Inevitably, at a house clearance sale, you have to wade through mountains of rubbish if you're ever to find anything remotely useful or interesting.
But even the most experienced house sale scourer could never expect to find anything quite as significant as a photo collection that was recently unearthed in the US.
Around 2,400 pictures taken from Ground Zero in the wake of the 9/11 attacks were discovered on a collection of CDs. The discs were in poor condition, but ultimately the data was retrievable, and the photos have now been uploaded to Flickr.
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The photos appear to have been taken by an unidentified construction worker involved in the clear-up process and the pictures depict the wreckage of the World Trade Centre that surrounded them.
Dr Johnathan Burgess, whose partner discovered the photos at the sale, archived the images and released them through fellow archivist Jason Scott. He said the photographs could very well have been lost forever had they not found them.
According to the BBC, he said: "Generally these items are neglected at sales. It's very likely these would be in a dumpster by now had we not gone.
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"It's a miracle the discs transferred so well, CD Roms of that age are pretty spotty."
Dr Burgess has been unsuccessful in tracking down the photographer so far, but said he decided to share the collection in order to do 'what's right for humanity'.
Almost 3,000 people were killed and a further 6,000 were injured in the attacks in 2001, which saw four hijacked airliners crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
A further 400,000 people directly involved in managing the immediate aftermath of the disaster are believed to have been exposed to toxic contaminants, or suffered injury or trauma, according to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Featured Image Credit: Jason Scott/FlickrTopics: Interesting, US News