New York has the legend. Florida has the actual alligator.
A public works crew in Oviedo, Florida, sent a camera-equipped robot into a stormwater pipe to figure out why a stretch of road kept developing sinkholes. What they found, staring back at the camera, was a 5-foot-long American alligator.
The City of Oviedo posted the footage to its Facebook page, where users promptly lost their collective mind in the comments. “Just another reason not to go wandering down into the stormwater pipes!” a city spokesperson wrote, which feels like an understated public safety announcement for Florida.
In the video, the robot’s camera creeps through a dark pipe toward what looks like two faint lights in the distance. Those lights turn out to be eyes. The gator rears up, mouth open, holds its ground just long enough to make its point, then turns and disappears deeper into the pipe. The robot gives chase before getting lodged in an indentation, and just like that, the alligator is gone. Back to whatever it was doing down there.
How Did the Alligator Even Get in the Sewers?
Officials believe the gator entered through one of the city’s stormwater ponds, which feed into the 75-mile drainage network running beneath Oviedo. “Thank goodness our crews have a robot,” the city wrote, which is also a sentence that has never been more justified.
For anyone who grew up convinced that alligators in the sewer was strictly a New York City myth, Florida residents in the comments were happy to clarify that this is, in fact, a known thing down here. The urban legend that inspired the 1980 B-movie “Alligator” and got a famous shoutout in “E.T.” has apparently been Florida’s lived reality for a while.
New York isn’t entirely off the hook either. In 2010, an 18-inch alligator crawled out of a storm drain in Queens and took cover under a parked car. This past February, a four-foot gator turned up in Prospect Park Lake in Brooklyn, later found to have a bathroom stopper in its stomach—a detail that raises more questions than it answers.
The Oviedo alligator, for its part, remains somewhere in the pipe system. Unnamed, untagged, and apparently unbothered.
The post The Alligators-in-the-Sewer Myth Is Real, and Florida Has the Video to Prove It appeared first on VICE.
