Public Works Sleuths Find Elderly Couples’ Special Rings
When Marie Robertson accidently flushed her rings down the toilet, her husband was ready to just give up and consider them lost for good. "I'm from the old school, I'm 91 years old," Charles Robertson said in a video recently released by the city of Springfield, Missouri, "in my age group you accept things the way they are."
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After three weeks, their daughter, Joy, however, convinced her father to ask the local public works department to see if they could help. The rings had special meaning for the couple who have been married for 67 years. Robertson, a retired dentist, had purchased a gold band with a cluster of small diamonds for his wife, who is now living in a nursing home and being treated for Alzheimer's, what he recalls to Yahoo Shine as "many, many, many years ago." His wife had a custom casing made of leftover gold filings from his dental practice fabricated to accompany it.
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"Honestly it was like finding a needle in a haystack," Jim Noblitt, who was part of the team dispatched from Public Works and Environmental Services to recover the ring, told Yahoo! Shine. Noblitt explained that he gets 3 or 4 calls a year to help find lost rings but its usually a futile assignment-the rings are whisked rapidly through the pipes and dumped into a larger sewer system.
Noblitt's secret weapon was a tiny remote control camera, which is snaked into the sewer pipes to check for maintenance issues. The team worked for a many hours and only spotted the usual "roots, rocks, and bugs." It was Friday afternoon, and Robertson recalls, "I told the fellows to go home." But, they kept working, and four separate lines away from the house-about 800 feet-had a breakthrough. There was a little dip in the PVC pipe that was catching debris. They flushed the out the line into a downstream manhole and started pulling up debris in 5 gallon buckets.
Noblitt spied the rings, fished them out, and rushed back to the house, but Roberston and his wife had gone out. He took them home himself and cleaned them. "They don't look too good after three weeks in the sewer," he said. "I finally reached the gentleman on the phone, and he asked when I would be at work on Monday. He was waiting for me downtown at the office at 7 a.m."
When he handed her the rings, Roberston says his wife was "elated." He added, "We were plum happy, and they [Noblitt and his team] were plum happy too. I can't sing their praises enough."
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