FERRIDAY &045; What was supposed to be a routine drill for oil workers in Lake St. John Wednesday turned out to be anything but.

As workers prepared to place a drill pipe inside the steel oil well pipe they had laid just a day earlier, they heard a kitten meowing.

&uot;I thought they were joking me,&uot; said Mart Lamar, director of the site being drilled by McGowen Working Partners, after the men called him to the site. But after checking their cell phones and any other device that might be responsible for the sounds, &uot;we convinced each other that there really was a cat in there.&uot;

Had they not believed the sounds, they would have placed a drill pipe in the hole, about 5 inches in diameter, where the kitten was, sending it 2,000 feet below the surface.

In order to bring the kitten out of the pipe, the men circulated fluid down the outside of the pipe causing the cat to rise to the surface.

It took a lot of elbow grease, but the men finally cleaned the thick dark drilling mud from the kitten that now resides at McGowan’s Lake St. John headquarters.

As for how the kitten got inside the pipe, Lamar believes it must have been inside when the pipe was horizontal before it was moved to a vertical position.