Missing Since 1990: The Fathers and Sons Echo Reservoir Never Gave Back

In the summer of 1990, a boating collision on Echo Reservoir in Summit County set off a search that would end without closure. Two motorboats collided about 200 yards from a dock on an August evening. Both parties had been out on the water enjoying what should have been a routine summer activity. The collision changed everything.

A 48-year-old man and a 12-year-old boy — believed to be father and son, both from Salt Lake City — went into the water. By the time search and rescue teams responded, the two were gone. The reservoir held them fast, yielding neither sign nor body in the initial search. At the request of the family, their names were not released to the press. They became, in the public record, simply the missing.

At the time that the Deseret News reported on the incident, searchers were simultaneously working three separate apparent drowning cases. One victim — David Myers, 31, of Price — had drowned in the Green River and been identified. The other three remained unaccounted for. The searches were active. The outcomes were uncertain. And for the family of the father and son lost at Echo, the uncertainty may have stretched far beyond that summer.

This story is thirty-five years old. It sits at the far end of a timeline that connects directly to where we are today. Echo Reservoir has had decades of boating seasons since that August evening in 1990. The lakebed has accumulated its own history — accidents, deliberate dumping, vehicles that left nearby roads, recreational debris, and in at least one documented case, people who went into the water and were never brought back out.

We tell this story not to dwell in tragedy but to name what it represents: the long tail of unresolved recoveries that accumulates when reservoirs are used heavily and recovery resources are thin. In 1990, the technology for underwater search was far less capable than it is today. Sonar systems that can now map a lakebed in hours simply did not exist in a practical, deployable form for county search and rescue teams. If those missing individuals went to the bottom of Echo Reservoir, the tools available at the time may not have been sufficient to find them.

Today, those tools exist. Purpose-built sonar, remotely operated vehicles, and specialized dive teams trained in underwater search and recovery can accomplish in one organized operation what was impossible in 1990. What we lack is not technology — it is the organized, funded, dedicated mission to deploy it systematically across Utah’s reservoirs.

The families of people lost to Utah’s lakes deserve the closure that modern recovery technology can provide. The water deserves to give back what it has held. And we believe that a state with the recreation culture, the water assets, and the technical capability that Utah possesses owes its people a serious, sustained answer to the question of what lies beneath.

Echo Reservoir is part of that answer. We have not forgotten 1990.

Fathom Restoration is a Utah nonprofit dedicated to recovering submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways. Donate, volunteer, or report a submerged vehicle at fathomrestoration.org.

Source: https://www.deseret.com/1990/8/1/18874307/3-apparent-drowning-victims-still-missing-authorities-identify-4th