Waste collection workers in the town of Bitonto, Italy, found a lottery ticket worth €1 million after having to search through a truck full of garbage. The administrator of the waste management company SANB, Roberto Nicola Toscano, told "Agence France-Presse" that the ticket was found "miraculously still intact".
Toscano received a panicked phone call from the woman who won the big prize but lost it. The woman, whose name has not been released, played Saturday's lottery and went to check her ticket results at a local store on Sunday.
However, the machine showed that her winnings were "not payable". This message is common and means that the prize is too big for the small shopkeeper to pay out. She misinterpreted the message and decided that there was no winnings.
"The winner always played the same numbers because they were related to a close person," Toscano said. According to the Italian newspaper "Corriere della Sera" the woman's winning combination was 2, 4, 8, 10 and 51. A family member noticed that the combination was the winning one and informed her, but she had already thrown away the ticket. When they returned to the store, the garbage truck had already removed the container containing her ticket.
How was the ticket discovered?
After the woman contacted the SANB, the garbage collection company took swift action to trace the route of the discarded ticket, Toscano told Agence France-Presse. They were able to identify the exact truck and stop it.
Searching the collected waste would have been risky due to the potential presence of hazardous materials, so the vehicle was taken to a special facility equipped to conduct the search, Toscano explained. It took the workers a day of "working in conditions that were anything but pleasant" to find the ticket, Toscano told Corriere della Sera.
Toscano said the woman cried when she heard over the phone that the ticket had been found. He told the newspaper that professionalism, organization and a lot of luck had led to this moment, stressing that the seemingly impossible result would not have been possible without the help of the garbage workers. Since SANB is a public organization, the cost of the search will be borne by taxpayers, but Toscano said the woman had promised to "cover all additional costs".
Mina Kirkova (editor)