Lost Phone Found Buried in Sawdust Pile - Kerikeri, Northland.

Lost rings in summer, phones in winter…

Had a call from Greg this evening, asking if I would be able to find his lost cellphone.

Backstory was he’d been working in a firewood yard today shifting logs to be split and last remembered seeing his phone a few hours previously. It was now going straight to answerphone so ringing it was ineffective.
We went through retracing his steps and narrowed it down to a corridor of sawdust and chippings in amongst the logs, maybe 5m wide by 20m long. A 12 tonne digger was sitting on the principle area of interest, so I first scanned the area behind it so he could walk the digger (and it’s enormous metal presence) backwards. As expected in an industrial environment, there were a lot of junk signals messing around in the headphones, with one promising false start that turned out to be a flattened drink can.

Once the digger had been moved, I then started to clear the area where it had been and very quickly picked up a solid ‘phoney’ sort of signal.

Digging down into the sawdust, I gingerly grabbed a very hot, angry and unstable iPhone, crushed by the digger unfortunately and the battery was starting to meltdown, but his precious SIM card was safely recovered – Not to mention averting possible fire issues had the phone ignited later in the evening whilst buried in sawdust…