Thousands of Shoes Mysteriously Appear on Hwy

A few pair of shoes that show up somewhere is no big deal, but THOUSANDS of them is indeed remarkable. It would seem a tractor trailer  lost its load and the driver never ‘fessed up. But is there an underground economy that uses used shoes as currency? Odd indeed.

Charity takes shoes strewn along Palmetto Expressway
www.miamiherald.com  |  BY BREANNE GILPATRICK AND JOSE PAGLIERY

Remember the thousands of used shoes strewn about the Palmetto Expressway last week? The mystery remains about who dumped them on the busy highway, but the shoes themselves will be collected Tuesday by an international charity and distributed to the needy.

Soles4Souls, a shoe-giving charitable organization with projects around the world, gathered up the shoes from a location near the Golden Glades interchange in North Miami-Dade County.

The Tennessee-based nonprofit agreed to haul away the discarded shoes after it learned of last week’s bizarre discovery by the Florida Highway Patrol.

Thousands of work boots, bath slippers, tennis sneakers and beach sandals — even roller blades — inexplicably appeared in the southbound lanes of the Palmetto early Friday morning. Cleaning up the mess of shoes disrupted traffic for several hours.

To date, no witnesses have come forward to explain just how thousands of shoes appeared at 7:42 a.m. on the busy highway between the Bird Road and Miller Drive exits.

Law enforcement officials have said the person responsible for leaving behind the sea of soles will be charged for the clean up.

The mound of footwear spent the weekend in an empty field near the Golden Glades interchange until workers could load them into a truck that will take the shoes to Alabama, where they will be cleaned, repaired and sorted before being sent to Haiti and to other locations.

Wayne Elsey, founder of Soles4Souls, estimated there were between 2,000 and 4,000 shoes in the pile — many with yard sale price tags attached.

Elsey first saw the shoe-strewn Palmetto on CNN, while on vacation in Orlando.

”It was pretty dramatic,” he said. “You see all these shoes lying along the highway, and no one knows where they came from, and the last thing I wanted was for them to show up in a landfill.”

Soles4Souls has given roughly 100,000 shoes to Haiti in recent months, but Elsey said the pile from the Palmetto is probably the charity’s most unusual donation.

”This is unique,” he said. “Normally, we have schools and civic groups collect shoes. . . . We’ve never seen anything like this.”