On Patagonias website, starting today, you can shop for new and used clothing at the same time.
The company first launched its resale platform, Worn Wear, nine years ago, making it a pioneer in the brand-owned secondhand clothing space. The platform lets customers send back used clothing in exchange for a gift card; the clothing is then cleaned, repaired, and sold at a deep discount to someone else.
But until now, you had to open a different website to actually buy refurbished Patagonia clothing. Now its in the same place, and you can add new and used clothing to the same shopping cart.
[Photo: Courtesy Patagonia]
The shift is a way to bring resale to the center of our brand and the forefront of our customer experience, says Sam Brown, Patagonias head of resale, noting that in the past, many customers havent been aware that Worn Wear exists.
Resale has become ubiquitous across fashion brands, but it typically happens separately from new sales. Patagonia’s integration is the next step in making secondhand shopping the new norm.
The brands website includes a used section that customers can browse. If you look up a new item, you’ll see links to buy a used version when its available. (Previously, new-product pages linked to the separate Worn Wear site.)
[Photo: Tim Davis/Courtesy Patagonia]
Bringing everything to the main site also helps give the resale platform a sense of more legitimacy. There’s still a gap of customers who are willing to buy used or trade in, Brown says. And I think we can close that gap by helping to normalize the shopping experience.
The project took four years to fully build. Putting used [products] on a typical main e-comm platform is definitely fitting a round peg into a square hole, Brown notes. Nothing about this has been easy.
[Photo: Tim Davis/Courtesy Patagonia]
First, since its not common for brands to sell new and used products in the same place, the companys UX design team had to find ways to make the differentiation clear for consumers, such as different colored backgrounds for used products.
The team also had to deal with new complexity. Rather than selling a particular new sweater, for example, suddenly it had to work with multiple sweaters with different levels of wear, sometimes in colors that are no longer in production.
We were figuring out how to come up with a solution where we can manage single-SKU logistics on the back end in the warehouse, and then present something to customers where theyre not choosing across 10 different individual items, Brown says. Thats a really hard technical hurdle, and something well probably have to iterate on.
[Photo: Tim Davis/Courtesy Patagonia]
The company now has to manage tens of thousands of products from its 20-year history, with a constantly changing assortment based on what customers decide to sell back, rather than a single season’s worth of styles and colors.
[Photo: Tim Davis/Courtesy Patagonia]
Making it easier to buy used products means more competition with sales of the brand’s new products. But that’s the point, Brown says: The copany wants to sell more used items so it can reduce the environmental impact that went into making them in the first place.
Right now, it’s also still relatively limited in scale, because the company can sell only the items that customers happen to send back; this year, the brand has sold nearly 160,000 used items.
Patagonia sees room to do more. “We have our work cut out for us in that so much apparel ends up in a landfill or it sits in people’s closets,” Brown says. “There’s definitely more utility we can get out of the stuff we’re making. It’s just a matter of building the infrastructure and the awareness of these programs.”
Sony sparked a backlash among gamers with its decision to phase out physical game discs. Now Nintendo is reassuring its customers that it has no plans to follow suit anytime soon.
We go off what the consumer prefers, and take that into account very heavily, Bill van Zyll, VP and general manager for Nintendo in Latin America, said in a recent interview. We also have a platform that was just launched. Were barely just over a year into [Nintendo Switch 2]. Its got both digital and physicalthat capability. Theres no plans to ditch physical.”
Van Zyll’s comments are more of a reaffirmation than a new policy announcement. But in the current gaming environment, they’re giving Nintendo loyalists reason to breathe a sigh of relief.
Physical game sales have been a hot topic since Sony’s announcement earlier this year. The company plans to stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation games starting in January 2028. From an economic standpoint, it’s hard to fault the decision. Just 15% of the PlayStation games sold in the fourth quarter of last year were physical copies. And as Sony develops its next-generation hardware, it’s undoubtedly trying to keep costs as low as possible, especially given recent spikes in the prices of memory and processor chips. Jettisoning a physical disc drive could help achieve that goal.
Still, for a company that once championed physical mediaeven mocking Microsoft’s restrictive game-sharing policiesthe move was bound to cause controversy. And Sony made things worse for itself in September, arguing in a legal filing that players who purchase digital games are buying licenses rather than ownership of the games themselves.
Nintendo is hoping to sidestep that controversy, and it’s easy to see why. While Sony gets only a fraction of its software sales from discs, physical games accounted for 38.5% of Nintendo’s total software revenue in the quarter ending June 30.
