Roto-Rooter to the Rescue
Roto-Rooter to the rescue! On April 22, Roto-Rooter of Cincinnati was called to the home of Margaret Clark of Anderson Township in Greater Cincinnati. Mrs. Clark had been cleaning her 4-carat diamond ring, a 20th anniversary gift from her husband. She left the ring on the sink wrapped in tissue to dry. When she returned later, she grabbed the tissue, ring and all, and threw it in the toilet and flushed it down. Mrs. Clark instantly realized her mistake and panicked. She thought the ring was gone for good. Talk about a plumbing problem!
She called Roto-Rooter for help. Roto-Rooter plumber Gary Morford used a line camera to inspect her mainline. It's a fiber optic camera we normally use to look for cracks or breaks and determine if a sewer repair is in order. Within minutes of running the camera into the pipe, Mrs. Clark spotted her big diamond ring on the video monitor, deep inside the pipe. Gary pinpointed the location of the ring and had to break concrete in the basement floor to reach it but he was able to recover the ring for the customer. Channel 12 News out of Cincinnati did a big story about it then fed the story to TV stations across the nation. The story appeared more than 90 times from coast to coast and on CNN repeatedly.
Three days later, a family called Roto-Rooter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to help find their lost cat, "Bud." It seems Bud went missing four days earlier and was thought to be gone for good until the family heard faint meows coming from a downspout vent on the side of the house. Neighbors and a fire and rescue crew tried to locate the cat to no avail. When Dave Jones, the Roto-Rooter Contractor arrived, he found that the home's downspouts were routed underground and the pipe extended about 200 feet into a nearby woods.
Dave fed a fiber optic line camera into the pipe and found Bud stuck at a junction about 120 feet in. The cat was unable move because he had gotten himself wedged at a junction where a 6-inch pipe met with a 4-inch pipe. Who knows if the cat chased a mouse into the line or was himself trying to avoid a larger predator from the woods?
With a little bit of digging, Bud was finally freed. After four days in the pipe, the cat had lost several pounds and was a little dehydrated but is now doing well. An hour after his rescue, a thunderstorm dropped a lot of rain on the area and Bud would have surely drowned if not for Roto-Rooter. The customer couldn't be happier with us.
Three Harrisburg TV stations and the local paper covered the story and fed it to other papers and stations across the country. Again, Roto-Rooter was all over the news for helping the cat. But this was not our first cat rescue.
We typically get one or two out of pipes each year. The rescue of Zap the kitten in Birmingham a few years ago comes to mind. He owes his life to a Roto-Rooter plumber. Have a look at that little kitty face from the perspective of one of Roto-Rooter's pipe inspection cameras.
As a 24 hour plumbing company, Roto-Rooter probably gets more of these offbeat calls for plumbing services than local plumbing companies. Plumbing services encompasses much more than faucet repairs or clearing clogged toilet drains. While our residential plumbing team finds the strangest stuff, once in a while our commercial plumbing staff recovers something weird too. One business was having toilet problems and one of our licensed plumbing specialists found the toilet drain loaded with about a dozen of those tiny liquor bottles like the ones they serve on airplanes.