A Truck Went Through the Ice. Getting It Out Took Six Weeks.

An angler drove over thin ice on Lake Winnipesaukee on March 13 and his Honda Ridgeline went through. Early attempts to bring it up failed, it was left overnight, and by the next day it was on the bottom.

It came out on April 23, from about fifty feet of water off Gilford Town Beach in New Hampshire, in a recovery that ran more than four hours. Between those two dates is the part worth reading.

The Do-It-Yourself Attempts Left Their Own Debris

State environmental staff checked the site three days later and saw no visible sheen. With the ice unstable, the recommendation was to wait for ice-out, and no fine was issued, on the understanding that the owner would remove the truck himself.

He tried. New Hampshire Fish and Game Conservation Officer Chris Bryson called those efforts high-risk. They included attaching a winch to a tree and cutting a canal with a chainsaw, and over the course of them the truck was dragged underwater about three quarters of a mile, from Dockham Shore to a point off Gilford Town Beach.

None of it worked, and it did not leave the lake the way it found it. When professional divers finally went down, they brought up more than the truck. “We did recover about 300 yards of cable, some dive equipment, a grappling hook and a cinder block,” said Nick Sackos of Dive Winnipesaukee, the first diver in the water.

The Truck Came Out Because Someone Had the Authority

Gilford town administrator Scott Dunn took the problem to the selectboard, then to Executive Councilor Joe Kenney, who two decades earlier had sponsored state Senate legislation on removing vehicles from waterbodies. On April 15 the selectboard voted unanimously to let the Department of Environmental Services use the beach, and DES gave the owner a final 48 hours. The deadline came and went, and the state took over, with the owner billed for the cost.

That cost is not small. Tim McDonald, co-owner of Marine Solutions, said a recovery like this one runs between ten and twenty thousand dollars. About a dozen people from three companies worked the job. Divers attached buoyancy bags in whitecaps, the truck surfaced upside down and had to be flipped with a cable, and it was on a flatbed by 12:55 p.m.

DES spokesperson Jim Martin said there were no apparent leaks and the divers saw no sign of chemical pollution. Crews boomed the area anyway. “Every single second it is down there, even though we didn’t see leaking, you run the risk,” McDonald said. Only the attention was unusual, Martin added: New Hampshire loses a number of vehicles and snowmobiles through the ice every year.

The Same Question, Asked in Utah

New Hampshire had the pieces in place: an agency willing to act, a cost-recovery path, and salvage companies close enough to call. Utah has the inventory. 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. Most have been down far longer than six weeks.

Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we are a diver organization first. Our mission is recovering submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from lakes and waterways across the state. We are building toward doing that 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.

A vehicle that has sat for years is not the clean case Gilford got. Fuel, engine oil, and a lead acid battery sit there while the housing around them corrodes. Under the Clean Water Act, a discharge that leaves a visible sheen is reportable, and USGS has tracked oil contamination persisting in groundwater for decades at its Bemidji, Minnesota research site.

About fifty people were at the docks when that truck reached the flatbed, and they clapped. Getting one vehicle out of a lake should not take six weeks and a call to a state executive councilor. If you know of 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.laconiadailysun.com/news/local/sunk-truck-removed-from-lake-winnipesaukee-no-leaks-found/article_dbccf7fa-b1c4-4407-884d-c9beaf54b452.html