When your job is to clean up the debris that washes ashore you probably don’t get all that excited when you find a few bags and a plane seat. In fact, your excitement levels are so low that you burn the bags and seat and don’t bother to tell anyone, only realising months later that you may have found part of the missing MH370 plane.

Nicolas Ferrier works on the shores of Reunion, keeping the shoreline clean and ridding the French island of the debris that often washes ashore. He was so unconcerned with finding the plane seat that he had only bothered to tell one person before burning it. Here’s the Telegraph:

Mr Ferrier spotted the seat in early May. And on Saturday he told his story for the first time – up until now, no one but his wife has known about the find.

It was, he explained, washed up on the mile-long stretch of coast which he monitors near Saint Andre, on the east of the Indian Ocean island. And last week the same stretch of coast was at the centre of the world’s attention, after what is believed to be part of a Boeing 777 wing was washed ashore. Given that the only such plane to have crashed in the Southern Hemisphere is MH370 – the ill-fated flight that vanished in mysterious circumstances in March 2014 – it seems, at last, that the riddle could have been solved.

So how is Nicolas and the rest of Reunion’s 850 000 inhabitants handling all the attention?

“Malaysia Airlines is a bit like bin Laden,” he chuckled, his thickly-accented French mixed with Creole. “No one had ever heard of it – then suddenly we talk about nothing else.”

Don’t expect that attention to die down any time soon my friend, after over a year with nothing to go on investigators will be combing your shores for every last clue they can get their paws on.

[source:telegraph]