Cat rescued after 12 hours stuck in pipe

Plucky kitten Jessie is recovering at home after being rescued from an underground pipe she was stuck in for 12 hours.

The six-month-old was dug out by firefighters after falling 6ft deep into the guttering pipe outside her home in Bloxwich. Despite the ordeal and suffering from hypothermia she is now well on the road to recovery.

Owner Nick Cherry, aged 27, who lives with hairdresser girlfriend Katie Edwards, 20, in Signal Grove, said: "On Friday I took my girlfriend to work about 9am and we have only just started to let her out a bit so she normally just sits under the cars.

"I came back and she wasn't there so I presumed she had wandered off.

"Later on in the night my girlfriend was leaning out the window and we could hear the cat, I went out and the penny dropped because she was sniffing round that pipe the other day."

Katie rang the fire service while Nick, a self-employed plasterer, got to work trying to remove some of the guttering to reach down and get Jessie.

Unable to find her, he called firefighters who arrived at around 9.30pm on Friday with the technical rescue team who used a telescopic flexible camera to locate the missing pet. Fire crew members then dismantled the pipe, rescued Jessie and reassembled the pipe.

Nick added: "She was lifeless when she came out."We tried to calm her down and wrapped her up in blankets and took her to the PDSA in Birmingham.

"They said she had hypothermia and they kept her in overnight and we picked her up on Saturday afternoon.

"We are going to be more protective now, but it would be cruel not to let her out. She has definitely got nine lives, I think not much longer down there and she wouldn't have made it."

Watch Commander Steve Palmer from Bloxwich Fire Station, added: "She was a bit worse for wear, but it was a happy ending and all the lads worked really hard."