Nobody Was Inside: The Night a Car Went for a Swim at Deer Creek
There are unlucky days, and then there are days that end with your car at the bottom of a reservoir while you stand on shore holding a phone. On the night of September 27, 2020, a vehicle owner drove down to the boat ramp at Deer Creek State Park to do something completely innocuous: take pictures of their car. In what must rank among the most disorienting sequences of events a person can experience at a state park, the car began rolling while they were out of it — and kept rolling, down the grade of the boat ramp, into Deer Creek Reservoir.
No one was inside. No one was hurt. The car simply went in.
Wasatch County Search and Rescue was called at 11:05 p.m. to respond. Dive teams located the vehicle on the reservoir floor. A recovery operation was organized, the car was extracted, and everyone went home. The Salt Lake Tribune covered it. Multiple outlets picked it up. For a day or two, it was the kind of quirky local news story that people share with a rueful laugh — something about it captures a specifically modern kind of catastrophe, the automobile and the phone and the boat ramp all playing their part in a sequence nobody planned.
But step back from the anecdote and the incident reveals something worth sitting with. Deer Creek Reservoir is a managed water supply. On the night of September 27, 2020, a passenger vehicle sat on its floor for hours before a recovery operation could be organized and completed. That vehicle contained the standard inventory of automotive fluids: engine oil, coolant, brake fluid, power steering fluid, transmission fluid. None of those compounds belong in a drinking water reservoir. None of them simply neutralize on contact with water.
This incident had a relatively clean resolution — the car was recovered, the exposure was limited in duration, and there were no injuries. But it is a window into how easily vehicles enter Utah's reservoirs and how dependent the outcome is on whether anyone is watching, whether search and rescue is available, and whether the recovery operation is completed before the environmental damage compounds.
Deer Creek is not the only Utah reservoir with a boat ramp that doubles as an unintentional entry point for vehicles. Every state park with water access has the same vulnerability. The ramp is designed to put boats in the water. It is equally effective at putting cars there by accident. Fathom Restoration is here for the incidents that do not resolve quickly — the vehicles that sink and are not recovered, the debris that accumulates unnoticed on lake floors that no one surveys. Help us maintain the capacity to respond when the next car goes in at fathomrestoration.org.
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.sltrib.com/news/2020/09/28/police-car-submerged-utah/
