Reported by the Woonsocket Call on 04-09-2008
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BY VINAYA SAKSENA

PAWTUCKET — You never know what you reel in when you go fishing.

On Tuesday morning, State Police divers, along with the Blackstone River Watershed Council (BRWC) and local businesses, pulled in a Ford Mustang at the Municipal Pier off of School Street. Taken from the water shortly after 9:30 that morning, the Mustang was the first of four vehicles excavated from the river by the police and their accomplices that day. And according to State Police Lt. Darren Delaney, plenty more are expected to be found where those came from, based on information obtained in the area previously.

“Basically, back in January, we were doing a dive with the Massachusetts State Police during a joint investigation,” Delaney explained. “From there, we located several vehicles.”

On Tuesday, members of the State Police Dive Team searched a stretch of the river starting slightly north of the pier and stretching approximately 800 feet south of there, an area which Delaney said was home to an estimated 27 vehicles that had been discarded in the river for undetermined reasons. Some of these were believed to have been stolen and then ditched by those that stole them, while others had gone to the bottom of the river for reasons that were less clear.

BRWC President Frank Matta, a Cumberland resident, said his organization had been contacted by the state police to help out with efforts to secure automobiles from the river. He said his organization had helped to coordinate the resources from local businesses used in the effort. A vehicle from Tow Line Towing of North Providence was used to pull the vehicles up from the water, while a vehicle from Robinson Crane Service of Lincoln helped move the vehicles from the edge of the water and flip them so that their top sides were facing up. Recovered vehicles were to be processed by Bill’s Auto Parts of Cumberland.

The Pawtucket Fire Department also lent its resources to the retrieval effort, providing a rescue unit and a boat, which carried equipment that could not be held in the dive team’s Zodiac inflatable boat. The department also brought along trucks, in part to hose down the grime-covered cars that emerged from the river. Fire Chief Timothy McLaughlin said his department would also be setting up a “decontamination sector” for the divers at the end of the day, where fire personnel would help the divers clean off substances they had been immersed in throughout the day.

By the time Tuesday’s auto retrieval activities had concluded, five vehicles had been reported recovered. Of those, four were believed to have been stolen, while the history of the fifth vehicle was inconclusive as of press time.

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