Family accidentally threw away grandma's $25k and called waste collection crew for help—their response stunned the family
Have you ever come across a time you threw a prized possession into the trash? Or maybe an important jewel fell into the sink? The conversation with the cleaning crew that follows is notable too. Similarly, a Lorain County family went through an embarrassing and frightening experience after accidentally throwing $25,000 into the garbage, per News5 Cleveland. The family was worried sick and dialed the waste collection crew in hopes that they could retrieve the money. To their surprise, the cleaning crew was prepared with a spot-on reaction that the family will cherish for a lifetime.
“Trucks coming in from every direction, Downtown Cleveland all the way to Vermilion, dumping garbage,” said supervisor Gary Capan. The crew collected 4,500 tonnes of garbage in six days of hard work. One can only imagine what a task it would be to find the money among it all. While doing their work, as usual, they received a call from the family stating that they’d lost thousands of dollars. The family had no idea about it until their grandma mentioned it, but it was already too late. “It turned out to be $25,000. They were cleaning out their house for their grandmother and they cleaned out the refrigerator, threw out all the garbage, grabbed all the freezer stuff and put it in a bag and then the grandma was like, ‘Hey, there's an envelope with $25,000 in there, don't lose that,’ and she's like, 'Grandma, I already lost that, it's in the garbage!'” the man recalled.
With only the cleaning crew as their hope, the family called them and shared their problem. While it seemed like an impossible task, there was still some hope. The truck containing the $25,000 hadn’t made it to the dumpfill yet. Knowing it was “game over” if it reached there, Capan and his team got to work immediately. “What happens when they get to the landfill is, they will come in, they'll drop off their load of garbage, the bulldozers will immediately start smoothing it out, pushing it into the hill, dropping dirt on it and start covering up the process of the landfill. And we do that in a nonstop process. If it got dropped there, there's no finding it anymore,” Capan explained.
But the team didn’t lose heart. They first dialed the driver and asked him about his location and acted quickly from thereon. The driver was asked to arrive at the recycling center and drop off his 6 tonnes of trash so the team could get busy. “I told the girls, if it’s in there, we’ll find it for you because they were pretty upset,” said Dan Schoewe, the operations manager at the recycling center. Luckily, after 10 minutes of a rigorous, hands-on search, Schoewe found the envelope.
“I said, ‘Man, it looks just like that,’ pulled it off, opened it up and there was the package inside with the money. They were so happy, they were tearing up,” he recalled. He pointed out that the team gets many requests about lost items and valuables, but they’re not always able to help. “It can be very, very difficult. It's rare that we can find something for somebody. So this is like the biggest one I've seen in 30 years,” the operations manager said.