Fifty Abandoned Boats and No One Willing to Claim Them
Brian Lee counts abandoned boats for a living, more or less. He runs TowBoatUS on Chickamauga and Nickajack Lakes in Tennessee, and by his own tally, fifty of them sit in those two reservoirs alone. Nearly as many are scattered across nearby Watts Bar. Some are still afloat, listing against the bank. Some are all the way under, the kind nobody knows about until a sonar pass finds them. Out of sight, out of mind, is how Lee put it to a Chattanooga TV station this summer.
The obvious question is who is supposed to deal with them. Three different agencies got asked, and each one pointed somewhere else.
Whose Job Is It
The Tennessee Valley Authority manages the reservoirs. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency manages the water. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation manages the pollution. None of them owns the boats.
TVA’s actual authority is narrower than most people assume. Section 26a of the TVA Act lets it regulate obstructions in the river system, not the vessels sitting in it. TVA can only step in after a boat has sat in violation for fourteen straight days, and only after ninety days of notice have run out, and only if it decides the wreck is an immediate risk to safety, navigation, the environment, or its own infrastructure. When TVA does pay to remove one, the cost lands on TVA’s own ratepayers. The agency calls this a growing nationwide issue with no simple or inexpensive solution. TWRA says it is currently working towards resolution to identify funding sources to cover removal costs. Neither statement commits to a date.
Nobody Owns the Paper Trail Either
Part of the problem is that nobody can prove who owns the wreck. Tennessee does not title boats the way it titles cars. A boat can change hands two or three times with no paperwork at all, and Lee says the trail can go cold one owner away from whoever registered it last. No title, no owner. No owner, no one to bill for removal.
Lee prices the job, raising the hull, towing it, demolishing what’s left, at four to five hundred dollars a foot. On a forty-foot boat that is twenty thousand dollars or more. In most cases, he says, what the wreck is worth once it is out of the water does not come close to covering what it cost to get it there. That gap, not any single agency’s failure, is the real reason these boats stay put.
The Same Shape, Different Water
Utah does not have Tennessee’s specific numbers, but the shape of the problem is not unique to Tennessee. Anywhere a boat or a vehicle sinks in water that crosses agency lines, the same vacuum opens up: no clear owner, no clear budget, and no one whose job description says go get it.
That vacuum is what Fathom Restoration is building to fill. We are a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and our mission is recovering submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and reservoirs statewide. We have done our own counting rather than wait on someone else’s database: the 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.
Every one of those hulls carries the same risk Lee’s boats do. A sunken vessel holds fuel in its tank, oil in its engine, and a lead acid battery, regardless of which state’s water it is sitting in. Under the Clean Water Act, any discharge that leaves a visible sheen on the surface is a reportable event. Petroleum does not simply break down and vanish either. USGS’s decades-long research site at Bemidji, Minnesota has tracked contamination persisting in groundwater long after the original spill.
We are building toward doing this recovery work ourselves, and we are direct about what has to happen first: recovery-specific insurance, sovereign lands permits, and commercial dive certification, in that order, before a single lift.
Tennessee built a public tool, at boatus.org/database, so anyone can log a wreck’s location instead of hoping an agency notices. Utah needs the same instinct. 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://newschannel9.com/news/local/whos-responsible-abandoned-boats-become-growing-problem-in-tennessee-lakes-rivers
