The 100 Deadliest Days Just Started — And Utah’s Waterways Are Ready
Memorial Day weekend. 7 p.m. I-80 westbound, Exit 99, Lake Point.
A car takes the off-ramp too hot. The driver loses control. The vehicle fishtails, leaves the road, and rolls into a retention pond near Tooele. By the time North Tooele Fire District arrives, the car is upside down and fully submerged.
The 35-year-old driver was airlifted out. He didn't make it.
A dive team was called to recover the car from the water.
That's how Utah's "100 deadliest days" opened this year.
Every summer, this plays out across Utah's lakes, reservoirs, rivers, and roadside ponds. A moment of distraction. A second of lost traction. A vehicle disappears beneath the surface. Sometimes a dive team shows up within hours. Sometimes nobody comes for weeks. Sometimes nobody comes at all.
Jon Smith, a spokesman for North Tooele Fire District, said it plainly after the Lake Point crash: "You see and you respond to people's absolute worst day." He also said more than 80 percent of his district's call volume over the next three months will be on the I-80 corridor. The calls keep coming. The water keeps taking.
Utah Highway Patrol called it a matter of choices. "One poor choice or bad habit behind the wheel can escalate so quickly," said Maj. Chamberlin Neff. That's true. What's also true is what happens after the vehicle goes in — and what gets left behind when the divers go home.
Here's what doesn't make the news: the environmental cost of a vehicle sitting submerged.
A single car carries an arsenal of contaminants. Motor oil, transmission fluid, gasoline, brake fluid, coolant, battery acid. One quart of motor oil can contaminate up to 250,000 gallons of water. A full tank of gas, leaching slowly into sediment, poisons aquatic ecosystems for years. Heavy metals — lead, zinc, chromium — leach from components like brake pads and batteries, accumulating in fish tissue and lakebed sediment long after the headlines have moved on.
When first responders pull a car from the water the same day, the contamination window is short. When a vehicle sits for months — or years — it becomes a slow chemical drip into the watershed. Utah has over a dozen major water bodies, thousands of miles of rivers and canals, and no dedicated operation to systematically locate and extract what's been left behind.
That's the mission gap Fathom Restoration exists to fill.
We're Utah's first nonprofit built specifically for this work. Our focus: recovering lost vehicles, vessels, equipment, and debris from Utah's lakes, rivers, and reservoirs — protecting water quality, protecting aquatic ecosystems, and cleaning up the mess that nobody else is equipped or funded to address.
We deploy trained dive teams. We work with landowners, state agencies, and local authorities to locate, extract, and properly dispose of submerged hazardous material. We're not waiting for the emergency call — we're running systematic recovery operations to identify what's already down there and get it out.
The work isn't glamorous. The water in Utah's lakes is murky, cold, and silted. The vehicles are corroded, unstable, and sometimes dangerous to approach. But this is the work. Someone has to do it.
This summer, as the 100 deadliest days clock ticks forward and more accidents put more metal into Utah's water, Fathom Restoration will be ready to go in.
Here's how you can join the mission:
Donate at fathomrestoration.org — every dollar goes directly toward equipment, training, and recovery operations.
Volunteer — if you have commercial dive certification or underwater recovery experience, we want to hear from you.
Follow us on social media to track our operations, see what we're pulling out of Utah's waterways, and stay informed on the state of Utah's water quality.
The water is dirty. We're going in. Stand with us.
Source: Tooele County first responders brace for '100 deadliest days' of summer — KSL.com, May 26, 2026
