Sunken truck traced to Tache man

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This article was published 16/09/2024 (229 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An angler with a fish-finder sparked a mystery that was solved by RCMP and linked to a RM of Tache man.

Russell RCMP said they received a report of a submerged vehicle on Lake of the Prairies in the RM of Riding Mountain-West on Aug. 20. The angler provided them with fish finder images and the GPS location.

Police scoured missing person reports in the area but could find no record of how or when the vehicle may have been submerged.

That brought in the RCMP Underwater Recovery Team led by Cpl. Kathryn Ternier, who found the vehicle using the boat sonar on Aug. 27.

She said visibility was down to less than a foot in the water due to sediment.

“We determined that we would deploy a drop sonar to direct our remote operated vehicle (ROV) to the vehicle,” she said. “We would not use divers at this stage, as the ROV can perform the same tasks effectively.”

Ternier said the ROV went to a depth of six metres and the team was able to learn the plate number of the vehicle, recognizing that it was a 1970s model pickup.

The age of the truck made them curious.

“The fact that the vehicle was from the 70s was really interesting,” she said. “What were we dealing with? What was the story? We had so many questions.”

Thanks to Manitoba Public Insurance those questions were soon answered.

They were referred to the registered owner of the vehicle, a man from the RM of Tache.

He told police he had been returning home in the winter of 1990 and took a shortcut across the ice when his truck went through. Everyone got out safely at that time, and he explained he had returned multiple times over the years in an effort to locate the truck.

For Ternier this was a good ending to an interesting case.

“Nobody has been harmed, and we got to solve a decades-old mystery,” she said.