Van Zyll said Nintendo takes an “agnostic” approach to how games are distributed. Whatever consumers want is fine with the company.
Whether Nintendo will maintain that position in the years to come is less certain. Van Zyll made no long-term commitments. Given how secretive Nintendo is about future hardware plansoften keeping its non-Japanese divisions in the dark during the early stages of developmentthat’s a promise he likely couldn’t make anyway.
It’s also worth noting Van Zyll’s role. He oversees Latin America, where physical game sales remain particularly strong. In many ways, he was preaching to the choir rather than speaking directly to players in North America and Europe.
And while the Switch 2 accepts game cartridges, those cartridges don’t always contain the games themselves. Many Switch 2 titles, particularly those from third-party publishers, use game-key cards that simply allow players to download the game from Nintendo’s servers. Nintendo’s own major releases generally contain the full game on the cartridge. For game-key cards, though, the preservation risk remains: If the game becomes unavailable to download, the cartridge alone won’t be enough to recover it.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has taken a more middle-of-the-road approach. While it has made no announcements about the future of physical media, the company recently launched a program letting players claim digital access to eligible games they own on disc.
Make no mistake: Digital is the future of game distribution, despite the valid concerns of preservationists and collectors. But after Sony’s PR bungle, other game makers are likely to tread more cautiously with future moves away from discs and cartridges. Companies like Nintendo will also pay close attention to regional demand. As long as that remains strong in important markets, some form of physical media is likely to stick around.
I’ve been having a lot of conversations with industry leaders lately about the prevalence of so-called shadow AI. Theyre worried about the risks of unapproved AI tools at work, and most come to me wanting to know how to rein in their employees. But thats looking at the problem backwards.
Their concern is well founded. Among organizations surveyed in IBMs Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 that had experienced a data breach, 43% reported security incidents involving shadow AI, up from 20% the previous year. And the problem isnt going away. In our own recent survey, we found that roughly one in three respondents reported shadow AI use at their companies.
The problem is, leaders are missing what shadow AI is actually telling them about their businesses. Most chalk it up to an employee problem, when its really a leadership one.
The prevalence of shadow AI means your company is trying to innovate faster than youre letting it. Thats a significant risk in and of itself.
Shadow AI is a signal
Picture an HR professional who, frustrated with a repetitive task like assembling personalized onboarding materials, automates this process with an unauthorized tool.
Some might say they put the companys security at risk to avoid doing the job theyre paid to do. But another way of looking at it is this: Your employee just revealed a way to create better onboarding materials, save time and money, and free up an entire team for deeper work. In other words, theyre showing you how to trim the fat on your business so everyone can focus on new opportunities to grow the company.
Shadow AI is often the result of an organization’s standardizing its AI approach too early. It may seem like strong leadership, but by committing too soon to one set of tools, youre closing the door to new opportunities. If you force people to use tools that arent the best ones for the job, theyre likely to use the right tool anyway, creating unnecessary risks.
How leaders should respond to shadow AI
Shadow AI is a green sprout of innovation, so dont treat it like a weed. If, in the example above, the company simply fired or penalized that HR professional, they would be sending a message to employees that innovation is not welcome. Your main priority as a leader right now should be getting AI experimentation out of the shadows so everyone can benefit.
One company we work with did this by hosting an AI amnesty month. Employees were encouraged to share the tools theyd been using without fear of reprisal. The company found that those using shadow AI were some of their best performers and were frustrated by having to keep their innovations in the dark. The initiative allowed the company to evaluate all the tools at its disposaltools that were already road testedand decide which to implement widely and which to formally reject. They celebrated the innovation and found a path for employees to operate them securely.
Doing so mitigates another crucial risk. If your employees have found a more efficient way to do their jobs, your competitors will discover the same. You are ceding the advantage to them if you ignore what your team has found.
How to build a culture of AI experimentation
To be clear, shadow AI carries significant risk and should be discouraged. But how you discourage it will have an impact on how your company relates to AI in general, so be intentional in your messaging and reactions.
Create a culture of responsible innovation by:
encouraging employees to seek out new tools while establishing clear rules around what data they can use and what systems those tools can access
coordinating with IT to create approved pathways for testing new tools rather than simply blocking them
creating a sandbox system with synthetic data so employees can experiment without exposing company or customer information
supplying employees with time, resources, and training so they have the space and ability to use these tools responsibly, and
creating forums for employees to share whats working so that everyone can learn from each other.
