Garden City couple Garrett Chadderdon and Noelle Storey got engaged on Feb. 8. Storey accidentally flushed her 3-carat marquise diamond down the toilet earlier this month.
Courtesy of Noelle Storey
Garden City couple Garrett Chadderdon and Noelle Storey had largely given up hope when they made the call to Plumbing Solutions of Idaho.
In a freak accident, Storey had mistakenly flushed her 3-carat marquise diamond engagement ring down the toilet the night before.
They knew the chances of retrieving it were highly unlikely. But plumber Dylan Arteaga and her boss, Andy Sifford, had a plan — or two, or three.
“We were running out of hope the entire time,” said Storey, who got engaged to Chadderdon on Feb. 8. “So just having their positive reinforcement and encouragement and optimism the whole time was extremely helpful throughout.
“Just the fact that they were willing to come up with more ideas, and they made it seem like they would stop at nothing to get this ring back for us, was just incredible.”
Arteaga arrived early on the morning of April 4 and knew immediately she wouldn’t have much time to find the ring. Chadderdon and Storey live in a community of townhouses, all of which are connected to one main line. That meant every toilet flush or shower from another home would push the ring closer to the main sewer, where it likely would be lost forever.
It didn’t take Arteaga long to locate where the ring was, but the difficult part would be getting their hands on it.
Well, that and cleaning it.
“I pulled the toilet and I put the camera down there,” Arteaga said. “I found the ring about 88 feet out.”
The ring was inside a sewer pipe outside the house, about 10 feet down. Excavating the pipe would shut down the water system for the entire neighborhood and be extremely costly. Chadderdon and Storey were ready to call it a loss.
But Arteaga and Sifford weren’t ready to give up. They decided they would try to get at the ring from the main sewer, hoping to flush it out and catch it in a pool net. That meant someone would need to brave the sewer, and Arteaga didn’t hesitate.
“I care about people. I am married, and I know what my wedding ring means to me,” Arteaga said. “I could just tell that she was devastated. She was heartbroken. She was showing me pictures of the ring. It was a beautiful ring, and I just have a heart.”
Arteaga was “elbow deep” in sewage waste, holding the pool net while Sifford and another plumber sent water down the line trying to push the ring out. They quickly lost sight of the ring and began to worry it had been lost.
The team decided to add an attachment to the camera to take up more space in the pipe and hopefully push the ring toward Arteaga. That didn’t work either.
“It’s funny. My manager looked down the manhole at one point and my Apple Watch was just covered in dookie,” Arteaga said. “We got to a point where the customer came over and yelled down the manhole, ‘It’s OK. We’re not gonna find it.’ And I was like, ‘No, we’re finding this thing.’”
After two failed plans, Sifford added towels around the camera, this time making it large enough to fill the entire pipe.
“I used the camera and put it down the main line and then pulled back slowly,” Arteaga said. “It was like blind fishing, and I eventually got it to pop out and I grabbed it. It was wrapped around a bunch of toilet paper and a tampon, but I got it.
“It’s a huge ring, so that was exciting, and they could not have been happier. She was in tears, because we all kind of gave up hope after a while.”
Arteaga estimated that the ring eventually got pushed about 115 feet from the toilet where it had been flushed, and the whole retrieval process took about five hours.
“Our work’s not easy. I mean, what we do, it’s physical, it’s disgusting,” Sifford said. “So jobs like that, it’s rewarding. It would have been a little defeating if we hadn’t done it. But the odds of it working out were so slim. … But when it does work out, it’s rewarding. It really just takes a rough job and makes you realize this is why we do this.”
