Wedding rings lost — and found! — in 'stinky, gross, wet' compost pile at B.C. landfill
There are things worse than a needle in a haystack. Try two precious wedding rings, lost somewhere in a slimy heap of compost — about three dump trucks' worth.
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That's the impossible situation Steve Van Ysseldyk found himself in last week when his wife, Jeannine, misplaced her rings while cleaning up a bag of movie theatre popcorn that had spilled onto their lawn.
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They scoured the lawn but nothing turned up. Garbage day had come and gone, which meant the popcorn bag — and perhaps the rings — would have been loaded onto a truck and shipped to the landfill on Dewdney Trunk Road operated by the City of Mission.
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Determined to do his best to retrieve the irreplaceable keepsakes, Van Ysseldyk showed up at the dump the next morning — which just happened to be an unseasonably wet, drizzly summer Friday.
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Enter our hero, Denny Webster, a subcontractor who manages the organics coming into the dump for the City of Mission.
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Undeterred, Webster 'scooped it up a scoop at a time, swung it around and thinned it out. I had a shovel I'd brought with me, and I started picking through it all,' said Van Ysseldyk.
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After more than half an hour of this, 'I came across part of it, with some popcorn, and within 30 seconds, I was like, 'OK, there's one ring.''
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It was the anniversary ring, but the solitaire was still missing. Van Ysseldyk asked Webster where he'd found that lucky batch of trash. He pointed to an area around back, and the intrepid hunter resumed his search.
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'Sure enough, there was the other half of my compost, with more popcorn and part of the bag. I started gingerly sifting through it, not to disturb it too much. Literally, I probably found the two rings within just over an hour.'
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