What leaders should communicate about AI
The best way to fight shadow AI is to create a culture where no one feels the need to hide their usage in the first place. That comes down to the message youre sending to your employees: We will not tolerate shadow AI, but we will do everything we can to empower you to use AI. Let them know that because they are closest to the work, they know how to make the work better, and youre giving them the chance to do that.
The way things have always been done is not the path to the future. If your employees arent stuck doing drudgery work, theyll have time to find ways of doing things you previously never thought possible. Leaders should follow the motto: Find a way; dont get in the way.
The Trump administration has done everything it can to slow the growth of EVs. But in an ironic twist, Trumps war in Iran is boosting the EV industry globally.
After the U.S. attacked Iran in late February and the price of crude oil soared, global EV sales also surged. A new report from Ember, an energy think tank that is tracking EV sales in 56 countries, found that 49 of them have hit new records for EVs this year.
[Image: Ember]
Between March and August, EV sales in New Zealand grew 165% compared with the previous six months. In Chile, they were up 124%, and in India, 58%.
[Image: Ember]
In many countries, the growth was also supported by new policies. In Germany, for example, pro-EV policies that rolled out last year were in place as fuel prices rose. By August, as Germany’s gas prices reached a record high of around $8.52 per gallon, the country’s battery electric vehicle sales made up 27.5% of total car salesa 50% increase over the same month last year.
“First you had fuel efficiency standardswhich basically means a lot of manufacturers suddenly started bringing out more affordable electric car models at the start of this yearand then there was also some more direct policy support in Germany,” says Euan Graham, senior energy analyst at Ember. “So, all of that has meant that as consumer interest in EVs has risen and as petrol prices have risen, consumers have also had more affordable electric car models to choose from.”
In Uruguay, which has supported EV growth for more than a decade, the share of EV sales reached a record high of 38% in August. Vietnam hit 51%. Australia reached a 20% share. Norway, a longtime leader in EVs, hit 98%. Countries that have been slower to adopt the cars are also catching up. India had a 2% EV share in 2024, but that grew to 7% this August.
Overall, total global EV sales are up 11% year over year for the first eight months of 2026. Excluding data from the U.S. and China (Chinese car sales have dropped overall), global EV sales have grown 45% this year.
[Image: Ember]
The U.S. is being left behind
There’s a notable outlier: New EV sales have fallen in the U.S. Over the first nine months of 2026, EV sales were down 30% compared with the same period last year.
Several policy changes contributed to the decline. The Trump administration killed off the $7,500 tax credit for EVs. It also froze funding for EV charging infrastructure (a judge ruled that the freeze was illegal, though states have been slow to use the money). Tariffs made it more expensive to make EV batteries. The administration rolled back fuel efficiency standards. In response, automakers have canceled multiple EV models in the U.S., from the Ford F-150 Lightning to the Nissan Ariya. As gas prices rose this year, consumers had fewer options.
EV sales in the U.S. rebounded slightly in the third quarter, and used EV sales are also growing. New lower-cost models like Slate’s minimalist electric truck and Ford’s upcoming $28,000 EV will likely help. Still, the U.S. is lagging behind the rest of the world.
[Image: Ember]
Ember tracks EV sales in every country where data is available. In 49 out of 56 countries, the market share of EVs has now outpaced the U.S. Fifteen countries, including India and Brazil, overtook the U.S. this year.China’s huge EV industry, which is now a major exporter, is benefiting. Domestic EV industries are growing in some other countries, including Vietnam and India. American auto manufacturers, meanwhile, have been forced to write down billions in losses because of their EV investments. Eventually, as the rest of the world keeps moving in a different direction, they may become obsolete. “I think the biggest impact is on the long-term competitiveness of U.S. auto manufacturers,” Graham says.
The Ember report details how much countries with strong EV adoption have benefited during the Iran war. China, for example, has been able to displace $14 billion in crude oil imports because of its fleet of electric cars. (That’s not counting the additional benefit from the use of electric trucks, buses, and other vehicles.) Globally, the report estimates that oil-importing countries have been able to displace 200 million barrels of crude oil since the war started, worth around $20 billion.
It’s not clear what will happen when the war ends and fuel prices stabilize. Graham expects the market share of EVs to continue to grow, but says that policy is still critical. “I think that the long-term impact of this supply crisis is really going to be defined by whether governments change how they plan for the future,” he says.
