A kitten cries from a drain. Firefighters make a ‘contraption.’ And a family gets a pet.

Georgie the kitten only weighed about a pound, small enough to fall through the grate of a storm drain. But lucky for him, he could meow like a full-grown tiger.

Richard Averitte and his 9-year-old son, Felix, heard the unlucky feline on their afternoon walk down Forestville Road on Saturday. Then they spotted him stranded at the bottom the drain — a little gray blur stuck 5 feet down.

For Averitte, the situation looked grim enough that he started rehearsing his “sometimes things don’t work out” speech.

But then Felix spotted Raleigh’s fire station no. 28 across the street. Even though Averitte explained that real firefighters don’t really rescue stuck animals like the firefighters on TV, they ran over to report the kitten’s plight.

Before long, a handful of them were standing over the drain, scratching their heads, offering comments like, “Gosh, that’s a mess.”

But then came another firefighter, Averitte said, “and this one looked a little more studious. He had steel-rimmed glasses, like an engineering student.”

The crew of station No. 28 then fashioned a “contraption” out of rope and PVC pipe, dangling a loop down through the slats of the storm drain in attempt to loop the kitten.

As they tried and failed a few times, Averitte started rehearsing another speech, this one generally about things going bad sometimes, despite people trying to help, and how Superman can’t save everybody.

“All of a sudden, they got the kitten,” he said. “They reeled it up and he grabbed it. It was like the human condition, right there.”

It turned out the Averitte family already had three cats, but how could they refuse a gray-striped waif who called from the bottom of a hole?

A visit to the vet showed their newest family member to be about 4 weeks old, most likely feral but healthy.

They named him Georgie, a joke that fans of Stephen King’s “It” will understand, involving a character tragically pulled into the sewer by a clown-shaped monster.

But in this case, Georgie’s monster lost out.

This story was originally published June 26, 2023 at 4:32 PM.

Josh Shaffer

The News & Observer

919-829-4818

Josh Shaffer is a general assignment reporter on the watch for “talkers,” which are stories you might discuss around a water cooler. He has worked for The News & Observer since 2004 and writes a column about unusual people and places.