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    Thirty Yard Coffin.  

    Police officers will tell you that dumpsters are often crime scenes, places where drugs and weapons are abandoned or stashed.  They're also places for anonymous burial, a modern day potter's field for murder victims, abandoned babies and homeless people.  But dumpsters are dangerous objects themselves, huge steel boxes containting an unpredictable mass of sharp, heavy, biologically and chemically active materials.
    Trash collectors have dangerous jobs; they work in traffic, alongside a rolling 20 ton hydraulic presses, moving garbage.  

Trash Collector Dies after Inhaling Discarded Acid

By Lawrence Van Gelder, New York Times, November 13, 1996

New York -- A city worker died Tuesday after he inhaled the fumes of a corrosive acid from a discarded container that burst under the compacting blades of a garbage truck making routine collections in Brooklyn. Fire Department hazardous materials experts identified the substance as hydrofluoric acid, often used to etch glass. A second sanitation worker was injured in the incident, which brought the Mayor and Sanitation Commissioner rushing to the burn unit of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, touched off an investigation by police and sanitation departments and raised the possibility of homicide charges against those responsible for leaving the acid to be picked up. The source of acid was not known Tuesday night.

    Hydroflouric acid acts by combining with sodium and calcium inside your cells.  It passes straight through skin and begins to chemically burn muscle tissue from the inside out, which is described as being excruciatingly painful.  Depending on how much a victim is exposed to, doctors can halt the process with a calcim drip.  Otherwise, the patient will continue to suffer until the acid, tracing it's way through the circulatory system, destroys the heart.
    Asleep or passed out, someone occaisonally ends up in the garbage truck.  Operating the compactor is known as tossing the salad.
    

Girl, 8, Found Buried Alive in Trash Bin

By JILL BARTON, Associated Press Writer 57 minutes ago

LAKE WORTH, Fla. - An 8-year-old girl who was raped and buried alive told a friend she remembers her attacker towering over her before she passed out, then awoke seven hours later beneath a pile of rocks and concrete blocks when she heard the voices of rescuers.

The girl, who had been staying overnight at her godmother's house, was reported missing early Sunday. She was hospitalized in good condition Monday and a teenage boy who also had been staying at the home was arrested. Authorities said he confessed...

The girl was found Sunday morning when police Sgt. Mike Hall climbed into a 25-foot long trash bin, opened the lid to a 30-gallon recycling container and saw part of her hand and foot peeking out from under heavy concrete slabs.