The Federal Money for Sunken Boats Stops at the Coast

There is real federal money for pulling abandoned boats out of American waters. The BoatUS Foundation holds a $10 million grant from NOAA’s Marine Debris Program to run a national competitive program for removing abandoned and derelict vessels, with individual awards from $50,000 to $1,000,000.

Look at where it went. Yakutat, Alaska. The Metlakatla Indian Community. The Sitka Conservation Society. The Port Authority of Guam. Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. The State of Maine. The North Carolina Coastal Federation. The Oregon Department of State Lands. The Virgin Islands. The Makah Tribe in Washington. Ten projects, together accounting for more than 300 boats.

Every one of them sits on salt water or a Great Lake.

The eligibility line

That is not an accident of who applied. It is written into the program. The funding covers organizations serving coastal and marine areas of the United States, including the Great Lakes, U.S. territories, and Freely Associated States. Projects have to benefit what NOAA calls Trust Resources: fisheries, marine mammals and turtles, marshes and mangroves, seagrass beds, coral reefs, and Great Lakes habitat.

Utah has none of those things. Neither does Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, or New Mexico. An interior state can have thousands of miles of shoreline across its reservoirs and not one foot of it qualifies.

The same gap shows up in the tracking. Part of the grant built a national database so agencies and the public can report abandoned vessels and see where the problem concentrates. It runs on a platform called MyCoast. The name says it plainly.

What removal actually costs

The reason this matters is arithmetic. When BoatUS launched the program it put the average cost of removing a single boat at more than $24,000. For most communities there is no local money for that, and the funding programs that do exist are complicated enough that a small town or a small nonprofit burns weeks just figuring out whether it qualifies.

So an inland lake gets the worst version of the problem. Same hulls, same fuel tanks, same batteries, no dedicated funding stream, and no national database that thinks the water counts.

Inland states are counting it themselves

That absence is why we built our own inventory rather than waiting for one. Fathom’s Utah Waterways Submerged Debris Atlas catalogs an estimated 499 submerged items across 20 Utah lakes, assembled from news reports, government records, court filings, peer-reviewed studies, and salvage case files. Of the items confirmed individually, 226 are documented, and among them 103 are vessels and 56 are vehicles. Boats outnumber cars close to two to one.

Those hulls behave the same in fresh water as they do in a Louisiana bayou. A boat on the bottom holds fuel in its tank, oil in its engine, and a lead acid battery. Under the Clean Water Act, a discharge that leaves a visible sheen on the surface is a reportable event, and it does not take much to produce one. Petroleum does not simply flush away either. USGS research at the long running Bemidji crude oil site in Minnesota has tracked contamination in groundwater for decades after the original spill.

Where we are

Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused on lake cleanup and the recovery of submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways. We are a diver organization first. Real lake cleanup means reaching the bottom, not skimming the surface.

We are building toward vessel and vehicle recovery and we are straight about the gates in front of it: recovery-specific insurance, sovereign lands permits, and commercial dive certification. Those come before equipment, and equipment comes before a lift.

Coastal states have a federal program, a database, and a line item. Inland states have volunteers, donors, and whatever they are willing to count for themselves. That is the work in front of us.

If you know of a sunken boat, vehicle, 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://boatus.org/abandoned-derelict-vessels/