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Ive here. It’s hard to see trash as the basis for a feel-good story. But we’re running this story as “news you can use” in case you’re in a city where garbage trucks are GPS-tagged, so if you know where your stuff is in the garbage, you can somehow locate Where does it end up in the junkyard.
Keep in mind that in NYC and I’m assuming most cities, the actual lost and found office, like when people bring things to the police station, is totally different. My wallet was stolen and, surprisingly, three weeks later, I got my driver’s license and some credit cards back (which had been cancelled at the time). But taxi drivers are also good at bringing things back. I once found a wallet in a taxi and we took a detour to the office where its owner works (it has a building ID with a photo). The driver told me otherwise, the passenger found something in the cab and handed it to him to see if he could return it. One was a $4,000 purse; the woman received a bill for a “cash” set of furniture, then changed her mind when she saw the live broadcast. She was ecstatic when he brought it to her and IIRC gave him $200. On the other hand, not everyone is so honest. My mom left a bag in the taxi. He took it back to my building where he picked her up…and then lost it and she withdrew over $300 in cash.
By Katie Honan ([email protected]) Originally published on CityJanuary 30, 2022
Dozens of times a year, the average New Yorker dons gloves, boots and even hazmat suits to sneak through piles of trash looking for belongings that have been inadvertently tossed or thrown into the bin.
After hours of searching, they sometimes find buried treasure – luckily lotteryHoly religious objects,cherish family albumliteral meaning cash bag and even denture — destined to be thrown a long way before it finally boarded a barge.
“People have discovered something amazing — Wedding and Engagement Rings, wallet, wallet,” said Sean Brereton, deputy director of the health department’s solid waste management operations.
Theodora Adelabe knew the feeling. In December, she had passed through security at JFK Airport, and on her way back to Nigeria for her father’s memorial service, she realized that her blue backpack was not full of items of high monetary and emotional value.
She went back the same way, calling family and friends who had seen her early that morning as she prepared to fly.
Theodora Adeladu was thrown into a garbage truck with her personal and work computer, along with thousands of dollars in cash, jewelry and traditional clothing, but was misidentified by a sanitation worker for garbage. Hiram Alejandro Duran / THE CITY
“I was panicking, I was crying,” she said. An hour later, she rescheduled a flight knowing she couldn’t leave the bag, which contained her work laptop, gold and jewelry, traditional clothing for service — and $10,000 in cash.
smells like roses
It turned out that around 5:30 that morning, she parked the car at a friend’s house and left her bag outside. Neighbors who asked to check the surveillance footage saw a DSNY truck pass by around 8:15 a.m. and threw a blue backpack into a trash can along with other rubbish.
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After Googling, Adelabe rushed to the nearest sanitary garage, found the first employee and knelt down for help.
“Some things are treated as trash instead of trash,” she said she told him.
He helped her stand up and assured her, she recalled.
“‘If we pick it up, then we’ll find it,'” he told her, advising her after they quarantined the picked up truck while digging at a garbage transfer station in Brooklyn later in the day Pick up her bag.
“Before I left the garage, they were clapping and saying, go get Theodora!” she said.
Hours later, hours after her bag was picked up, she put on a hazmat suit and searched through the morning’s trash.
They divided the trash into eight parts, and the supervisor helped her determine where she should search first, based on addresses and pickup times.
“There are diapers and pasta,” Adelabe said. But she was so focused on her search, “I didn’t smell anything.”
About two hours later, she found a dark blue backpack.
“I said, I found it — I found it,” she said. “I lifted it up and I fell to the floor.”
It miraculously turned on despite the health department employee trying to lower her expectations for the shape of the laptop after hours in the truck. Adelabe, a fourth-grade teacher at Canarsie, packed up, changed her clothes, and boarded her 9:30pm flight to Nigeria.
“You don’t even appreciate what they do until you go in and see what they do,” she told THE CITY. “It was something I was oversighted, but they were still very, very supportive.”
refusal to fail
The sanitation department collects and recycles 12,000 tons of trash every day across the city, transporting it to a dump outside the city on large barges filled with trash containers.
It may seem impossible to find anything as small as an engagement ring among all this junk, but the department uses GPS to track its trucks and knows when and where each pickup was made, officials said.
However, there is only a brief window — about two to three hours — when a person might find the lost item after it’s been removed from a truck and placed in a container that ends up in a landfill in another state.
During the last six months of 2021, the health department scheduled 29 searches for lost valuables, officials said.
Of those searches, 12 were successful and 4 were canceled, meaning the person either found their valuables elsewhere or didn’t think it was worth picking up from a pile of litter and rejected them.
Timothy Belmer, the department’s director and export officer, said all searches are conducted by people who have lost their items, but officials are helping them by offering advice, offering items based on when and where they were picked up. s position.
He encourages hopefuls to seek out any noteworthy items they remember picking up on their blocks, like mattresses. Throwing out the mail with the address also helps, he notes.
“It’s like putting together a murder mystery,” Bellmer said.
This story was originally written by Cityan independent nonprofit news organization dedicated to tough reporting in the service of the people of New York.
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