BC Transit finding tourist loot.

VANCOUVER — Olympic visitors are leaving a massive amount of lost goods on Vancouver’s public transit system, including cash, passports, bicycles, mobile phones and even artificial limbs.

“We’ve seen about a 50 per cent increase in the number of items turned in since the Olympics started,” TransLink spokesman Drew Snider said. And Olympic officials say they’re also dealing with a rising mountain of lost treasures as well. Transit and Olympic officials say lost and found items range from the mundane — wallets, tuques and mittens — to the absurd — child car seats and a dental retainer with a tooth still in it. Even a package of cigarettes recovered on a bus has been labelled, boxed and couriered to TransLink’s Stadium Sky-train lost property centre for processing.

All items are recorded, warehoused and catalogued with the time, description and location of where the item was recovered. For Vanoc, this includes the venue section and seat number if available, while TransLink records the route, location and run number. TransLink’s lost property storage centre has a whole area devoted to the dozens of crutches, canes, walkers and artificial limbs left by those who apparently boarded transit needing mobility aids and then somehow waltzed off without them.

Meanwhile, at the Vanoc claims centre, Hendrik Hoekema is one of 10 employees charged with the monumental task of collecting, sorting and reuniting a flood of lost belongings with their rightful owners.

Staffed by the charitable Network of Inner City Community Services Society, the claims centre has about 2,000 items and expects to have more than 12,000 by the end of the Olympics.

“Reading glasses — OK,” says Hoekema, answering the centre’s claims-report phone and jotting down the details of another lost item.  “At B.C. Place, uh huh, during the opening ceremonies, thank you.” Such impossible, Hail Mary claims are all too commonplace but are logged and rigorously followed up on nonetheless.

TransLink will donate any unclaimed cash to the United Way and give clothing and all other items to various local charities. A Vanoc spokesman said it will offer some of its found property — much of it Vancouver 2010 merchandise — to the Network of Inner City Community Services Society and auction the rest to help meet Vanoc’s operating budget.