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7 Strangest Items Found In Plumbing Pipes

You can imagine the oddities that plumbers find during the course of their day inside people’s pipes. Odd drain cleaning tales are more common than not. We thought we would share with you some of the top strangest items discovered in plumbing pipes.

Fire department rescues 13 baby ducks from sewer drain:

Thirteen baby ducks fell into a storm drain in an Apex, NC community. Several neighbors in the Regency at White Oak Creek neighborhood in Apex grew worried when they saw a mother duck pacing around a storm drain. Four firefighters arrived and helped retrieve the ducks from the sewer, putting them in a bucket to reunite them with their parents. Video shows one of the men gently sliding the ducklings out of the bucket in front of a pond. They all rushed to mother, happy to be reconnected.

Gold:

In Ticino, Switzerland, the streets aren’t paved with gold. But the sewage pipes are packed with it. And across the country as a whole, some $3 million worth of gold and silver is thrown out in wastewater every year.

That is according to Swiss researchers who evaluated 64 municipal wastewater treatment plants across the country. Scientists have long known that small amounts of valuable metals can wind up mixed in with sewage. In Switzerland, the researchers found, the small quantities add up — to more than 6,600 pounds of silver and nearly 100 pounds of gold, the researchers estimated.

In most cases, it would be so expensive to extract and recycle that it wouldn’t make economic sense — recovery would be “scarcely worthwhile,” as the researchers put it.

But the concentrations of metals varied across the country. And in Ticino — where a number of gold refineries are located — there’s an unusually high amount of gold passing through treatment plants.

Firefighters In China Pull Cow Out Of A Drain:

When you hear about an animal stuck in a drain, you probably think about cats or dogs. But what about a cow?

Apparently, that isn’t entirely unheard of. In China’s Guangxi province, a group of firefighters were filmed rescuing a large brown cow from a drain that seemed way too small for the animal.

Its owner, who was identified by The Telegraph as Mr. Huang, said that the cow simply ran away. After two days of searching, Huang discovered the cow when he heard it mooing at the bottom of the drain.

Dentures:

A customer called a plumbing company with a toilet stoppage. When the technician looked into the pipes to find the source, he pulled out upper and lower dentures from the toilet. The customer wondered where his dentures went. Apparently, he had a little too much to drink the night before and unknowingly made a deposit in the porcelain wishing well. Oops! 

A Poopsicle:

A period of freezing weather always keeps plumbers busy with bursting frozen pipes, but a Washington DC plumber got a call about a main sewer backup. Upon arrival, the plumbers found that the sewer line had frozen solid and the section of pipe with feces in it would need to be cut out and replaced. When the technician removed the pipe, he found a “poopsicle.”

Photographs:

Bad breakups, forgotten friends, and lost family members may all be reasons people flush pictures down the toilet. The problem is that paper like this – the non-toilet variety, that is – won’t break down very quickly and can easily cause a clog.

We suggest burning them, or better yet, recycling that paper instead of flushing it.

Wigs:

Why somebody would flush a wig down a toilet we’ll never know. Plumbers have stories of finding them in the toilet system plumbing pipes which makes us wonder if we’re missing something about the wide world of wig wearers.

It seems like the trash can would be a better way to do dispose of a wig, right?

If your drains are blocked and you don’t know why-Give the drain cleaning professionals at Auger Pros Plumbing a Call, we’ve seen it all and we’d be happy to help. 214-206-6580

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