Hometown Heroes

A drain-cleaning franchiser reports on a year’s worth of rescues of valuable items and priceless pets recovered from difficult places

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One of the perks of being a drain-cleaning contractor is that every now and then, maybe only once in a lifetime, you get to be a hero.

Whitney Wyatt-Kovar, public relations specialist at Mr. Rooter Corp., pulled together a list of dramatic rescues from 2009. Some of these led to stories in the local franchises’ hometown newspapers.

“From jewelry to animals, Mr. Rooter plumbers recovered quite a few precious items last year,” says Wyatt-Kovar. “While some of the recoveries took hours, others took mere minutes. But both had the same outcome – overjoyed and relieved customers.”

Expensive ring. Mike Roberts, general manager of the Mr. Rooter of Phoenix franchise, recovered a $70,000 wedding ring that a woman in a Phoenix restaurant accidentally flushed down the toilet in January.

The rescue was an eight-hour process that included removing the toilet, searching the line with a video inspection camera, and digging up the floor to retrieve the ring. “It was like dredging the ocean for a treasure chest,” Roberts said. “The sewer line was so deteriorated that flakes of the pipe and debris were littered through the length of the line.”

Daughter’s diamond. It was déjà vu for Roberts in April when a second customer called about a ring down the toilet – this time at her home in Phoenix. This $6,000 sapphire and diamond ring was a gift to the customer from her father. Roberts dropped a video inspection camera down the ventilation pipe. Just five minutes into the search, he located the ring in a pipe below a closet off the hallway.

The ring owner’s father, Bob Jorgensen, dug up the floor himself. Roberts returned the next day to break open the pipe and recover the ring. Its owner, Camille Jorgensen, 24, was in tears when she saw it. Her father had bought the 4.5-carat sapphire ring with a setting of 1-carat diamonds on the sides while in Thailand.

“The ring was a very special gift from daddy to daughter,” Bob Jorgensen said. “She had such a look of excitement when I revealed it to her for the first time, and I knew it was a very special ring. When she came and told me what had happened, there was no limit to what we would do to recover it.”

Lucky ducklings. George Jessup, a commercial service technician at Mr. Rooter Plumbing of Pittsburgh was driving down a road in Shaler Township when he saw a duck sitting on a storm drain. Something didn’t seem right, so he pulled over. When he looked down the drain, he saw ducklings, and he knew he had to rescue them.

After trying to lift the heavy drain grating, Jessup called the fire department and police. Within 30 minutes, they got seven ducklings out. “They were the cutest things you ever saw,” Jessup said. “I’m so glad we were able to save them.” The fire department flushed the pipe and Jessup sent his inspection camera into the pipe to make sure no ducklings were still trapped. Seeing none, he went back to work.

Trouble for a toddler. In May, Dan Kraby, a Mr. Rooter technician at the franchise in Salem, Mass., needed three hours to recover a woman’s wedding and engagement rings at a house in Newburyport, Mass. Her toddler son had flushed them down the toilet when she wasn’t looking. “She will have a great story to tell her son when he grows up,” Kovar says.

Bad Karma. In March, Robert Plantic, a technician at the Mr. Rooter Plumbing franchise in Toronto, Ont., learned that a customer’s cat, named Karma, was missing. Using a video inspection camera, he found the cat in two hours. Karma had worked her way under the floorboards that renovators were putting down to cover holes in the customer’s house.

Easy recover. Mr. Rooter of Central Texas plumber Jim Hauk didn’t need a video inspection camera to find a diamond that went down the kitchen sink drain in a customer’s house in Waco, Texas, in June. He spotted the diamond after disconnecting the drain line close to the garbage disposal.

Their little secret. In January, technician Gerald Johns of the Mr. Rooter of New Orleans shop recovered a 1-carat diamond engagement ring that had slipped off the customer’s finger in her home. She didn’t notice that it had fallen into the toilet until she had already pushed the handle to flush. “The woman didn’t tell her fiancé, and her secret is safe with Mr. Rooter,” Wyatt-Kovar says.

Says Mary Kennedy Thompson, president of Mr. Rooter Corp., “Our service professionals turned into heroes when they saved the day for our customers. They went above and beyond to safely recover these treasures.”



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