One person’s trash dramatically turned into another’s treasure as workers in Belgium happened upon a gold hoard worth more than $10 million while installing a sewer line in a building they were renovating.
“Our first reaction was actually disbelief,” Kobe, an 18-year-old student worker, told Belgium outlet VRT. “Of course, we hadn’t expected to find gold.”
At the time, the construction crew was renovating a building in the city center of the Flemish community of Sint-Gillis-Dendermonde, located about 40 miles from Brussels.
During the building rehab, workers were removing the foundation to make way for a sewer pipe when they “suddenly saw something lying there,” Kobe recalled.
At first they though it was a cache of one-Euro coins. Then someone identified a gold nugget.
“I went to look and took the gold in my hands,” recalled the site manager Mario. “We kept digging up new coins and bars as well. Only then did it really sink in what we had found. That was a crazy feeling.”
He added, “After 33 years in construction, it is the first time I have experienced something like this.”
The hoard of ingots and bullion amounted to around 9 million Euros or approximately $10.4 million USD, the New York Post reported.
Belgium laws, however, applied to the treasure trove. Regulations forced the crew to hand over the previous metals to police. Taking them, authorities said, would have been theft.
“There are so many coins and bars — it would be almost impossible [to take],” said Mario. “Besides, that would be theft.”
The stash is currently being held by CAW Oost-Vlaanderen, an organization that provides welfare support to the residents of Dendermonde, the BBC reported. That organization owns the property where the treasure was discovered.
The BBC reported:
The rightful owner has five years to claim the hoard under Belgian law — though the local prosecutor, who has launched an investigation, said it was not yet known whom this might be.
If no one comes forward, civil law states that hidden treasure on someone else’s property be divided between the finder and the property’s owner.
It has not been determined yet who stashed the loot. Historian and former mayor Piet Buyse speculated that it’s the property of the building’s former owners, a local brewer family the name of Van Assche, the Brussels Times reported.
The welfare organization hopes they will be able to keep it to support its charity work.
Meanwhile, dozens of people have been visiting the site to look for more treasure, VRT reported, prompting local police to order ambitious treasure hunters to stay away as there is nothing left and the construction site is potentially dangerous.
The building is set to be totally demolished.
The teen worker Kobe is holding out hope that his role in the discovery will be rewarded.
“Of course, we do hope we’ll get a ‘finder’s fee,’” he told VRT. “That would be nice.”
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.