When a Reservoir Drops, the Clock Starts
Green Mountain Reservoir in Colorado normally keeps thirty to forty feet of water over the spot where a crew stood this month. Not this year. Drought has pulled the reservoir down so far that the lakebed itself came into view, and what it gave up was not scenery. It was an ATV that went through the ice around 2018 and a snowmobile that may have been down there since the 1990s.
A Narrow Window to Get It Out
The U.S. Forest Service, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, and the Summit County Water Rescue Team moved as soon as the machines were exposed. Daniel Morris, a recreation staff officer with the Forest Service’s Dillon Ranger District, said nobody is sure exactly when the snowmobile went in, only that it predates the ATV by years. Getting either one out looked simple from the shore. It wasn’t. Crews floated the ATV across the remaining water on inflatable flotation devices, then fought through thick mud to drag it the rest of the way to solid ground. The Forest Service has already tracked down the ATV’s owner, who plans to come collect it, though Morris joked it has “seen its better days.” Nobody has claimed the snowmobile.
Morris put the stakes in plain terms: “This is drinking water for someone down the line, and it’s part of the forest so we try to get out and clean things up as we see them.” He said the reservoir hasn’t been this low since the 1960s, and nobody knows what else is sitting on the newly exposed lakebed. His own words: “We might be doing this again in a couple of weeks if something pops up.”
The Same Clock Is Running in Utah
That window closes the moment the water comes back. Utah’s reservoirs are drawing down for the same reason Colorado’s are, one of the driest winters in recent memory, and every foot of newly exposed shoreline is the same kind of temporary opening. Our Utah Waterways Submerged Debris Atlas documents an estimated 499 submerged items across 20 Utah lakes, 226 of them confirmed individually, including 103 vessels and 56 vehicles. Every one of them is sitting somewhere, waiting on either a drought or a diver to find it first.
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we are a diver organization first: real lake cleanup means reaching the bottom, not just what a dry season happens to expose. Our mission is recovering submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways statewide. We are building toward doing that recovery work ourselves, and we are direct about the order it happens in: recovery-specific insurance, sovereign lands permits, and commercial dive certification, before a single lift. A sunken vehicle carries the same fuel in its tank, oil in its engine, and lead acid battery whether it surfaces in Colorado or Utah. Under the Clean Water Act, any discharge that leaves a visible sheen on the water is a reportable event, and petroleum does not simply disappear. USGS has tracked oil contamination persisting in groundwater for decades at its Bemidji, Minnesota research site.
Colorado had a Forest Service crew and a county water rescue team standing by when their reservoir gave something up. Utah needs that same readiness statewide. If you know of a submerged vehicle, vessel, 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.
Photo: CBSNews.com
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/green-mountain-reservoir-lost-vehicles-colorado/
