467 Pounds Out of One Creek in One Day
On Sunday, September 20, more than 20 divers went into Holmes Creek in Washington County, Florida, and the waterways around it. By the end of the day they had pulled out 467 pounds of trash.
The event was Creek Crawl 2026, the second annual community cleanup hosted by SEA Divers Scuba. Divers and volunteers worked across designated zones and brought up cans, bottles, fishing line, plastic, and everything else that does not belong on the bottom of a creek. One diver, Jeff Gilley, collected 72.1 pounds on his own.
The Count Matters as Much as the Haul
Creek Crawl ran alongside PADI AWARE Week, a global conservation push that puts divers to work for the underwater environment. One of its programs, Dive Against Debris, asks divers to do more than haul trash to the truck. What comes up gets documented and reported, so researchers and policymakers can see how much debris is down there and what kind.
That is the part of a dive cleanup people tend to skip. A pile on the shore makes a good photo. A record of what was in the pile, and where it came from, is what changes how a waterway gets managed.
Same Work, Utah Water
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and this is the work we do. Our volunteer divers go into Utah lakes and reservoirs and bring up the trash that settles where nobody on shore can see it.
The numbers move from place to place. On a recent volunteer crew dive at Deer Creek Reservoir, four of us worked one small area and came up with roughly 40 pounds, estimated rather than weighed. A boat ladder, a speaker, fishing poles, and a pile of cans. A few days later at the Sand Hollow dive park, three of us came up with one food wrapper and some fishing line. Busy boating water collects debris. Water that people treat as their own stays clean.
Holmes Creek makes the same point at a larger scale. More than twenty divers, one day, 467 pounds.
Some of What Is Down There Is Bigger Than a Can
Hand-carried debris is where every cleanup starts. It is not where the problem ends. Our Utah Waterways Submerged Debris Atlas documents an estimated 499 submerged items across 20 Utah lakes, 226 of them confirmed individually, including 103 vessels and 56 vehicles.
A sunken vehicle is a fuel tank, engine oil, ethylene glycol, and a lead acid battery sitting on a lakebed. Under the Clean Water Act, a discharge that leaves a visible sheen on the surface is reportable. The U.S. Geological Survey has tracked petroleum contamination persisting in groundwater for decades at its research site near Bemidji, Minnesota.
We are building toward the recovery of submerged vehicles and vessels, and we are doing it in the order it has to happen: recovery-specific insurance, sovereign lands permits, and commercial dive certification, all before a single lift. Until then, the work is the same work the divers in Holmes Creek did. Get in the water, bring the trash up, and write down what you found.
Leave It Cleaner Than You Found It
The organizers of Creek Crawl said it plainly: protecting local water is an ongoing job, not a single day. Pack out what you bring in. Throw trash away where it belongs. Leave the creek, the spring, or the reservoir cleaner than it was when you got there.
SEA Divers Scuba is already planning Creek Crawl 2027. We would like to see more days like it on Utah water, and more divers willing to spend a Sunday on the bottom with a mesh bag.
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit running volunteer dive cleanups on Utah's lakes and waterways and building toward the recovery of submerged vehicles and vessels. Donate or volunteer at fathomrestoration.org.
