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A little kitten named Petty survived a 90 foot accidental fall down a shaft and found a home with one of her rescuers.
A work crew with the Eastern New Mexico Water Utility Authority first saw the tiny kitten when she bolted out of an equipment shed at a project site at Ute Lake in New Mexico, shortly after their 9am arrival at an intake structure water project site on Friday, October 25.
Project engineer Mitch Haskins said the kitten ran past workers when they opened the door to a storage shed located next to a circular shaft that is part of an intake structure that will feed lake water into a pipeline leading to nearby Curry and Roosevelt counties.
Workers figured the kitten had taken shelter in the shed and was startled when they opened the door. She ran out onto the work site and disappeared from view.
An hour later, workers began to hear distressed meowing but still didn’t see her anywhere.
When they went beyond a safety fence surrounding the 90 foot deep shaft and looked down, they saw that the kitten had gotten through an opening in the fence and had fallen to the bottom.
The work crew organized a rescue operation and sent a man down the shaft. He returned holding the kitten, who was frightened and shaking but apparently unharmed.
Workers originally called the kitten Freefall, for the Tom Petty song ‘Free Fallin,’ but renamed her Petty when they discovered that she was a female.
Petty was adopted by the crew member who rescued her from the bottom of the shaft.
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See the video news report on the story.
