Like most of us when asked what we are most thankful for each Thanksgiving season, things like family, friends and good health top our lists. But this year, Tina and Bernie Fornadley of Niguel Shores in Dana Point have added some interesting acquaintances to their list—a crew from the South Coast Water District.
Just how did SCWD’s collection systems supervisor Ernie Garcia, system operator Justin Davis, senior operations and maintenance technician Artie Garcia and closed circuit TV operator Jimmy Gomez land on the Fornadley’s Thanksgiving list? It all started on an early morning in September when Tina woke to find her precious diamond engagement ring missing from her finger.
After hours of frantic searching, Tina’s husband Bernie asked, “Are you sure you didn’t flush it?”
Tina paused and thought back to the early morning hours and remembered getting up to use the bathroom at about 5 a.m. She recalled that during the night she had moved her ring to her pinky finger because it was bugging her.
“I never take my ring off but it felt itchy that night so I moved it to another finger. I realized that it must have slipped off when I got up to use the restroom.”
So by the process of elimination—and funnily enough, during the process of another kind of elimination—the Fornadleys realized the ring had most likely gone down the toilet.
By the time they came to this conclusion, it was 9 a.m. and in the four hours that had passed, the ring could be long gone.
Bernie tried, to no avail, vacuuming the toilet drain with a shop vac, hoping that by some miracle the ring had not made it to the main drain.
The couple has been married since August of 2000 and that ring—nearly 4 carats in weight—was the ring Bernie presented to Tina when he proposed.
Both were terribly distraught, Tina even more so after calling the water district to inquire whether they would have any recommendations to offer.
“At first they said there was nothing we could do,” said Tina. “I was so upset.”
With panic and the obvious sound of desperation in her voice as Tina tried desperately to hold back tears, the SCWD customer service representative on the other end of the line told Tina she would refer the problem to Ernie.
Ernie promptly called back to tell the Fornadleys he would be sending a crew shortly.
“My first thought when I heard Tina’s story was that their home is in a low flow area so if it did go into the main line there would be a chance to catch it,” said Ernie. “I told them not to use the sinks, showers or toilets and we would do our best.”
Justin installed a debris trap—a screen inside the 8-inch diameter pipe where it flows into at a manhole downstream—to hopefully catch any heavy debris. He also brought a hydraulic line cleaner along to try to flush the ring into the trap.
“I was confident that if it was in there we’d catch it,” said Justin. “I put two traps in just to be sure.”
After that Artie, Jimmy and Ernie put a video camera inside the main line and ran the camera 176 feet down the line but couldn’t see the ring on the video monitor. Justin also cleaned the line from downstream up a couple times that day.
Despite their efforts, the crew had no luck locating the ring and they packed up their truck and left.
“We had the cleanest line in Dana Point,” said Bernie, “but we still had no ring.”
Ernie suggested that Bernie call a plumber to video the line from the house. After about the third call Bernie placed, he got someone to respond. Bernie pulled the toilet off its mount in preparation for the plumber’s arrival.
The plumber told the couple that he checked the private line between the house and the main line and gave them a grave explanation—or according to Bernie, more of a sales pitch—saying the ring was most likely there but their line was clogged and had root blockage.
“The plumber had us thinking that to get the ring back the line would have had to be dug up and completely replaced, to the tune of thousands of dollars,” Bernie said. “He had us thinking that the expense to get the ring may not be worth it and he also put my wife in a panic, fearful that the pipes were busting and full of roots and our house was in jeopardy of a future flood. Incidentally, our private lines turned out to be just fine.”
Still heartbroken, Bernie reached out to Ernie once again.
Ernie was with his boss Joe McDivitt when Bernie’s call came in. Joe encouraged Ernie to go back for another try.
The next day the SCWD crew returned and replaced the debris trap for another go at it and repeated the same procedures—again to no avail.
“Next we brought a portable camera, ran it down the toilet drain and didn’t see the ring after quite a few attempts,” said Ernie. “We were just about to tell Bernie that there was no hope. Then in a last ditch effort we finally spotted it on camera and began trying to flush it down the line with a high pressure, 1000-psi jetter hose. The ring still wouldn’t come out but the sight of it gave us our second wind.”
The crew went in through another sewer line access point with a portable jetter. It didn’t work. They tried flushing all the toilets in the house at the same time and turned on all the faucets at once. The ring still wouldn’t budge.
They kept trying and watched on camera as the ring started to be nudged along slowly by the water pressure and the movement of the camera.
“Once the ring was pushed into the main drain, we thought we stood a good chance of retrieving it,” said Ernie. “When we first videoed the main, once again we couldn’t see the ring but we kept flushing the line.”
Justin, who was waiting down at the manhole cover on the street, saw a pile of foam accumulating in his debris trap, but no ring. Someone on the street was doing laundry and soap suds were coming through the main line, he said.
“As soon as we shut off the water pressure to the basket and the water calmed, I looked in and there it was,” said Justin.
Cheers rang out and high fives were exchanged all around.
Artie said that in his 27 years with SCWD he had taken a couple of similar calls, but this was the first time he’d actually found a ring.
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