Traditional software development lifecycles (SDLC) were designed around how fast people could type and coordinate. Sprints, manual quality gates, and review handoffs made sense when writing code was the slowest part of the job. With AI, developers can write, refactor, and document code faster than they could two years ago. What has not moved nearly as much is how fast the same organizations actually ship.
Gartner research on AI in software engineering explains part of why. More than half of developers report that AI has improved their team’s output by 10% or less, and some see no improvement at all. The teams increasing output are applying AI across the whole SDLC, not only to the moment of writing code. When you give engineers a faster way to write code without changing anything else in the process, the result is that more code is waiting for manual reviews, which slows the path to production.
This scenario is what pushed us to rebuild our own SDLC around AI rather than layer AI on top of it. Here is what that rebuild looks like, and where most teams lose the gains before they reach the business.
KEEP IT LEAN FOR SMALL PROJECTS
For smaller projects, an AI SDLC can be simple. Before using an AI tool, write clear requirements for each feature: what it should do, what it must not do, and how the team will know it works. AI can help draft and sharpen these requirements. Store them, along with the team’s coding standards, in the same system that tracks every change to the code. That way the AI reads them as rules on every task, and they stay current after kickoff.
Then, give AI agents a narrow, well-defined scope to write and test code. A tight scope reduces the plausible-looking mistakes a model makes when it has too much room to guess. Assign a second agent or engineer to check each change against the same rules before a person signs off. The review works best when the reviewer has not watched the code being written, which keeps bias out.
WHAT CHANGES AT AN ENTERPRISE SCALE
Enterprise environments need a more robust version of the same AI SDLC because more people and more regulation are involved. On those engagements, we break business intent into three steps:
A high-level goal turns into a feature spec
A feature spec turns into individual execution tasks
Every piece of code and every test case ties back to the requirement that justified it
That traceability lets a team explain why a particular piece of logic exists and it gives a compliance team what it needs when an audit shows up months later. The same discipline applies to the systems the team already uses. When the AI workflow connects to ticketing tools, code repositories, and approval chains, nobody has to rebuild task lists and release packages by hand every time something ships.
The person who approves a change should never be the person who generated it. That rule already applies to human engineers on any team I have run, and AI is not an exception.
WHERE PROJECTS USUALLY FAIL
Working with AI tools introduces a new risk they can produce code and documentation in minutes forcing engineers to rush code reviews rather than slowing down at the start of the process, where the real risk sits.
The requirement and specification documents created at the beginning are the most critical part of the entire lifecycle because everything downstream inherits their mistakes. A vague or ambiguous requirement no longer produces just a vague result. It produces a fast, confident, wrong one, and by the time anyone notices, the AI has already built several more things on top of it.
Closing that gap takes discipline. Engineers and product owners must treat time spent reviewing and refining a specification as work that saves time later. Spending two extra days getting a complex requirement document right is a good trade when the old alternative was weeks of meetings to reach the same alignment. Teams at Dreamix that have adopted this structured, disciplined review process ship roughly twice as fast, without giving up code quality.
REBUILD THE PROCESS
Updating a handful of tools inside an unchanged process does not produce the gains anyone is expecting. An AI SDLC means rebuilding the process itself around where the real bottleneck exists now, which is rarely the code anymore. Get the requirements and the review discipline right, and the speed AI offers will reach the business. Skip that part, and the speed just becomes a faster way to accumulate debt.
Denis Danov is the CTO of Dreamix Ltd.
Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic reportedly offered a salary of 145,000 euros (roughly equal to $190,000) for a personal assistant in its London office.
The posting called for a highly organized, detail-oriented, and self-starting administrative business partner to support senior go-to-market leaders. Responsibilities would include scheduling, handling travel logistics, managing an executives inbox and communications, filing expense claims, and other office tasks.
The post, since removed from Anthropics website but preserved here, also stated that the role would require outstanding attention to detail, strong relationship-building skills, and the ability to anticipate needs across teams while ensuring responsive, error-free execution.
Fast Company reached out to Anthropic for comment.
Social media users are pointing to the apparent irony of a leading agentic AI firm hiring a human worker to do a job that an AI agent could, at least theoretically, largely handle.
Somebody should really build some sort of tech tool that can handle this stuff autonomously, one user quipped.
