Published Oct 13, 2026
@riverreachconstruction / Instagram.com
An orange kitten named Sue in Ohio celebrates her humble beginnings by wearing a baby-sized construction hat and vest and functioning as an honorary member of the crew that found her this summer trapped in an excavator!
In July, a worker at River Reach Construction in Barberton, Ohio discovered squeaky meows coming from the bottom of his Komatsu excavator and knew he had to rescue the furry baby. In a viral video on Instagram, Chase Guello, operating supervisor for RiverReach, walked us through the rescue, starting with footage from above showing the kitten down at the bottom of the machinery.
“He fell down in there and he cannot get out,” Guello said on the video, which earned more than 644K likes and nearly 7K comments.
He got onto the ground, went under the Komatsu and removed the bottom skid plates to access the area where the kitten was trapped. The little feline, maybe about a month old, plopped right onto the ground, and Guello laughed with relief.
“Well, rescue mission successful. We have retrieved the little kitten,” he says, as the stray squeals. “He definitely needs some TLC.”
One Instagram user described the kitten’s appearance purrfectly: “Dropped out of there like a snack in a vending machine.”
Komatsu Construction commented on the post and said: “Welcome to the team, little guy!” Then, the company asked the worker to send a message with his address, “so we can send you some swag for saving this little one.” (Stay tuned for what that swag turned out to be!)
Guello brought the kitten into the office to cool down and recover. He said that he might name the kitten Komatsu. Guello looked for siblings and a mother but couldn’t find any, so he took home the kitten – who turned out to be a girl! He posted another Instagram video the next day to update people on the kitten’s status, and thank the thousands of people who made the story go viral.
The rescued kitten, later discovered to be female, quickly went viral after Guello shared updates online. @riverreachconstruction / Instagram.com
“Thank you again for blowing it up and thanks for the support, guys,” Guello said in the follow-up video. One user cleverly commented: “So now it’s a CATMATSU.”
Guello’s mother’s friend, who works in cat rescue in Akron, Ohio, fostered the kitten for a few weeks, and then gave her to his colleague, Jared, a mechanic. Jared’s plan, Guello said, is to bring her back and forth between work and home until she is old enough to be a shop cat. Meanwhile, the kitten was named Sue, short for Komatsu. She is a pale orange and almost buff tabby and has the sweetest face.
And now, for the cutest part of this story, reported in PEOPLE: Komatsu sent River Reach Construction a kitten-size construction vest and yellow hard hat, so that Sue can be an honorary crew member! River Reach Construction’s adorable photo of Sue in uniform got 55.3K likes on Instagram.
You can follow Sue’s journey on the River Reach Construction Instagram page, @riverreachconstruction. The company, which could not be reached for an interview, has posted some adorable reels of Sue looking healthy at about four months old. Here, Sue is “clocking in” for her shift.
We are so grateful to the River Reach Construction crew for saving this baby and giving her a happy ending, and we hope other people will help a Sue that might cross their path. Stray and abandoned kittens like Sue have a way of turning up in unusual places: in storm drains, under cars, at construction sites like in Sue’s case, and more. As for other kittens rescued from construction and other industrial sites, we have written about a few that thankfully had happy endings, thanks to Good Samaritans.
Stray kittens like Sue often appear in unusual and dangerous places, making Good Samaritans crucial to their rescue. @riverreachconstruction / Instagram.com
Earlier in 2026, a 4-week-old gray tabby kitten in Fort Worth, Texas was found in a bucket of industrial-strength glue in an industrial area of the city. A kindhearted man rushed him to the Humane Society of North Texas, where the medical staff got to work on the painstaking task of freeing the glue-covered kitten from the toxic, sticky stuff. The poor guy couldn’t even move his front legs.
Shelter staff tried many substances to remove the glue, including mineral oil, olive oil, and blue Dawn dish soap. Finally, a bottle of canola oil did the trick. The glue kitten, appropriately named Elmer, went into foster care with shelter volunteer Leah Owens, a recent widow who fell in love with Elmer and adopted him!
In another 2026 incident, a heroic worker at a waste management plant in British Columbia, Canada rescued two kittens that he found underneath a pile of cardboard he was loading into a trash compactor. If he hadn’t fetched the kittens from their vulnerable spot, they could have died a terrible death! But the worker thankfully took them to an animal shelter right away for care. Then, when he returned to the site, he found another kitten and returned to the shelter. Three days later, he found two more kittens, fostered them for the night, and brought them to the shelter! What an angel!
With severe hazards at industrial places like construction sites, factories, or waste management plants, stray kittens are in grave danger. We are so thankful to good souls who intervene and rescue the lost babies, and bring them to a place like a shelter that can put them on track to becoming a beloved pet in a safe home, as it should be.
And in the case of Sue, sometimes we can put a playful twist on the situation and celebrate the kitten’s happy ending!
