The Storm That Swallowed a Boat at Jordanelle Reservoir

It was a Monday afternoon in June 2024 when the weather at Jordanelle Reservoir turned fast. At 5:03 p.m., emergency dispatch received the call: a boat was taking on water in the middle of the reservoir. A storm had moved through quickly — the kind of weather event that catches boaters off guard at Utah’s mountain reservoirs — and the vessel was overwhelmed before its occupants could make it to shore.

What happened next was a combination of community response and luck. A bystander on or near the water recognized the emergency and moved to help, guiding the three people aboard to safety before conditions could turn fatal. The rescue effort stretched across roughly an hour and a half. When the boaters finally reached shore, soaked and shaken, the vessel they had been on was not with them.

The boat had not fully sunk — it remained partially afloat, waterlogged and disabled, somewhere on the reservoir. A recovery mission was organized to retrieve it. Whether that mission was fully completed, and what state the vessel was left in afterward, is less clear from the public record. What is clear is that a boat went into Jordanelle Reservoir during a storm, and the systems available for removing submerged or semi-submerged watercraft from Utah’s reservoirs are limited, underfunded, and not built for speed.

This is the nature of the problem at Utah’s recreational reservoirs. The storms come fast. The boats are not always seaworthy enough for the conditions that develop without warning. And when a vessel goes down, the mechanisms for getting it back up are improvised, expensive, and often left incomplete. Jordanelle, which sees heavy boat traffic during spring and summer from boaters launching out of the Hailstone Marina, has accumulated its share of this kind of debris over the years — boats that went in and were not fully recovered, gear that scattered when a vessel swamped, and equipment that settled to the bottom.

Wasatch County Search and Rescue issued public warnings after the June 2024 incident, urging boaters to check weather forecasts before launching and to get off the water when storms approach. Those reminders are important and correct. But they address the front end of the problem. Fathom Restoration, a disabled-veteran-led Utah nonprofit, is focused on the back end — the removal of what goes in when the warnings are not heeded, when the storm arrives faster than anyone expected, or when recovery operations stop before the job is fully done.

Our mission is underwater debris removal from Utah lakes: pulling submerged vehicles, vessels, and watercraft from lake floors so that these reservoirs stay clean and safe. If you know of a submerged vehicle or vessel in a Utah waterway, we want to hear from you. 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, or report a vehicle at fathomrestoration.org.

Source: https://townlift.com/2024/06/boat-sinks-at-jordanelle-reservoir-during-storm/