Kitten Found Inside an Ohio Excavator Now Wears a Hard Hat and Works With the Crew

Construction sites are built for noise. Diesels, backup alarms, steel on steel. What Chase Guello heard on July 14 in Leavittsburg, Ohio, did not belong in that mix. It was thin, high, almost mechanical at first—a beep or a screech coming from a Komatsu excavator he was checking before the crew headed out on a dam job.

He looked into the engine bay. Walking around inside the turret was a kitten small enough to disappear in a closed fist.

“Rescue mission for the day,” Guello said on camera. “Normally, it’s a piece of equipment. Right now, it’s this little guy. There’s a cat.”

Getting her out was not a matter of opening a door. Guello crawled under the machine, unscrewed the heavy skid plate that protects the underside, and kicked the panel free. The kitten dropped through the opening and landed on the ground. Viewers later called it a superhero landing. It looked more like gravity finally winning.

They carried her into the air-conditioned office trailer. July heat on Ohio dirt is no place for an animal that size, and Guello figured she had already spent a day or two inside the machine. The crew searched the site for a mother or siblings. Nothing. No other cats. No explanation for how she got into a piece of equipment that large.

That is the fork in the road most workdays never reach. You can treat the animal as a delay and move on. RiverReach Construction did not. The Barberton company specializes in the unglamorous end of building: river and stream restoration, dam work, wetlands, the kind of projects that put machines in the water and mud rather than on a skyline. A kitten in an excavator was not in the scope of work. They took her anyway.

Guello’s mother’s friend works at One of a Kind Pets in Akron. She fostered the kitten for a couple of weeks while she gained weight and learned how to be a cat instead of a piece of lost equipment. Followers on Instagram watched her drink from a bottle, then watched the company run a naming poll. The winner was obvious and a little on the nose: Komatsu, after the machine that had held her. They call her Sue.

The videos did what videos of tiny orange kittens in impossible places tend to do. Combined views on RiverReach’s Instagram climbed past 11 million. People who will never hire an environmental contractor in northeast Ohio started following a construction page because they wanted the next update on Sue. One commenter announced an OSHA inspection by an “Orange Short Haired Angel.” Another demanded a vest. The manufacturer of the excavator was paying attention too.

Komatsu sent what Guello described as the world’s smallest safety vest and a baby hard hat cut with holes for her ears. On July 30 the company posted photos and wrote, “We think Sue is ready for the job site.” She was not, not really. She was still a kitten in borrowed gear. The pictures did the work anyway.

Guello is not, by his own account, a cat person. When he picked Sue up from foster care, wrapped in a blanket, he said she was the cutest cat he had ever seen. Later he told a Cleveland station something blunter and more useful: blue-collar crews get typed as rough and unfeeling, and then a fist-sized animal falls out of a machine and the type does not hold. “We still care for such a little kitten.”

Sue now lives with Jared, the shop mechanic, who grew up on a farm and knows how to keep an animal alive. She commutes with him until she is old enough to stay at the shop as the official shop cat. Komatsu has already talked about sending a bigger hat and vest. She is outgrowing the first set the way kittens outgrow everything.

There is a temptation to treat this as only cute, and it is cute. A yellow hat on an orange head is almost unfair. What lasts a little longer is the sequence underneath the photos: a supervisor who stopped for a sound that did not belong, a crew that searched the dirt instead of starting the engine, a manufacturer that mailed a joke that was also a gift, and a shop that now has a cat with a name borrowed from heavy iron.

Sue did not apply for the job. The job found her in the last place a kitten should be, and then decided she could stay.