SYRACUSE, N.Y. (1010 WINS) -- More than 30,000 pieces of mail sent from upstate New York to New England had to be destroyed after being damaged beyond recovery by the flood waters that swamped the Southern Tier last month.
The mail was on one of the two trucks that fell into a 150-foot wide chasm cut across Interstate 88 by the rushing waters, said Maureen Marion, a Postal Service spokeswoman in Syracuse. The drivers of both trucks were killed.
Marion said postal officials were able to recover the mail on the truck, but only after it sat in the flood waters for four days. The postal service hired a private contractor to help sort and save the mail, but they had little success.
"We tried to salvage what we could. It was falling apart as they touched it. Even the pieces that were partially legible, there was concern that the letters had been contaminated by the chemicals, manure, fertilizer, oil and other things that end up in flood water,'' Marion said.
Once postal officials realized the mail was salvageable, it was destroyed, she said. The mail was kept secure the entire time, Marion added.
"People can rest assured that no one else saw any of their confidential or financial information,'' she said.
About 70 pieces of the load were certified letters, which allowed postal officials to trace some of the correspondence back to their original senders.
Fortunately, Marion said, the amount of affected mail was relatively small -- the Postal Service handles 212 billion pieces of mail a year -- and had very specific characteristics.
It was sent from people living in zip codes starting with 130 through 139, and came mostly from the Watertown, Syracuse and Binghamton areas. The letters were mailed on either June 27 or June 28 and was heading to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.
"If you sent a letter and match this criteria, you need to be talking with the people you sent the letter to,'' Marion said. "There's nothing the Postal Service can do to help.''
Some of the mail was in batches headed to one destination -- such as an insurance company or the IRS office in Andover, Mass. -- so postal authorities were able to alert the recipients about the missing mail. But Marion stressed that postal officials were mostly unable to identify or contact any of the senders.
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