(Courtesy photos)
Gallery: Wedding ring flushed down toilet retrieved by city crew
REDLANDS -- Eva Negrete slipped her wedding ring back on her finger Wednesday after it spent a month in the city's sewers.
Around 10 a.m. that morning, Joe Sanchez, wastewater collection system supervisor for the city, was alerted that Negrete had called to say she flushed her wedding ring down the toilet at her Clay Street home.
"I thought it had happened this morning, but she told me it happened a month ago," Sanchez said. "I thought that was a pretty good sign because it gave it time to move down the line.
"That's when I called the crew over. `We're gonna get this,' I told them. `We're gonna get this thing."'
They immediately executed a search down the manhole in front of her house. No results. Then they searched from the manhole on Lugonia Avenue.
In the third manhole downstream from her house they became heroes.
"It wasn't missing any diamonds. It was in good shape," Sanchez said. "We were excited about getting it."
They had run a hydrojet nozzle and hose - basically a vacuum truck - with an 800-foot reel through the manhole. They sent 2,500 pounds of pressure through the line sending sewage through a screen, which ultimately caught the ring.
"It was fortunate she lives at
the top of the line. There were not a lot of homes above her. If there had been, it could have washed through farther.Five hundred more feet is the last manhole they would have been able to get it out of, because that's where it meets the larger trunk line.
"If it had gotten in there, there's no way we would have found it," Sanchez said.
The whole thing took about 45 minutes, about 15 minutes per manhole.
"They rinsed it off, handed it to me, and I drove it to a jewelry store and had it cleaned," he said. "Then I called her and asked her to describe the ring to me.
"I told her that I found it, and she couldn't believe it. She was jazzed up, happy as ever."
The crew members are Kenneth Hilliard, James Estrada and Herman Marshall.
"Those guys deserve all the credit. They're the ones that fished it out," Sanchez said.
Negrete says she's engaged to be married March 23, but had already had the wedding band adhered to the engagement ring.
"We were without the ring and we were stressing out because we didn't have the money to go get a new ring," she said.
Sanchez' crew represents the city's attitude toward customer service, said city spokesman Carl Baker.
"That's the kind of people we have working at the city of Redlands. They care about the residents."
toni.momberger@inlandnewspapers.com, @tonimomberger, 909-259-9323
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