Public works crews in Chino Hills retrieved the lost sparkler and returned it to the rightful owner.

A year after a man in Chino Hills, California, accidentally flushed his fiancée’s engagement ring down the toilet, the couple was finally reunited with the long-lost jewel, KTLA 5 reports. In March of 2022, the Chino Hills resident lost the precious gemstone. Right after the tragic incident, the man’s soon-to-be mother-in-law alerted the Chino Hills Public Works staff and explained the situation, according to Nicole Freeman, a public information officer for the City of Chino Hills. In addition to asking for professional help, the man pulled out all the stops to recover the missing jewel. “Once he realized the ring was missing, he did what he could to try and retrieve it, even removing the toilet from the flange,” Freeman said.

Since he didn’t have any luck spotting the rock, he rented a sewer inspection camera to try to locate the engagement ring in the drainpipes. According to the news statement, the man actually saw the ring, but he ended up pushing it farther into the pipes. Instead of throwing in the towel, the public works crew noted that since the place of residence was located at the end of a cul-de-sac, the ring couldn’t have traveled very dar down the pipes, despite multiple loads of laundry and showers taken. So, the public works crews did all that they could to find the ring. They brought a closed-circuit television inspection truck to search the city’s mainline for the ring, and the staff tried flushing the sewer system while inspecting the mainline in an attempt to recover the item.

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Despite all of their efforts, the workers never spotted the ring; still, they told the man not to lose hope. More than a year later, in May of 2023, a miracle happened: While the Chino Hills Public Works crew was performing routine sewer maintenance in the man’s neighborhood, the workers came across the long-lost ring. “Staff who were originally in contact with the resident in March 2022 reached out to the resident to confirm the details of the missing ring, and once it was confirmed, the ring was sterilized and returned to the resident the next day,” Freeman stated. After the group returned the ring to the couple, the staff reported that the man was so happy to be reunited with the sentimental item.

In December of 2022, a local plumber in Florida also found a missing engagement ring that was flushed down the toilet 21 years beforehand, according to MSN. Right after Nick proposed to his now-wife, Shaina, she realized her diamond ring had fallen into the toilet after she was wiping off the bathroom counter. The couple did whatever they could to locate the rock. “I climbed down into the septic tank, so we could pump every bit of it through a strainer to try to find it,” Shaina recalled. To find the missing piece of jewelry, she used a hose over a window screen to pump out the water into a 55-gallon drum, Fox News reported. Despite their efforts, they never found the ring. They decided to accept their fate and buy a replacement ring.

Twenty-one years later, a local plumber came to replace the toilet for Nick’s mother, Renee, the family tells WFLA-TV in Tampa. The plumber unlatched the toilet from the ground and dumped the excess water into the bathtub. That’s when he noticed a sparkly object floating in the tub. “He said, ‘Do you think it’s Shaina’s ring?’” Renee remembered. “I looked at it again, and I went, ‘Oh my God, yes!’” The band was broken, but the diamond itself was intact, so Renee and her husband got the jewel cleaned and gave it to Nick and Shaina as a Christmas gift. After Shaina opened the gift, she was moved to tears. “I sat there, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is my ring. This is my ring,’” she reflected.

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