After receiving your engagement ring, you’re likely filled with excitement about marrying your partner. Such a piece is ultimately a daily reminder of your love for one another. And whether you selected it together or wanted it to be a complete surprise, it may be one of your most valuable possessions. As a result, you may be filled with some anxiety about the possibility of losing such a diamond. Unfortunately, that nightmare became a reality for one Idaho bride when she mistakenly flushed her three-carat marquise diamond down the toilet.
Following the incident, the couple, Garrett Chadderdon and Noelle Storey, who got engaged on February 8, 2025, immediately placed a call to a plumber. However, they were wary about even a professional’s ability to retrieve the diamond. “We were running out of hope the entire time,” Storey told the Idaho Statesman. Yet the plumbers, Dylan Arteaga and Andy Sifford, were committed to the task at hand. “Just having their positive reinforcement and encouragement and optimism the whole time was extremely helpful throughout,” Storey added. Even when one idea failed, the plumbers were willing to switch their approach and try something new. Since the soon-to-be newlyweds live in a townhouse, they’re connected to the same main line as their neighbors, making a retrieval of such an object that much more difficult. According to the Idaho Statesman, every time a house in their community flushed a toilet, the water pressure would push the ring closer and closer to the main sewer, making it even hard to retrieve.
Luckily, Arteaga was able to locate the ring fairly quickly: “I pulled the toilet, and I put the camera down there,” she told the newspaper. “I found the ring about 88 feet out.” Yet actually retrieving it was much more difficult, as accessing the pipe that the diamond was inside would require the plumbers to shut down the entire water system for the whole neighborhood. Such a plan didn’t seem feasible. However, they quickly came up with another approach, which required Arteaga to enter the sewer. The plumber didn’t hesitate at the task at hand: “I care about people,” she 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.” The third attempt, which involved the plumber essentially “blind fishing” with the camera, was ultimately a success. “It’s a huge ring, so that was exciting, and they could not have been happier,” the plumber told the outlet. “She was in tears, because we all kind of gave up hope after a while.”
The entire process took approximately five hours to complete, but the end result made the effort worthwhile. “Our work’s not easy,” Sifford said to the Idaho Statesman. “I mean, what we do, it’s physical, it’s disgusting. So jobs like that, it’s rewarding. It would have been a little defeating if we hadn’t done it. But the odds of it working out were so slim…But when it does work out, it’s rewarding. It really just takes a rough job and makes you realize this is why we do this.”