Workers recover woman's diamond rings — worth $10,000 — from sewer

GOLDEN, COLO. - It's not very often you hear stories about items being found in a sewer, but Jason Hart and Kevin Osborne aren't too shy when it comes to telling you the value of what they recently found.

"We've found screwdrivers, G.I. Joes, and Barbie heads," Hart said. "All of a sudden I see a gold band, and a ring."

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Tuesday, Hart, Osborne and the rest of their crew from the North Table Mountain Water and Sanitation Department near Golden were dispatched to find two gold rings Gail Wilkerson accidentally flushed down her toilet.

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"This is the most wonderful story," Wilkerson said.

Wilkerson would probably tell you there's much more to that $10,000 price tag her diamond rings recently appraised for. One of them her father gave her on her 18th birthday. He died that year.

The other ring contained diamonds her mother wore.

"You can't put anything to it to describe it," she said. "I just felt like not a whole person without them."

Wilkerson said she took her rings off at a water park so she wouldn't lose them. She rolled them in Kleenex and put them in her bag.

"Well, during the day I had blown my nose, and I had thrown more Kleenexes in there, so when I got home I just grabbed the Kleenexes, threw them down the toilet," she said.

She went to bed and woke up in a panic.

"And I started screaming, 'Oh, my gosh! I flushed my rings down the toilet,'" she said.

She and her friends hired a plumbing crew to check the lines in her house. When they struck out, they recommended the local sewer crew.

Asked about the chances of finding the rings, the crew from North Table Mountain Water and Sanitation said they were slim to none. They used their aging jet truck, sprayed down the sewer line and set a trap.

"So I was down in the manhole, kind of digging through, sifting through the debris and then I happened to find the rings," Hart said.

"I was pretty surprised," he said.

So was Gail Wilkerson, with a story to tell of just how much she almost put down the drain.

"They could have given up, and they didn't have to go through all the extra lengths," Wilkerson said.

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