The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday slightly upgraded its outlook for the world economy for this year, while warning of growing risks from rising debt, including the financial frenzy around artificial intelligence.The IMF says it expects the global economy to grow at a 3.1% pace this year. That’s up from its July forecast for 3.0% growth and well below the 3.5% expansion in 2025. Growth in 2027 should rebound to 3.4%, it said in its latest Economic Outlook.The report, released as world economic and financial leaders gathered in Bangkok for the fall meetings of the IMF and World Bank, predicts that growth in the United States will remain steady at 2.3% in 2026 and 2027.Collectively, advanced economies will grow 2.1% this year, up from 2.0% in 2025, and then slow to 1.9% growth next year, it said.The forecasts are based on a nearly 41% increase in oil prices this year, at an average of $96 a barrel. Global inflation is foreseen at 4.7% in 2026, falling to 4.1% next year. They are also based on the assumption that shipments of oil and gas through the Strait of Hormuz will resume by March, and that the boom in AI demand will moderate.
AI has uneven impacts
The boom in artificial intelligence is offsetting damage from sharply higher prices for oil and gas, IMF economists say, but it also carries risks.Its benefits are not shared equally: the U.S. and China account for more than three-quarters of net demand for imports of computer chips and other AI-related equipment, the report said.“The outlook is highly uneven,” Silvana Tenreyro, the IMF’s director of research, told reporters in Bangkok.Growth is increasingly concentrated, with 32 countries accounting for 95% of global growth, the report said. That compares with 54 countries as of April.“The global economy is not simply slowing or accelerating; rather, growth is being reallocated across countries according to their exposure to the war-induced supply shock and AI-related demand strength,” it says.Athanasios Vamvakidis, deputy director at the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, said an AI-related correction in stock markets is just one of the risks. Rising bond yields are another evolving problem, along with cyberthreats that could disrupt financial systems, he said.Underscoring such concerns, sell-offs of AI-related shares swept through Asia on Tuesday, with South Korea’s Kospi sinking as much as 7% before it closed 5.5% lower.AI’s effects on employment are another worry, “a slow moving tsunami, but a tsunami nonetheless,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said.“The impact over time on jobs globally we estimate to be around 40% jobs either augmented or downgraded or eliminated. And we are already seeing some of this impact,” she said.
Debt remains a key concern for regional economies
The IMF chief is urging countries to do a better job of improving their national finances and taming mounting levels of debt.That’s especially crucial at a time of high borrowing costs, Tenreyro said.Countries that are somewhat insulated from the energy shocks of the Iran war and that are benefiting from rapid adoption of AI are managing to keep growth on track. But developing economies and emerging markets more vulnerable to higher costs for oil and gas will see growth slow to 3.7% this year from 4.5% in 2025, the report says. It forecasts they will regain momentum next year, expanding at a 4.4% annual pace.The situation is much worse in the Middle East and Central Asia, where those regions’ economies are expected to contract this year before recovering to a 6.3% rate of growth in 2027.The 21 European countries that share the euro currency are expected to grow by a meager 1.1% this year and 1.2% in 2027.China, the world’s No. 2 economy, is expected to expand 4.5% this year, down from 5% in 2025, in line with the government’s official target.India is once again forecast to be the world’s fastest-growing major economy, advancing at a 7% clip, down from a sizzling 7.7% last year.The IMF is a 191-nation lending organization that works to promote economic growth and financial stability and to reduce global poverty. At the meetings in Bangkok, finance ministers and central bank governors will assess the state of the world economy and discuss strategies to support financial stability and sustained growth.
Elaine Kurtenbach, AP business writer
Associated Press journalists Haruka Nuga and Tian Macleod Ji contributed.
Social Security Administration (SSA) commissioner Frank Bisignano says he anticipates the federal government program will continue to exist for “another 90 years.”
This is a long journey. Its 90 years old,” Bisignano told CNBCs Squawk Box on Monday, saying the Trump Administration has pledged to “protect and preserve” the fund.
However, according to Social Security’s own trustees’ report, the retirement trust fund is estimated to run out of money and become insolvent as early as the fourth quarter of 2032, in about six years.
The predictions come at a time when many seniors are already struggling with the skyrocketing cost of living, including rising food, utilities, and gas prices.
On Wednesday, the SSA is scheduled to release its highly anticipated cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) numbers for 2027. AARP expects a 3.6% adjustment, or an extra $75, on average, per monthly check.
Those numbers are expected after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its consumer price index based on September inflation data.
Some 71 million Americansincluding 54 million retired workers and 9 million of their survivors and dependentsreceive monthly Social Security benefits, according to the SSA.
