STOCKTON, Calif. — Greg Dart is a retired electrical contractor who volunteers his time maintaining a small obscure website at the Port of Stockton where non-profits store their goods.
About three years ago, Dart remembers the American Red Cross began storing about 50,000 N-95 and non-medical grade masks at the port.
"We had to move some stuff they had on the floor," Dart said. "One of those was a big pallet of dust masks, thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And, I had just had that in my memory."
A few days ago, checked the warehouse again for the masks, knowing that there's a country-wide shortage for healthcare workers on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic.
The masks were still there.
The Stockton Record first reported on the masks days ago. Since then, all of them have been removed.
In a statement to ABC10, the Red Cross said it had the masks moved to "a more secure location out of caution for theft... now that word is out" that they were being stored.
The masks were part of the Red Cross' stockpile of protection equipment stored in case of emergency in disaster-prone California. The Red Cross said in addition to moving many of the masks to different storage, the organization began giving some of them away to healthcare workers.
"Given the increasing shortage of supplies for critical health professionals, we are distributing a portion of this stockpile to points of highest need as defined by our government partners," the Red Cross said in a statement.
Still, Dart said he thinks all of the tens of thousands of masks should be distributed now, to help fight the coronavirus pandemic.
"There are lives to be saved by the applications of masks," Dart said.
Follow the conversation on Facebook with Kurt Rivera.
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