Mike Roberts, general manager of the Mr. Rooter franchise in Phoenix, Ariz., has retrieved his share of ladies’ rings from sink traps, but nothing prepared him for a California woman’s mishap. Her 7-carat diamond wedding ring fell off her finger as she flushed the toilet in the Black Bear Diner restroom in Phoenix. The ring is worth $70,000.
City employees inserted a small catch basin in the manhole 300 feet downstream from the restaurant, then flushed the toilet more than 100 times. When the ring failed to materialize, they called Roberts.
“I knew it would be like dredging for a treasure chest in the ocean,” says Roberts. He at first planned with a city crew to locate the ring, then run a water jetter nozzle upstream from the manhole and pull the ring back. However, an inspection showed that the 4-inch cast iron lateral was flaking and littered with debris.
“Visibility was so bad that my camera technician David Penticomy and I didn’t look for the ring on the outward journey, just while we were slowly pulling back,” says Roberts, who used a RIDGID Mini SeeSnake Plus camera with 125 feet of pushrod. They checked the line multiple times; the camera lens required cleaning after every trip.
Three and a half hours later, Roberts saw what he thought was a platinum band 5 feet down the line from the toilet. He pushed the camera back and forth a few times to move the flakes of debris, and the ring flipped over. The excited customer, watching the inspection system monitor, exclaimed, “That’s it! Without a doubt. Dig it up!”
“All our pushing out probably moved the ring downstream and covered it with flakes,” says Roberts. “After searching that long to find it, everyone agreed that jetting was too risky as a recovery procedure.” With the restaurant owner’s permission to excavate, Roberts located the transmitter in the camera head and marked it on the floor. Technician Dan Viel then jack-hammered through the concrete.
Roberts and Viel used a shovel to dig down 40 inches, where they uncovered a 45-degree bend tied into the pipe with No-Hub couplings from Ideal, a Tomkins Co., in St. Augustine, Fla. “Dan disconnected the bands, pulled out the elbow, reached into the pipe, and there was the ring,” Roberts says. The excavation took 90 minutes.
“Even covered in sludge, it was the most beautiful ring I had ever seen,” says Roberts. “We washed it off, and eight hours after it fell into the toilet, the customer slipped it back on her finger. Tears of joy were streaming down her cheeks, and she hugged and thanked us.” Roberts noticed that the ring was a loose fit – perhaps explaining how it fell off the woman’s finger.
The Mr. Rooter bill came to $5,200 and the city’s to $1,000. The customer’s husband tipped Roberts and his team generously and also tipped the restaurant shift manager for staying late. “Our goal is to be the most recognized Mr. Rooter franchise in the world,” says Roberts. “This job certainly has helped.”
