Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 11, 1990 TAG: 9004110406
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On a walk Sunday down the road from the private dump in Selma, local resident Alicia Gordon found medical billing statements scattered along Virginia 696.
Among the envelopes, she and a friend found an opened but uncashed $83 money order from a New York man to a company called Flushing Pathology at a mailbox in North Bellmore, N.Y. Since last year, the dump has been taking in dozens of truckloads of out-of-state trash daily, much of it from Northeastern states.
Sunday night, Gordon called Ciro Diaz at his Brooklyn home. He sent the money order late last month and did not realize his payment was lost.
"I had a hard time explaining to him that I didn't get it from a post office, that I got it from a landfill, that it came off the back of a truck," Gordon said. "He wasn't even sure where Virginia was.
"He said, `Oh, you're such a good Samaritan." Gordon is mailing Diaz's money order back to him.
The incident has made Gordon, who has long been an opponent of the dump's truck traffic and pollution, all the more annoyed at what's being thrown on her community.
She found medical billing records from such big institutions as Mount Sinai Hospital in New York strewn along the roadbank. The litter bore the names, Social Security numbers and even credit card numbers of medical patients, Gordon said.
"I don't want my name and phone number lying around in people's garbage," she said. "That stuff ought to be shredded."
by CNB