A kitten stuck deep inside a Utah drain pipe got an unlikely hero this week: a robot normally used to inspect sewer lines. West Valley City's Public Works Department sent in R2D2, a custom remote-controlled crawler equipped with a live camera and lights, and the machine nudged the frightened animal straight into the arms of a waiting crew member.
According to Gulf Coast News and Weather, West Valley City Government said its Storm Water Crew received a call about the kitten trapped in a drain pipe on Monday. The crew first tried a low-tech approach, lowering a pole camera into the pipe to locate the animal and attempting to coax it out by hand. As reported by wgal.com, the kitten simply would not budge.
Robot Built for Pipes, Not Pets, Finishes the Job
That is when officials brought in R2D2, a tool normally used to inspect the condition of underground pipes rather than rescue animals from them. The city government said R2D2 could now add kitten rescuer to its list of functions, per Gulf Coast News and Weather. Once lowered into the pipe, the crawler gently nudged the kitten forward until it dropped safely into a crew member's hands, and the station's report notes the kitten did not appear to be injured afterward.
West Valley City Government shared video of the rescue on Facebook, showing the remote-controlled crawler guiding the kitten out of the pipe step by step. The West Valley City Government Facebook page describes the city as Utah's second-largest, with roughly 145,000 residents.
Not the First Kitten Pulled From a Pipe
Utah has seen this kind of rescue before. In St. George, three kittens were once found stuck in a water pipe roughly 10 feet underground, and it took nearly four hours for the St. George Fire Department and Roto-Rooter Southern Utah to flush them out with plumbing equipment, according to wfla.com. Rescuers there placed the kittens in pet carriers once free, and all three reportedly found permanent homes afterward.
Other rescues around the country have relied on whatever tool fit the situation. In Michigan, Southfield firefighters used a shop vacuum's suction to draw a trapped cat within reach, as detailed by thecooldown.com. In Colorado, a kitten stuck in a storm drain for four days was finally flushed out with water by West Metro Fire Rescue, according to kdvr.com. And in Danville, Virginia, firefighters responding to reports of purring and meowing freed a kitten from a drainage pipe on school grounds, per wfxrtv.com.
Each of these cases ended the same way the Utah rescue did: with the animal pulled out safely, whatever equipment it took to get there. For West Valley City's Storm Water Crew, that meant turning a pipe-inspection robot into an unexpected rescue tool for a single very stuck kitten.
