Sonar and ROV: How Crews Searched Rockport Reservoir

It was a summer evening at Rockport State Park. A man was out on the reservoir with his dog, both of them on a paddleboard. It was the kind of low-stakes recreation that brings tens of thousands of Utahns to reservoirs every summer. At some point, they fell in together.

The dog made it to shore. The man did not.

The Summit County Sheriff’s Office launched search and water rescue teams. What followed was an hours-long search involving multiple agencies and specialized technology, including sonar equipment from Wasatch County and Summit County’s own remotely operated underwater vehicle. Just before 11 p.m. on the night of July 21, 2022, those tools found what eyes on the surface could not.

The recovery that night was, in a technical sense, a best-case outcome for a worst-case situation. The technology was available. The agencies cooperated. The search ended the same night rather than stretching into days.

The conditions that led to that outcome deserve examination.

Paddleboarding is among the fastest-growing water activities in Utah. It requires no motorboat license, minimal equipment beyond the board itself, and appeals to people across a wide range of fitness levels and ages. It also carries real risks that the low barrier to entry can obscure: exposure to sudden weather changes, distance from shore, cold water temperatures even in summer, and the challenge of self-rescue when a capsize occurs far from help.

Rockport Reservoir sits at roughly 6,000 feet elevation. Water temperatures in July are cold enough to cause cold-water shock in an unexpected immersion. A healthy adult who goes into that water unexpectedly has a significantly shorter window to self-rescue than the temperature and the setting might suggest.

This incident also illustrates the role of sonar and ROV technology in modern water recovery operations. The capacity to search a reservoir bottom by conventional diving is limited by visibility, depth, and endurance. Sonar and remotely operated vehicles extend that capability, but they require investment, training, and coordination across agencies that does not always exist.

That family received an answer the same night because the right equipment was available and the right agencies cooperated. That outcome is not guaranteed across every Utah reservoir on every summer evening. It depends on geography, on agency relationships, on equipment inventory, on response time. At a more remote reservoir, with a smaller agency, on a night with fewer resources available, the technology that worked that night might not have been there.

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Source: https://www.kpcw.org/summit-county/2022-07-22/rockport-reservoir-drowning-victims-body-recovered-late-thursday-night