The Most Dangerous Stretch: Highway 189 and the Deer Creek Corridor
It happened on a Tuesday afternoon in April 2023. A vehicle traveling southbound on US-189 crossed the center line at high speed and struck an SUV head-on in the northbound lanes. The collision involved four vehicles. One of the vehicles caught fire. When the wreckage was cleared and the investigation began, two people were dead — Jeremy C. Pope, 46, and Hanani Aiono, 26, both residents of Midway, killed by a wrong-way driver on a highway they likely traveled routinely.
This is not a story about a vehicle going into Deer Creek Reservoir. It is a story about the road that runs alongside it — a corridor with enough traffic, enough gradient, enough curves, and enough proximity to deep water that it demands serious attention from anyone thinking about waterway safety and environmental risk in the Wasatch Back.
US-189 connects Utah Valley to the Heber Valley through Provo Canyon, running tight against the shore of Deer Creek Reservoir for a significant portion of its length. The section near the reservoir sees commercial truck traffic, recreational vehicles pulling boat trailers, commuters, and tourists — a mix of users traveling at highway speed along a road where the margin for error is narrow and the water is close. When crashes happen here, they can be fatal on land and catastrophic for the reservoir below.
The April 2023 crash was a land-based tragedy — the vehicles did not enter the water. But the May 2024 propane tanker incident on the same highway corridor showed exactly what happens when the margin disappears entirely. A rig jackknifed, punched through a guardrail, and landed in Deer Creek Reservoir with its driver inside and 130 gallons of diesel heading for the water table. The distance between a head-on collision on the highway and a submerged vehicle in the reservoir is, in some places along that road, a matter of feet and the integrity of a guardrail.
This corridor is one of the reasons Deer Creek Reservoir appears repeatedly in incident reports, news coverage, and search and rescue logs. It is not that the reservoir is uniquely dangerous — it is that the road beside it funnels a high volume of traffic past a body of water with limited protection between the two. Accidents on US-189 near Deer Creek carry the potential to become environmental incidents in a water supply that serves hundreds of thousands of Utahns.
Fathom Restoration monitors this connection between Utah’s road network and its water systems. Our mission centers on recovering submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah lakes — precisely the kind of contamination events that happen when highway accidents and open water share the same geography. The memory of Jeremy Pope and Hanani Aiono deserves more than a guardrail inspection. It deserves the kind of sustained attention to waterway safety that makes sure the next accident on that road does not also become the next pollution event at Deer Creek. Support our mission 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.deseret.com/utah/2023/4/20/23691291/2-killed-crash-deer-creek-reservoir/
