Rose Albers stands in the lobby of the Glenwood Springs post office. It just looked that way after the U.S. Postal Service recently lost 75,000 pieces of mail - all the letters sent on one day from all Colorado ZIP codes beginning in 816. The mail disappeared March 26, when it was sent on a Postal Service truck to Commerce City to be sorted in the General Mail Facility there. Normally, the mail is sorted in Glenwood Springs and sent on to a loading facility at Denver International Airport. But the machines that sort mail in Glenwood Springs broke down that day, so the mail went to the Commerce City processing center.
Nobody really knows what happened.
And because it was prime tax-filing season, the letters undoubtedly included tax returns. She started hearing from friends and customers that the same thing had happened to them, and they started asking questions at the post office. Eventually, there were enough complaints that Glenwood Springs Postmaster John Dunbar concluded something had happened to the mail on March 26. DeSarro said it's possible the mail was shunted off to some corner of the Commerce City sorting facility, where 8 million to 10 million pieces of mail are sorted every day. At least one insurance policy was canceled for nonpayment and one home sale delayed by lost documents.