Kit-chen sink drama has the purr-fect ending
Six-month-old Ritchie had been missing for three days before her owners realised she was under the family home in Thurles, Co Tipperary.
Homeowner Tom Ryan Casey, 34, said: “We let out Ritchie and her sister Lulu on Friday morning as normal but Ritchie never came back. When we had those freezing cold nights on Friday and Saturday we just assumed that we’d lost her for good.”
But then the Ryan Casey family heard ‘cat’erwauling coming from under their dormer bungalow so they mounted a full-scale rescue operation, which is believed to have cost them thousands of euro.
“On Sunday my wife Ita was putting out the washing when she heard this miaowing noise coming from a pipe that goes under the house,” he explained.
The family realised the mischievous puss had squeezed into the opening of a four-inch-wide pipe and then crawled along the duct before getting stuck - under their newly built house.
The Ryan Caseys rang the gardaí and the fire brigade for help but no one was able to assist.
So the following day the Ryan Caseys put out an appeal on radio station Tipp FM for help in extracting the ‘sour puss’ from under their house.
Their prayers were answered by drainage firm A Quick Sharp and CCTV firm Weiser Systems.
Mr Ryan Casey said: “We dug up the bedroom to get the kitten, who was stuck two feet down in a pipe below all the concrete and everything. The men started with a hammer and chisel but they were getting nowhere so we had to bring in a pneumatic drill to get through the concrete.”
The rescue took four hours in all - and involved five men as well as five or six others neighbours.
The adventurous puss, which belongs to five-year-old Ayrton Ryan Casey, was eventually hauled out of the pipe and is none-the-worse for her ordeal.
Now the Ryan Caseys, who also have a daughter Bailey, aged three, and a son Corey, one, have blocked off the pipe to prevent a copy-cat cat-astrophe.
Ritchie is recovering at home but has left her owners with one slight headache: how to fill in the hole left behind from the rescue attempt.
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