HALL COUNTY, Ga. — There was a frantic search after $100,000 worth of diamond jewelry was accidentally tossed into a metro Atlanta landfill.
On March 9, a woman made a distraught call into a Hall County landfill. That set off a real treasure hunt.
“We're looking for diamonds. We're looking for a bracelet; looking for some rings,” said Hall County’s Solid Waste Director Johnnie Vickers.
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The jewelry was accidentally thrown out and taken to the Candler Road landfill.
“Just depends on timing. Timing is everything in this game to recover something,” Vickers said.
Vickers assembled a team of five employees to help sift through a mound of trash. They checked logs for when the load may have come in and narrowed down their search to a 20-minute window and about 9 to 10 tons of trash.
“We try to treat it just like if we had lost it,” Vickers said.
Their one clue was that the jewelry was in a black bag, and after several hours, crews made an incredible discovery.
“We reached down and picked up one last bag,” Vickers said. “He said, ‘Looky there, looky there, praise Jesus!’”
They found the black bag with the diamond jewelry inside. And the workers said the timing truly is everything.
Had the phone call come in a few minutes later, or had that window of time been off by a few minutes, the trash would've been dumped at the face of the landfill and that woman's jewelry would be gone forever.