Posted on August 14, 2024
The ghosts of cars from the 1960s and earlier haunt the confluence of the Pittsburgh’s three rivers.
Parts from up to 100 vehicles — many believed to be from a long-defunct Downtown parking lot — are submerged in the Allegheny River, according to Captain Evan Clark of Three Rivers Waterkeeper, an environmental group, that on Monday was overseeing a dredging operation near the Point.
After decades of piling up along the river’s bottom, the cars are now just piles of automobile scrap, chassis and metal parts rusting away 12 to 18 feet below the surface.
“If you were to dive down there right now, you’d see a solid tangle of vehicles,” Clark said as an excavating machine pulled metal and soil out of the Downtown side of the river, between the Roberto Clemente and Fort Duquesne bridges.
“Everybody’s parents and grandparents talked about how the rivers are poisoned,” he added. “To see this clean-up work, it shows that people care about the rivers, and they’re getting better.”
The North Side-based group partnered with Living Lands & Water, an Illinois-based nonprofit that’s removed more than 13 million pounds of garbage from American rivers, to launch a multi-day effort Monday to remove sunken vehicles and other debris from the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio rivers.
Their excavator — chained to a roughly 30-by-110 barge — started pulling gnarled metal and dark soil out of the Allegheny River at about 11 a.m., said Callie Schaser, a Living Lands & Water spokeswoman.
In less than four hours, the excavator had recovered 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of vehicle parts — the equivalent of about 20 cars — from the river, Schaser said. In addition to a red Volkswagen Beetle, intact enough for it to recognizable, the machine removed scores of bicycles and skateboards, thousands of feet of fishing line and one mattress.
A crew of about 20 people, many of them volunteers, worked Monday on the privately funded project. Pittsburgh River Rescue and a group of divers from Cincinnati kept watch on the riverfront.
The two groups plan to work this week on the Monongahela and Ohio rivers, Clark told TribLive. Using sonar on the three rivers in May, he said he found an additional 30 to 50 vehicles, some of them boats, submerged in the Monongahela River near Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood.
Police from both the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County said that none of the dredging is related to any cases.
This is “strictly environmental in nature,” said Emily Bourne, a Pittsburgh police spokeswoman.
All sorts of things go into Pittsburgh’s waterways.
Last Friday, for instance, River Rescue divers conducting routine training in the Allegheny found a drone that had fallen in during a recent show at PNC Park, Pittsburgh EMS posted to social media.
Human remains were discovered June 30 in a vehicle submerged in the Allegheny River near Butler Street in Springdale. A dive team was training in the river nearby found the vehicle, Allegheny County Police said.
Authorities have said evidence points to the car belonging to Bunnie Lee, 78, a Pittsburgh man who disappeared in 2013. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner’s Office did not return emails on Monday seeking identification of the remains.
Last year, authorities retrieved an unoccupied car from near the Springdale Marina — a Yugo, last manufactured in 2008.
Authorities have said cases with sunken cars usually involve theft, insurance fraud or missing people.
Living Land & Water has worked with nearly 127,000 volunteers to remove 13 million pounds of garbage from rivers nationwide, the group said on its website.
The Allegheny River is either the 25th or 26th river Living Land & Water has helped clean up, Schaser said.
