San Francisco firefighters rescue man trapped in garbage truck

Firefighters in San Francisco rescued a man who was trapped for hours inside a garbage truck after he was accidentally loaded into the vehicle while digging through a dumpster. The incident occurred early Wednesday morning on the 100 block of Mason Street in the city's Tenderloin district. According to the San Francisco Fire Department, the rescue operation began shortly after 4:11 a.m. on September 2, 2026. A passerby flagged down the driver of a Recology garbage truck, reporting that someone was yelling from inside the truck's garbage compartment. The driver had just emptied a commercial dumpster into the truck and activated the compactor once before being alerted. Fire officials said the man had been inside the dumpster when its contents were mechanically lifted and emptied into the truck. He was buried beneath approximately 30 cubic yards of trash. About 25 firefighters responded and determined that manually removing the garbage was safer than dumping the entire load, which could have caused further injury. The rescue took more than two hours. Throughout the operation, firefighters communicated with the trapped man, who remained conscious.