ATTLEBORO (CBS) – For an Attleboro woman, it was a stroke of luck that put her wedding rings back on her fingers.

Deb Kirby accidentally threw out 5 rings.

Imagine you’re trying to find something tiny in a 15 ton pile of trash. That was the task that faced Deb Kirby of Attleboro. Here’s what happened. One night Deb took off five rings, her wedding and engagement rings, a ring her father gave her and two others, and put them on her kitchen counter after a busy day. She wrapped them up in paper towels to dry and by accident swept them all up as she cleaned her counters and dropped them in the trash. The next morning was trash day and the garbage bag containing the precious rings was soon on its’ way to an incinerator.

When she realized what she had done, Deb called Waste Management, the trash hauler for Attleboro. “My voice was shaking. I said Aaron, I’m completely freaking out, I believe I threw away my wedding rings,” she said.

WBZ NewsRadio 1030′s Laurie Kirby reports

Aaron Smith of Waste Management figured out which truck it was and stopped it not far from the incinerator. “It was close, very close to getting there,” he says. Smith redirected the truck to the Raynham transfer station where they dumped it. “I thought I would be all by myself in a pile of trash digging for this. Eight men came out and helped me,” she says.

All they had to go on was that the rings were in a black trash bag with a blue string tie, and there were an awful lot of those. But after only about half an hour of digging, one of the guys found the right bag. “I just ran over to him sliding through the trash, and I hugged him and I hugged them all and I was so happy,” says Deb. “They could have very easily said there’s no way you’re going to find those rings. But they took the extra steps and they made the effort and it paid off,” she adds.

Deb says from now on those rings never come off.