A Fish Finder Found the Truck. Getting It Out Took Three Days.
A fisherman on Montgomery County State Lake in southeast Kansas was watching his LiveScope screen near the dock on the northeast side of the lake, and what came back did not look like structure or fish. It looked like a vehicle.
He reported it. Deputies from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office responded around 8:30 that Friday night. By Sunday the truck was on a wrecker.
Four Organizations, Three Days, One Truck
The response escalated one step at a time, and each step required a different capability.
Friday was the report and the deputies. Saturday, game wardens with Kansas Wildlife and Parks came out and put an underwater drone on it, which is how they identified it as a Dodge Dakota and confirmed it had no license plate attached. Sunday brought the actual removal: sheriff’s deputies, Kansas Wildlife and Parks officers, and divers from the Wyandotte Volunteer Fire Department.
The divers went in first, not to lift anything, but to look. They evaluated the vehicle and the conditions around it before deciding on the safest way to take it out. Only then did Rough Country Towing and Recovery bring in a heavy wrecker, and only after divers had secured cables to the truck did anyone pull.
It came up a silver 2004 Dodge Dakota 4×4, four door. No one was inside. Authorities said it appeared to have been in the lake a long time, and how it got there is still under investigation.
Nothing About the Discovery Was Systematic
Read that sequence again and the part that stands out is the beginning. A truck sat on the bottom of a state lake, near a dock, long enough that officers could tell it had been down a long time. Four organizations mobilized inside seventy-two hours once they knew.
Nobody knew until a man fishing on a Friday evening happened to look at his sonar screen.
That is how nearly all of these are found. Not by survey, not by inventory, not by any agency whose job it is to know what is on the bottom of a public lake. By an angler with a consumer fish finder, or a diver on a recreational dive, or a drought that drops the water line far enough to expose what was always there.
Utah Has the Same Gap
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we are a diver organization first. Our mission is the recovery of submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from lakes and waterways across the state, and the water quality that depends on getting them out.
We built the Utah Waterways Submerged Debris Atlas because the same gap exists here. It documents an estimated 499 submerged items across 20 Utah lakes, 226 of them confirmed individually, including 103 vessels and 56 vehicles. Nearly every one of those entries traces back to somebody noticing something, not to a program designed to find them.
A vehicle that has been down a long time is not inert while it waits. Fuel, engine oil, and a lead acid battery sit inside a housing that is corroding around them. Under the Clean Water Act, a discharge that leaves a visible sheen on the surface is reportable, and USGS has tracked petroleum contamination persisting in groundwater for decades at its long-running Bemidji, Minnesota research site.
We are building toward doing this recovery work ourselves, and we are direct about the order it happens in: recovery-specific insurance, sovereign lands permits, and commercial dive certification, before a single lift.
Kansas got lucky. A fisherman looked at a screen. Utah should not have to rely on luck either, but until it does not, the reporting is the whole front end of the system. If you have seen a submerged vehicle, vessel, or debris pile in a Utah waterway, report it at fathomrestoration.org.
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to lake cleanup and the recovery of submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways. Donate / Volunteer / Report a vehicle at fathomrestoration.org.
Source: https://www.newson6.com/tulsa-oklahoma-news/vehicle-recovered-from-montgomery-county-state-lake
