El Paso County document shredding event sees huge turnout

April 30--There was an unexpected traffic jam in downtown Colorado Springs on Saturday.

The pileup along Cascade Avenue didn't have to do with construction, a horrible crash or some other inconvenience: These motorists waited in their vehicles for up to an hour or more on purpose. Each vehicle hauled boxes of old documents to be shredded at Saturday's "Letter Rip" event to help prevent identity theft.

But was the wait worth it?

"I hope so," said Todd Boesdorfer, who had been waiting in the line for about an hour and was about 20 vehicles away from the shredder at 1:30 p.m.

"We wanted to get some junk out of the house, old tax returns, four years of our old receipts," he said.

In 2015, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 490,000 reports of stolen identity. According to Lifelock.com, protecting and destroying any personal, criminal and insurance records is vital in keeping valuable information like Social Security numbers out of the hands of thieves who will use that info for small crimes like subscribing to magazines to racking up immense debt.

On Saturday, one by one vehicles pulled up to a large shredding truck provided by Mobile Record Shredders of Pueblo to destroy their records and fight identity theft. This year's shredding event on East Vermijo Avenue west of Cascade was sponsored by El Paso County, the Better Business Bureau and The Gazette's news partner, KKTV.

Kellie O'Brien, who owns Mobile Record Shredders, said she and her company worked a similar event in 2015. Shortly after 1 p.m. on Saturday, she said one truckload had already taken 10,000 pounds of shredded paper to her warehouse in Pueblo, where it will be baled and recycled. Another full truck with a 10,000-pound capacity was parked along Vermijo, while a third was still shredding but "almost full," O'Brien said.

"We should have had all three trucks going at the same time," she said, noting that the first truck was already on its way back from Pueblo to help with the demand.

One of O'Brien's workers, who was also at the 2015 event, said people had brought them about 20,000 pounds of documents to destroy last year. He and his boss looked at the still-long line of vehicles snaking through downtown Saturday afternoon and predicted they might get close to 40,000 pounds before the event ended at 2:30 p.m.

Jim Reid, the El Paso County executive director of public services, was bundled up Saturday afternoon, directing traffic along Cascade Avenue. He said the lineup formed even before the event got started at 9:30 a.m., guessing that throughout the day there was about "three times as many as we had last year."

According to county spokesman Baaron Pittenger, more than 1,000 vehicles dropped off documents to be shredded.

The unexpected rush to shred documents took some folks by surprise. And although they weren't completely content with the hourlong line, they patiently waited their turn at the shredder.

Roxanne Steidl drove from the Cimarron Hills area to have her documents destroyed.

"I came all the way down here just to get rid of three boxes," she said. "I've been waiting for an hour, watching my gas tank go down."

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