found.

A shaken Benny Whitlock stands, shivering and soaking wet, in Patterson Avenue after a desperate rescue from the sewer under the street. Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 16, 1965.

The firemen raced to the next manhole at Sheppard and Park Avenue, pulled the cover, and descended into the sewer. By that time the wall of water was already receding, making it easier to search for Messner with spotlights and to call out to him on megaphones. The firemen, wearing gas masks because of the danger of exposure to sewer gas, worked their way down Shepherd Street, opening manholes and descending, hoping to find that Messner had somehow resisted the rushing water and had found something to grab onto along the sewer as he swept by. They opened manholes all the way to where the sewer reached the next main in the 1100 block of Hermitage Road, and there it joined a mammoth tunnel that emptied into the river near 14^th Street.

A 1917 photograph from The Engineering News – Record, shows the scale of the massive main sewer line in the floor of Shockoe Valley before it was covered. The interior was 10 x 16 feet at this point and drained 12-1/2 square miles of the city before emptying into the James River at 14^th Street. In the background is the Marshall Street Viaduct (demolished 1970), which ran from downtown Richmond to Church Hill.

City workers in rowboats patrolled the opening of the sewer near the massive gates which prevented access from the riverbank. Divers searched the opening of the tunnel with the assumption that Messner’s body had been washed the entire length of the system. The search was called off at 9:00 PM because of darkness, to resume the next day.

James Messner’s body was found near here, in the shadow of the I-95 bridge.

Friday, the search continued with firemen again entering the sewer system, a tugboat searching the river below the city, and others dragging the river near the enormous sewer opening. Two volunteers in an outboard boat joined the search, and they were the ones who discovered Messner’s body in the James River, sprawled on a sandbar near what is now the I-95 bridge. He was three miles away from where he descended into the manhole at Patterson and Belmont. Messner was buried in the cemetery at Hebron Baptist Church in King William County, his Death Certificate specifying the cause of death: “Drowning - due to flash-flood in sewer.”

Messner’s sister Olive apparently paid for this grave marker in King William County, commemorating his manner of death. Photo by A.D. Sorrell on FindaGrave.com.

James Messner was a City of Richmond employee who died a dreadful, disorienting death, drowning while tumbling helplessly in the stinking black darkness below the streets. His sister noted on his grave marker he was “killed in the line of duty.” Richmond’s first responders are usually thought of as working in the most dangerous circumstances and occasionally being seriously injured in the course of their duties. While his is not a sacrifice of the kind characterized as “heroic,” Messner nevertheless did die while serving the people of Richmond. As recently as September 2023 a City of Richmond employee named Derrick Christian was crushed by a tree in Libby Hill Park. Christian, like James Messner, gave their lives improving this city where we live, and deserve to not be forgotten.

-Selden