Sanitation workers dig through dump to find woman's lost rings

Sept. 8 (UPI) -- Sanitation workers in Nova Scotia spent more than two hours digging through piles of trash at a dump to recover five rings that were accidentally thrown out with a paper towel.

Alexandra Stokal of Cape Breton said she had put her rings in a paper towel to dry after a cleaning, and her husband later threw the paper towel away without realizing there was jewelry inside it.

Stokal said the rings included her wedding rings and other sentimental pieces.

"When my father died, my mother bought us all a ring to commemorate that, a ring from my grandmother, so it was a big mix of things that meant a lot to me," she told CTV News.

Stokal contacted the Cape Breton Regional Municipality Solid Waste transfer facility when she realized the rings had been carted away with the trash by sanitation workers.

"The odds are very slim that we could recover something that small, but we said we'd give it a shot for her," CBRM Foreman J.B. O'Brien said.

O'Brien and five other workers spent more than two hours digging through approximately a thousand bags of trash until they found the garbage from Stokal's home.

"Chris Ward was the guy that found the rings on the floor for us. As soon as we found them, the lady started crying and was all happy and didn't know what to do," O'Brien said.

Stokal said she is grateful to the workers.

"I'm very seldom at a loss for words, but when we found the rings, I was speechless," she said.

Waste collection workers for Republic Services in Lorain County, Ohio, rallied to the assistance of a family with a similar problem last year, when an envelope containing $25,000 was accidentally thrown in the trash.

Operations supervisor Gary Capan said the family's grandmother had been storing the envelope in the freezer and it was accidentally thrown out during a clean-out of the appliance. Dan Schoewe, the operations manager at the recycling center, said workers were able to find the envelope after about 10 minutes of searching.