He heard cries from a storm drain. Then he went for help.

A man searching for his cat heard a feline crying from the depths of a North Myrtle Beach storm drain Monday night. The cat was trapped.

Misty had been missing for a while and although he couldn’t see the cat, the man walked to the Windy Hill fire station a block away to enlist some help in its rescue.

Firefighters from North Myrtle Beach Fire Rescue’s B-battalion crew responded to the storm drain shortly before 10 p.m.

“Crews investigated and confirmed the cat was down in the storm water system near the 3600 Block of Turner Street,” firefighters reported in a Facebook post on NMB Fire Rescue’s page.

“We couldn’t see the cat,” said Lt. Kyle Post, but he knew who could. The crew called in reinforcements from station 1, who came bearing a search camera.

The camera was lowered into the drain and “we saw the cat down there,” Post said. But they couldn’t reach it... just yet.

Exercising more ingenuity, firefighters used the camera to block one side of the storm drain and went to block another entrance to the pipe to prevent the cat from fleeing further into the drainage system.

Post said they used a small forestry hose to put a little water in the system to scare the cat to the entrance where rescuers were able to reach in and grab it.

The entrance had been just “steep enough to where it could get in there but it couldn’t get back out on its own,” Post said.

But the rescue worked. “The cat was safely removed from the drain and returned to her owner in about 30 minutes,” the department reported on Facebook, posting a video of photos taken during the rescue.

Misty was safe in the arms of her grateful owner in a misty-eyed reunion; and for the firefighters it was another successful rescue under their belts.

“That’s one of the reasons we do the job for our customers, the public. It’s not an everyday situation, but that’s what we’re here for,” Post said.

This story was originally published March 9, 2017 at 4:16 PM with the headline "He heard cries from a storm drain. Then he went for help.."