A San Francisco man was rescued from inside a garbage truck earlier this week, local authorities said.

Footage of the rescue, shared by the San Francisco Fire Department, showed firefighters digging through a mountain of trash to find the trapped man.

Crews responded to reports of yelling from inside a Recology garbage truck in downtown San Francisco 4:11 a.m. on Wednesday.

Firefighters unloaded the entire truck and spent approximately two hours searching through the debris to reach the trapped individual, the department said in a Facebook statement.

The man was found conscious and spoke with crews before being transported to a local trauma center to receive medical treatment.

The extent of his injuries has not been disclosed.

Photos and videos from the scene posted by the fire department show rescuers hastily shovelling through piles of garbage with tools and discarding much of it into the road.

A fire official said these types of incidents happen “from time to time” and that there are people who go into dumpsters looking for food and other items, saying this was an example of a person who had become trapped while scouring through rubbish.

A firefighter also suffered an injury to the hand during the rescue operation and was taken to hospital to receive stitches, NBC News reported.

Capt. Mariano Elias, a public information officer for the fire department, told the New York Times that the driver of the garbage truck was on his pickup route and about to discard the waste when a passerby flagged him down and alerted him to shouting coming from the back of the vehicle.

“He turned his truck off to listen, and they did hear someone yelling and screaming for help,” Captain Elias told the U.S outlet.

The driver tried to communicate with the person inside, but the trapped individual couldn’t pull himself out, so the driver called the authorities, it added.

According to the report, about 25 firefighters rescued the man, whom they dug out of the truck after determining it would be too dangerous to dump him out of the vehicle with all of the garbage.

In 2025, a New York man died after the contents of a dumpster he was sleeping in were discarded into a garbage truck.