2009 is here and Roto-Rooter has produced its annual list of Top 5 Strangest Items Recovered from Drainpipes over the past year. As North America's largest provider of plumbing and drain cleaning services, Roto-Rooter has more than 4000 plumbing technicians from Boston to Austin and everywhere in between. Lots of plumbing companies probably find strange items but I doubt they find the wide variety of things we find every year.
Our list includes a 4-carat diamond ring recovered by a Cincinnati plumber in April. He had to dig up the basement floor to reach the pipe after locating it with a fiber-optic sewer inspection camera normally used for sewer repair work. The list also included two cats. The first was a Maine Coon kitty in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on April 26th. The second was a kitten rescued by a Columbus, Ohio plumber on June 19th. That kitten was suctioned out using a low power setting on a pumper truck normally used for cleaning out septic tanks and grease traps. But the cat wasn't actually sucked through the hosed. The service tech used a small hose in tandem with a sewer inspection camera to suction the little cat's hind quarter to the mouth of the hose just long enough to drag him out of the pipe 
unharmed.
The list also includes an amazing 94-foot long tree root extracted from a pipe by Bart Mathis, a Roto-Rooter Contractor from Sarasota, Florida. Bart made the list a few years ago for rescuing Zap, a tiny kitten from an underground conduit pipe. That 94-foot long root may be the longest on record for any of the plumbing contractors I'm aware of. That may also be the most effective sewer cleaning job ever completed. Finally, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, one of our licensed plumbing specialists pulled out a series of children's' toys that were responsible for a mysterious clog. The toys included a bowling pin and steering wheel. Here's the news release if you want to learn more about our Top 5 list of strangest drainpipe recoveries of 2008.
