California’s never-ending drought has brought one single piece of good news: ending the mystery of a missing 1965 plane crash in Folsom Lake near Sacramento.
Three passengers and the pilot died when the small passenger plane crashed into the lake, and grieved family members spent the next 50 years searching for the wreckage, ABC News reported. Now, the search is over.
Folsom Lake is normally 250 feet deep, but water has receded by 37%, so this allowed the plane to be picked up by sonar.
“I saw something that was not normal,” said Tyler Atkinson, a researcher testing out the sonar equipment for Seafloor Systems, Inc. The researchers returned twice more before they could obtain a clear photo of the plane with a remote-operated underwater camera.
The wreckage of a 1965 plane crash of a Piper Comanche 250 in Folsom Lake may have just been identified by researchers, using underwater sonar surveying equipment and low lake levels at the dam, outside of Sacramento. https://t.co/hddX54qsVA pic.twitter.com/zbLgegDiQG
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) June 14, 2021
The Placer County Sheriff’s Department told ABC News that it will use divers to recover victim remains.
Meanwhile, the discovery was bittersweet for Katherine Radican. Her now-deceased husband Frank Wilcox spent most of his life searching for the plane because his teenage brother was on board. Wilcox was just 3 years old at the time of the crash.
“[Wilcox] didn’t really know his brother, but him and his mom would go out to the lake periodically when the water was low and look around to see if they could see anything,” Radican said. Wilcox promised his mother that he would keep searching.
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the drought. Lake Mead, which provides water to Southern California along with Arizona and Nevada, has sunk to its lowest level since it was created in the 1930s. The lake, located at Hoover Dam, has sunk 140 feet since 2000.
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Farm communities are especially hard hit in California, where the ground has sunk more than 45 feet since 1935 due to excessive groundwater mining.
