Eight construction workers in Belgium unearthed gold coins and bars worth around nine million euros (roughly 10.5 million dollars) last Tuesday, after a drill bit jammed during renovation work on a building in Dendermonde, a city approximately 30 kilometres northwest of Brussels.

The discovery unfolded when the workers realised the drill had struck a solid gold bar buried beneath the structure. They informed the property owner, who contacted police. Authorities then carried out a careful inventory under camera surveillance at the local police station before sealing the hoard to prevent any future ownership disputes.

Photographs posted to the Dendermonde police’s Facebook page show a metal bucket packed with gold coins alongside a table covered in gold bars. The images give some sense of the scale of what the crew pulled out of the ground on an otherwise routine working day.

Patrick Feys, Chief of the Dendermonde Police District, explained that the drill jamming mid-excavation was what first alerted the workers to their find. He also expressed hope that the gold might eventually fund a worthy cause, though he acknowledged that any such outcome would depend on the investigation and whatever legal proceedings follow.

A police inquiry is now under way to determine how the cache came to be buried there and who holds legal title to it. Belgian law on found treasure can be complex and with a figure of this size in play, the question of ownership is unlikely to be settled quickly.

For now, the gold sits sealed in police custody while investigators piece together its origins. The eight workers, meanwhile, have presumably returned to the renovation. Whether they see any share of the windfall remains very much an open question.