I came back from vacation this week and in my mailbox, to my delight, was a thick envelope from the Federal Aviation Administration. On July 18, I had filed a Freedom of Information Act request through the FAA web site for records of objects that fall from the sky from aircraft. I was curious about how often such things happened, and what it meant for those on the ground.

The Aug. 6 letter from Joseph K. Tintera, manager in the FAA’s Regulatory Support Division in Oklahoma City, indicated that the nation’s aviation safety office apparently doesn’t have a unique description for such events.

Nevertheless, to the agency’s credit, it ran several keyword searches in its database, including “dropped off,” “separated from,” “fell off” and the most-used term of art related to plummeting pieces: “departed the aircraft.”

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The photo above, taken in 2006, shows the unusual contraband: the fur-clad bodies of 126 beaver, 12 muskrat, a mink, and an otter. Officers with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources seized the animals as part of its investigation into Timothy L. Kresel, a trapper who lived in Brooklyn Park. Kresel’s methods of capturing fur-bearing creatures in the wild got him into significant trouble with the agency that enforces trapping laws.

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Reading my colleague H.J. Cummins’ report on Xcel Energy’s effort to recover their money from hundreds of malfunctioning gas meters, it seems timely to tell the tale of a man and his electric meter, which he says had the opposite problem: it claimed he was using all kinds of juice at his condo over the winter, when he and his wife weren’t even living there.

Earl Weckman, 74, is a retired Hopkins police officer. That doesn’t mean he has forgotten how to build a case.

Weckman lives with his wife Marilyn in a condo in Rogers. When winter comes, the couple departs for four months in Arizona. They get their bills forwarded to their place in Mesa, and this past winter, Weckman noticed something strange in his Xcel Energy bills. They were about double what they were the year before (in January 2008, $82.17 versus $39.50 in 2007).

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In March, city inspectors stopped at an old metal finishing shop on the North Side of Minneapolis to have a look around. Heavy snows pressed down on a partially collapsed roof. Inside the building was a witch’s brew of chemicals in 180 containers, the caustic products and residues of 30 years of metal plating and finishing. They were stored in such a haphazard way, and the building was so dilapidated, that the city inspectors called for help. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s emergency cleanup unit showed up within days, and determined that Ken’s Metal Finishing was an “imminent and substantial endangerment” to the neighborhood, which includes a school, a day care center, a park and homes.

“The roof was literally raining down inside the building,” said Dave Jaeger, supervisor of a Hennepin County agency called the contaminated lands unit. “We just felt this was an unstable situation.”

A toxic threat has to be fairly immediate for the EPA to send in the guys with the moon-suits. In April, the EPA’s On-Scene Coordinator and private contractors set up a secure compound around the weatherbeaten building on the corner of Emerson and 24th Avenue North. Workers in protective suits and respirators emptied drums and cut up metal vats with saws. Air monitors set up around the building ensured that no airborne nasties would escape into the neighborhood. They needed a tanker truck to haul away the 1,320 gallons of “heavy metal contaminated liquids.” That was just part of the cleanup, which included cyanide liquids, acid liquids and other toxic stuff. The work went on through the end of May.

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