Thousands of Shoes Appear on Miami Freeway

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Miami Herald
Saturday, January 3, 2009

MIAMI, Jan. 2 -- Thousands of work boots, bath slippers, tennis sneakers, beach sandals and even roller skates all inexplicably materialized Friday morning on the Palmetto Expressway, disrupting traffic for hours, the Florida Highway Patrol said.

Lt. Pat Santangelo said he was not sure where the shoes came from. There were no signs of a crash, and no one claimed them.

A private contractor was hired to pick up the sea of soles and deposit them at an empty field, where a Nashville-based nonprofit group, Soles4Souls, is planning to pick them up Monday. Soles4Souls, which has distributed millions of pairs of shoes around the world, will ship the massive batch of shoes by truck to a processing facility in Alabama. There the organization will decide where to distribute them.

"We throw nothing away. Right now, they'll probably go to Haiti," founder Wayne Elsey said.

News of the discarded shoes in Miami traveled fast over the Internet as Web sites all over the world got wind of the story.

Santangelo said that no witnesses had come forward but that those responsible would pay the cost of cleaning up the mess. "It's not cheap," he said.