'MacGyvers of Auburndale' rescue cat stuck in pipe
AUBURNDALE (FOX 13) - Some call them the "MacGyvers of Auburndale." Two city employees who see the world in ways others can't even imagine work in the city’s utilities department and just came up with their best solution to a problem yet!
Manny Silva and Joel Rivera are called out every time the city has to come up with a solution that is outside the box. They just did it again, this time with a cat which got stuck in a water line.
After what Castle the cat just went thru, you can understand why he may be hiding be under the bed for a long time.
The other day, his owner let him into the lanai.
“I was unaware that the screen was damaged and he simply walked out thru here," Dan Borah explained, pointing through a hole in his screen.
Castle scampered into a nearby drainage pipe and, 40 hours later, he was still in there.
“We were concerned that the cat was unable to come out and was so afraid to come out that he might have actually died in the pipe, behind our house, Borah said.
So he called downtown. The city of Auburndale sent out their "go-to guys" - Manny Silva and Joel Rivera.
They went to this end of the pipe and called the cat. No-go.
So they came to another side, dug a hole and cut the pipe; hoping the cat would be close enough to grab.
He wasn’t.
"It was like 90 or 92 degrees. It was hot, really hot. We were concerned about the cat suffocating in there," Rivera said.
By now, castle had crawled deep into the line, 70 feet away from the opening. Despite that, they thought "never say die."
"There is always a solution to every problem,” Silva said.
And this was theirs - they put a water hose on to the end of a seemingly endless PVC pipe, ran it into the drainage line past castle, and gently turned on the water.
And out came Castle.
"Had it not been for their creative thinking, I just don't know what would have happened," Borah said.