As Fast Company previously reported, the Trump Administration is also sending a onetime $90 payment to more than 20 million Social Security recipients to help with their Medicare Part B coverage premiums, and a $500 refund check sent to nearly 1 million Obamacare enrollees, who the administration claims were overcharged by the Affordable Care Act when signing up for health insurance in three dozen states.
However, critics have called out the timing of these so-called rebates and payments, which come just weeks ahead of the nation’s midterm elections on November 3.
CVS Pharmacy Inc. and various subsidiaries have agreed to pay $315 million to resolve a Justice Department case alleging it unlawfully dispensed medically unnecessary prescriptions of highly addictive opioids, officials said Tuesday.
The settlement resolves a lawsuit brought in 2024 that accused the healthcare giant of prescribing massive amounts of opioids and other controlled substances to fuel its own profits at the expense of public health and safety.
Its the latest effort by the federal government to hold accountable companies that officials have alleged helped fuel the U.S. addiction and overdose crisis.
Todays settlement is a significant milestone in the Justice Departments efforts to combat the opioid epidemic by cracking down on pharmacies who unlawfully fulfill prescriptions for controlled substances,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in an emailed statement.
CVS said in a statement that its pharmacists were trained in the safe and appropriate use of all medications and that it had implemented best-in-class programs to help them make the best decisions on behalf of patients.
The company said it strongly disagreed with the claims made in the lawsuit and that the settlement admits no wrongdoing.
The company said in 2024 that pharmacists were being held to vague, undefined, and ever-changing standards of practice when it comes to filling prescription opioids.
The lawsuit filed under President Joe Bidens administration accused CVS of violating the Controlled Substances Act by filling illegitimate prescriptions for high doses of potent opioids that fed dependence and addiction. The Justice Department alleged it dispensed large quantities of opioids based on prescriptions from known pill mills,” or providers that hand out prescriptions for drugs without a legitimate medical purpose.
It alleged that poor staffing levels coupled with performance metrics and incentive compensation policies implemented by the company led to pharmacists racing to fill prescriptions without confirming they were legitimate. The prescriptions were often billed to and reimbursed by Medicaid and other federal healthcare programs, the lawsuit says.
Under the settlement, CVS must also “implement additional safeguards to ensure that prescriptions for opioids and other controlled substances are dispensed only when medically appropriate, Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, who leads the Justice Departments Civil Division, said in a statement.
Over the last decade, drugmakers, wholesalers, pharmacies, and other companies have agreed to settlements with governments in the U.S. totaling over $50 billion. Most of the money is intended to go to address the crisis, which has been linked to more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. some years, though the numbers have fallen sharply recently.
Most of the settlementsand dollarshave been with state and local governments, but the U.S. has reached several deals, including in the last two years with the pharmacies Walgreens and Walmart.
By Alanna Durkin Richer, Associated Press
Associated Press reporter Geoff Mulvihill contributed to this report.
Three people were seen entering a manhole in New York City on Sunday, marking at least the eighth sewer-diving incident in the city and on Long Island since May.
In the latest incident, three men were seen entering a manhole in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood shortly before 1 a.m. When police arrived at the scene, the men were gone.
Just last week on October 9, five people were spotted climbing out of a manhole on the Upper East Side. The group drove off in a black SUV, leaving behind shovels and other tools. Other sewer spelunking cases in the city have been reported outside Penn Station, in Williamsburg, in Bensonhurst, and in Gravesend.
Traversing NYCs sewers seems to be on the rise, but whats inspiring spelunkers to take the plunge?
Going for gold
Police and officials from the citys Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) say that sewer divers are likely entering the sewers as would-be treasure hunters, looking for lost valuables and scrap metal washed away during storms. While this is unsafe for the perpetrators, officials say it poses no threat to the public.
Treasure hunting is confirmed to have been the motivation for two men who were caught entering and leaving a manhole on the Upper East Side in September. Speaking to prosecutors, Detective Stephen Jones said that Kevin Rodriguez and Samuel Reveron, accused of trespassing, told him that theyd entered the manhole to look for valuables that get washed away in the storm drains and sewers.
Entering New York Citys sewers is both illegal and dangerous, officials say. A DEP spokesperson explained the risks to ABC after a sewer-diving incident in August.
Sewers can contain numerous hazards, including noxious and potentially deadly gases, unstable surfaces, flooding risks, and confined spaces, the spokesperson said. For these reasons, members of the public should never enter a pipe, drain, catch basin, manhole, or outfall.
