When Garden City, ID, resident Noelle Storey accidentally flushed her 3-carat marquise-cut diamond engagement ring down the toilet, the newlywed's hopes of ever seeing it again seemed to swirl away with it.
But thanks to the unwavering determination of plumber Dylan Arteaga of Plumbing Solutions of Idaho, what could have been a heartbreaking loss turned into a powerful story of perseverance — and shared understanding.
According to the Idaho Statesman, Storey and her fiancé Garrett Chadderdon had been engaged barely two months when the ring vanished in a freak bathroom mishap. Desperate and running out of hope, the couple contacted Plumbing Solutions early on April 4, not expecting a miracle, but hoping for at least a sliver of possibility.
What they got was Arteaga, a plumber who not only brought technical skill to the job, but something even more powerful: empathy.
“I care about people,” Arteaga told the Idaho Statesman. “I am married, and I know what my wedding ring means to me. 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's big heart turned out to be a crucial part of what happened next. After locating the ring with a drain camera roughly 88 feet down the sewer pipe, Arteaga and her boss, Andy Sifford, realized conventional retrieval methods weren’t going to cut it.
Excavating the pipe would have disrupted water service to the entire neighborhood— a costly and invasive option. Instead, they opted for an unconventional approach: fishing the ring out of the sewer with a pool net.
While others might have balked, Arteaga didn’t hesitate to descend into the manhole, standing elbow-deep in raw sewage, holding a net and an unwavering sense of purpose.
“We got to a point where the customer came over and yelled down the manhole, ‘It’s OK. We’re not gonna find it,’ she recounted. "And I was like, ‘No, we’re finding this thing.’”
It took three plans and five hours of painstaking — and stinky — work before Arteaga’s sheer persistence paid off.
The plumbers wrapped a towel around the camera probe so it would take up more space in the pipe. They used the improvised device as a blind fishing rod. Eventually they were able to push the ring down the pipe to the sewer where Arteaga snagged it.
“It’s a huge ring, so that was exciting,” Arteaga told the Idaho Statesman. “They could not have been happier. [Storey] was in tears, because we all kind of gave up hope after a while.”
The five-hour ordeal may have been physically grueling, but for Arteaga and her colleague, it was deeply rewarding.
“Our work’s not easy,” Sifford told the Idaho Statesman. “It’s physical, it’s disgusting… But when it does work out, it’s rewarding.”
Credit: Image by The Jeweler Blog using ChatGPT and DALL-E 3.