No one can say for sure just how long the nine-foot-long alligator had been in the storm drain, but people in the neighborhood said they first noticed it about two months ago, peering out from between the bars of a metal grate.
Was it living in the sewer? Day after day, she was there, hissing at anyone who got too close. But the longer the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) stayed in the storm drain of Hilton Head Plantation, the more people in Hilton Head Plantation started to wonder: was it stuck? Someone called the property management two weeks ago to complain about the alligator in the sewer, and plantation security started monitoring the situation, hoping the beast would somehow wriggle free and work it’s way back through the sewer. That didn’t happen, and then crowds of spectators started gathering–word got out. Something had to be done.
This wasn’t the first time this has happened on Hilton Head Island. An alligator wanders into a storm drain, can’t turn around because the pipe is too narrow and the turns are too sharp, and gets stuck. Alligators don’t need to eat every day, so they can survive for a while, but no one likes being stuck in a sewer–not even alligators. And most people wouldn’t volunteer to be the guy going in after the gator.
Leave it to Joe Maffo from Critter Management! He was called in to assess the situation on Friday afternoon and had the alligator freed after about four hours of trial and error. At first he tried prodding the gator with two twenty-foot lengths of PVC piping taped together, trying to get her to move further out of the pipe so he could get a snare around the neck and pull her out. But the alligator only moved out of the way of the pipe. She would rather stay in the storm drain than go with any person. She could move around within the pipe, but couldn’t make the sharp ninety-degree turn to get herself out. So Joe had to get creative.
He attached plastic bottles to a heavy rope, and then he tied several treble hooks and shark hooks to the rope. The plan: the bottles would keep the line afloat as he tried to snag the hooks on the alligator’s armored back.
Joe cast the line and pulled it back empty. Again he cast the line and pulled back nothing. The third time it worked. A shark hook snagged on the alligator’s upper jaw. As soon as they had pulled the gator through the pipe far enough to snare her around the snout, they did. They pulled her out a little further, moved the snare down around her neck so she couldn’t slip off, and then one last heave and she was free, sort of.
They taped her up and loaded her into the bed of Joe’s truck and he drove her the mile and a half to the Hilton Head Plantation POA office. She was scratched up from being in the pipe for so long, and after fighting off Critter Management all afternoon she was tired. When Joe set her down on the bank to set her free, she bellied down and rested there for ten minutes before casually raising up, walking into the water, and swimming away without so much as a splash. But tired as she was, the gator was swimming in a lagoon by dinnertime.
“I’d like to see them secure the ends of these pipes with something that wouldn’t restrict water flow but would keep the alligators from getting through,” Joe said. This was the fourth alligator he’d pulled out of a storm drain in six years or so. The others were: an eleven-footer in Rose Hill last year, one in sun city a few years before, and two at the different waste treatment plants on Hilton Head. “They weren’t aggressive,” Joe said. “They were just lost.”
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