A family cat who vanished from his own living room was found alive at a landfill days later, stranded on a ledge 15 feet above the floor of the trash pit.
Mike, an 8-year-old domestic short hair, had lived with Neal Augenstein and his family for more than six years when he simply failed to turn up for dinner one evening.
Neal spent the next two days walking the neighborhood with a bag of treats, calling Mike’s name and checking as far as the storm drains. Then a far worse possibility caught up with him.
The family had recently got rid of three old couches.
“I was having a sinking feeling that the cat was in the couch,” Neal told NBC4 Washington.
By the time he went looking, the couch had already been hauled away, which meant Mike was somewhere inside a working waste facility surrounded by heavy machinery and moving trash.
Then Mauricio Martinez, a heavy equipment operator at the landfill, spotted a frightened cat down in the pit with no way back up.
“And he seems scared,” Martinez recalled. “And he was, like, trapped. And it was a big drop.”
Mike had ended up on a ledge roughly 15 feet above the asphalt, with nowhere safe to jump, so the crew positioned a loader bucket underneath him and coaxed him aboard.
“It took us about 10 minutes to get the cat down,” said Joshua Murphy, the landfill’s assistant superintendent.
Mike was out of the pit, but he was not done running. He slipped away from the crew and crawled through a tunnel into a storage room, turning his own rescue into a second search. Animal control eventually caught him and took him to a nearby shelter.
That is where Neal finally got him back.
“Just an amazingly happy ending, and I’m so thankful to everyone who played a part in it,” he said.
