Posted on 01/02/2009 6:08:52 PM PST by Enchante
Thousands of work boots, bath slippers, tennis sneakers and beach sandals -- even roller blades, all inexplicably materialized, strewn upon the southbound lanes, disrupting traffic for hours.
A mountain of those thousands of used shoes is now somewhere in northern Miami-Dade County, and Florida Highway Patrol officials are distributing them to local and national nonprofits that promise to give them to the poor.
No witnesses have yet come forward to explain just how thousands of shoes appeared at 7:42 a.m. on the southbound lanes of the busy highway between the Bird Road and Miller Drive exits.
Some think a truck's doors simply burst open, allowing its massive shipment to scatter across the concrete. Others suggest an intricate prank, much like the one pulled off by thieves who returned a statue stolen from the West Palm Beach home of Bernard Madoff.
And others consider it a protest against President Bush, a reference to his recent shoe-dodging experience in Iraq.
Whatever the case, several nonprofits were invited to pick up as many shoes as they could carry from the stack that the Florida Highway Patrol was keeping in northern Miami-Dade.
As put by FHP spokesman Lt. Pat Santangelo: if no one claims the thousands of shoes, they'll go to the most needy.
The thousands of shoes caused long traffic delays and a two-hour clean-up Friday morning, according to state officials. Employees of the Florida Department of Transportation's Road Rangers service, which is meant to provide roadside assistance, managed to push all the shoes into one lane using large brooms. A private contractor was hired to use a front-end loader to pick up the shoes by the dozen and load them into a large dump truck, Santangelo said.
Law enforcement officials said the person responsible for leaving behind the sea of soles will be charged for the clean up.
Santangelo said he could not estimate the cost.
''It's not cheap,'' he said.
Santangelo received dozens of calls Friday from people across the country who offered to take the shoes and distribute them to needy people in distraught regions of the world.
One option, he said, was donating the used shoes to impoverished Haitian residents who are still suffering from the aftermath of the 2008 hurricane season.
Soles4Souls, a shoe-giving charitable organization with projects around the world, offered to take any shoes left from the giant mountain still in North Miami Beach. Whatever shoes are not taken by local charities will be given to the large Tennessee -based nonprofit, Santangelo said.
Someone dumped thousands of pairs of shoes on a Miami expressway -- authorities trying to determine whether it's accidental, or is someone playing some kind of bizarre (and dangerous) prank?
Glad it sounds like it didn't cause an accident or anything.....
Maybe leftists playing their idea of a prank about shoes to be thrown at President Bush? BUT if anyone was doing any kind of a hoax or prank, a busy expressway is a crazy place to do it..... so maybe they fell out of a truck??
Hard to believe that no one saw anything about this at 7:42 am..... I don’t live in FL but aren’t expressways in any metro area rather busy at that hour???
I didn’t know there were that many Muslim TV reporters in Miami.
Maybe there was a convention....
And they said Miami was the City without sole.
this thread needs the three stooges video... throwing shoes at Bush..
It's not as laced up as I thought.
“And others consider it a protest against President Bush, a reference to his recent shoe-dodging experience in Iraq.”
Typical for the liberal rag that the Herald is. The only one who thought that was the person that wrote the article.
“No witnesses have yet come forward to explain just how thousands of shoes appeared at 7:42 a.m. on the southbound lanes of the busy highway...”
My prediction: Thousands of people were walking on the highway, when the rapture occurred.
Grone … ;-)
I confess that I am considering that possibility and the derangement of leftists makes it a possibility. However, the logistics don’t seem plausible and even the worst BDS nuts ought to realize that doing something like this on a major expressway is very dangerous and could get the BDS kiddies in trouble. So, on balance, it seems very unlikely it has anything to do with the nutjob political left.
No, my first thought when I heard it was Muslim terrorists and their sympathizers.
It’s possible but not plausible. Palmetto and Bird/Miller is mostly Cuban territory with the exception of the U. of Miami not being too far away but if it were to be political I would expect it to happen on I-95 rather than at the Palmetto & Bird.
That's the most likely scenario. Perhaps the owner or driver, afraid of facing the responsibility, didn't report it.
When I was over the road driving I once picked up a load of shoes the truck was so packed they couldnt close the back doors of the semi so they used a fork lift to push the doors shut I pity the guy who opened it when I dropped the load off.
Sounds as if the shoes were ill gotten and destined for the islands or South America.
;^)
Hmm. There is a commercial currently on TV that shows precisely that- shoes raining out of the sky. Can’t recall what the product is, but the shoes pour down on the road and a lady pulls her car over and starts picking them up, followed by other motorists.
Somebody has no life.
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