After 13 years, a Minnesota lady who unintentionally flushed her wedding band down the toilet has discovered it.
“Oh my gosh, this is my ring,” said 71-year-old Mary Strand earlier this week at the metropolitan council office in Rogers when she was presented with the gold and diamond ring.
“It’s nice to see it again.”
While working at a plant in March, the wastewater treatment workers of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Council discovered a ring buried in grit and sludge next to a chisel and a clamp.
The council received hundreds of reports from people claiming to have misplaced the ring, but with the aid of old photographs and jeweler Paul Hartquist, they were finally able to identify the owner.
After WCCO published a report regarding the council officials’ efforts to track down the ring’s original owner, Ms. Strand said that her daughter saw the ring on television. “You’re never going to believe this, mom, but I just saw Frank Vascellaro do a story about your ring,” my daughter said when she called me, according to Ms. Strand.
John Tierney, the maintenance manager for the Met Council, expressed optimism that “we would find someone and I’m glad for these two.”
On their 33rd wedding anniversary in 2010, Ms. Strand received the ring as a gift from her husband, David. 46 years have passed since the pair got married.
She claimed that because the ring didn’t fit properly, it dropped into the toilet after a few months of wearing it.
“I am standing there washing my hands and I reached over and I flushed it and I am watching this ring swirl around,” Ms Strand said, explaining how she lost the ring.
“I dove for the ring and it went down the drain.”
Even her husband’s skill in locating the ring—who apparently owns his own drain and sewer company—failed.
“We put a camera down the line, a sewer camera, it goes 200 feet down the line, and we didn’t see anything,” Mr Strand said. “That was it. We wrote it off.”
Even though the ring has been circling sewers for 13 years and is no longer usable, Ms. Strand said she was just “glad to have it back, because you can get it reset.”
It comes out that Ms. Strand had previously misplaced other rings.
She had misplaced her wedding band as well as a ring that her coworkers had given her for Christmas and was set with five sapphires, according to the Washington Post.
