N95 masks are at a premium during the coronavirus pandemic.

“These things are like gold,” Jim Brown, said the Indiana man who found as nearly 30,000 N95 masks and 1,500 bottles of hand cleaner in a storage unit on March 26.

The supplies had been lying dormant for nearly five years after they twice unsuccessfully tried to send them abroad on charitable missions.

About five years ago, Beacon Health donated about 30,000 N95 masks and 1,500 bottles of hand cleaner to Grace Community Church’s Iraq refugee mission, Grace4Iraq. On Thursday, that act of compassion returned home. https://t.co/MyxbfaxKyo

— The Goshen News (@YourGoshenNews) March 26, 2020

Five years ago, Beacon Health System, which owns Elkhart General Hospital, donated the masks and hand cleaners to Grace4Iraq, their refugee mission.

“The team tried to get them in, but we could not get them into Iraq,” Brown told the News. “We were left with, I don’t know, 30,000 masks and probably 1,500 bottles of hand cleaner and didn’t really know what to do with them."

“There was just no way to get them in because of the emergency situation on the ground, just because of politics,” Brown told the News. “So Nick ... put them in storage in a garage somewhere ... and they have been there for a few years in storage, just sitting there.”

On March 26, one of Miller’s employees reminded him about the masks, Brown said. They went to the storage unit and found the masks still in unopened boxes.

“We realized our community needs these very masks,” Brown said.

Brown contacted Elkhart County Incident Management. The agency sent a representative that afternoon, who was given 15,000 of the masks, the News reported.

The other half was donated to agencies in Kosciusko County and Parkview Fort Wayne, the newspaper reported. Parkview received 5,000 masks, Kosciusko Community Hospital got 10,000 and 1,000 went to the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Department.