The Sunken Boat That Came Up in Two Hours
A 42-foot boat hit the rocks near Morgan Point on Chicago’s lakefront Tuesday evening and went to the bottom of Lake Michigan. By Wednesday it was back on the surface.
The hull was damaged badly enough that crews could not simply pump the water out. So commercial divers from TowBoatUS went in, inspected the damage, and rigged large inflatable airbags to the vessel. Inflated, the bags lifted the boat slowly while holding it steady and keeping it from rolling over. Once it was floating, the crew towed it about two miles to 31st Street Harbor at 4 to 5 mph. Richard Lenardson, who owns and operates TowBoatUS, told FOX 32 Chicago the operation was expected to take about two hours.
Two hours. That number is the story.
Why That Boat Came Up
It came up because it had an owner, and that owner picked up the phone and hired a salvage company. That is the entire difference between a vessel that gets recovered and a vessel that becomes part of the lake.
The technical problem was not the hard part. Divers, rigging, lift bags, a tow. TowBoatUS had run a similar job on Lake Michigan a month earlier, raising a 38-foot boat and towing it ten miles. The equipment exists. The methods are decades old and well understood. What is scarce is not capability. It is somebody willing to pay for the work when there is nothing left to salvage.
Most sunken boats do not have that person. The owner is gone, or the coverage ran out, or the hull is worth less than the invoice to raise it. So the boat stays. Nobody files a report, nobody sends a crew, and the water closes over it.
What Stays Down in Utah
Our own research points at something people usually have backwards. Fathom’s Utah Waterways Submerged Debris Atlas catalogs 499 documented and estimated submerged items across 20 Utah lakes, built from news reports, government records, court filings, peer-reviewed studies, and salvage case files. Among the 226 items we confirmed individually, 103 are vessels and 56 are vehicles. Boats outnumber cars by close to two to one.
Those boats are not inert. Under the Clean Water Act, a discharge that causes a visible sheen on the surface of the water is a reportable event (40 CFR Part 110). It does not take much fuel to do that. And petroleum in the environment does not simply flush away. USGS research at the long-running Bemidji crude oil research site in Minnesota has tracked contamination persisting in groundwater for decades after the original spill.
A hull on the bottom holds fuel in its tank, oil in its engine, and a battery. That comes out slowly, over years, into water people fish, swim in, and draw from downstream.
The Gap We Are Built For
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 still building toward vessel and vehicle recovery, and we are straight about where that stands. Lift bags, the same tool that brought that Chicago boat up, are on our equipment plan. So are the things that have to come first: recovery-specific insurance, sovereign-lands permits, and commercial dive certification. None of it is exotic. All of it costs money we are still raising.
The boat in Lake Michigan came up because someone with a stake in it wrote a check. The ones on the bottom of Utah’s reservoirs do not have that person. That is the whole reason this work needs a nonprofit doing it.
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://www.fox32chicago.com/news/sunken-boat-lake-michigan-chicago
