Dive team extracts stubborn minivan from the Manatee River

When pulled out of the Manatee River, the so-called “sunken Suburban” that had eluded the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office Dive Team for over 15 years turned out to be an early 1990s Plymouth Voyager minivan instead.

The team tried to pull the minivan from the river three times before, but in this case, the fourth time was the charm. 

During a training exercise May 21, the dive team successfully retrieved the corroded and mangled vehicle out of the river near the Fort Hamer boat launch.  

“We called it the Suburban because it was heavy and so full of sand and so stuck in the ground.” Sergeant Theron Robinson said. “It became this Kraken type of mythological creature that was unmovable.”

Sand was the reason for the three failed attempts. It filled the minivan up to its windows making the van so heavy that one of the team's lift bags broke. 

Lift bags are designed to lift 2,000 pounds, and the team was using two of them on the minivan — one on the front, one on the back. 

Robinson described the bag material as a tough, industrial plastic. The bags are equipped with a strap that attaches to the vehicle and a valve that attaches to an air hose. 

The bags fill up like balloons, and the power of buoyancy lifts the vehicle to the surface.

Once the bag and the car are floating, Robinson said the car is as easy to maneuver as a boat. A tow truck pulls it out of the water. 

That first attempt at retrieving the minivan was in 2008. The team successfully used the same equipment to tow three other vehicles out of the river during that visit, but not the Voyager.

During another attempt, the bumper and door broke off, but the rest still wouldn't budge.

The site was revisited this year because a nonprofit organization was looking for an elderly gentleman who went missing about five years ago. 

Robinson wasn’t at liberty to say which nonprofit, but the organization searches for missing people and was operating under the belief that the gentleman went missing from a boat ramp, so they checked several ramps in the area. 

During the search, the nonprofit spotted the minivan and asked the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office if the dive team could check it for the missing man.

While the dive team was fairly certain they knew exactly which vehicle the nonprofit had found, they fulfilled the request and verified that the minivan showed no signs of a person having been trapped inside. 

To the divers’ surprise, sand was not in the car either. Robinson can’t be sure as to how the sand was removed, but there are two feasible explanations. 

Either the combination of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton washed the sand out of the minivan or the sand was removed when the area was dredged for the new boat launch which opened in 2018. 

Regardless of how the sand was removed, it offered the divers an opportunity to test their skills.

“No. 1, we wanted to get it,” Robinson said. “But we also knew it would be difficult.”  

The team had been working on fine tuning its lifting skills, so if they could pull up the Kraken, it would be proof their skills had improved.  

The dive team consists of 16 divers and two bomb squad technicians. There were 15 members of the team on hand to train and celebrate the win. 

While the problem of removing the Voyager was solved, the mystery of how that minivan landed on the bottom of the Manatee River will not be solved. The minivan was covered in too much corrosion and too many oysters to pull a vehicle identification number off of it. 

“I imagine if somebody took a wire brush to it, they would be able to find the (VIN) on the firewall,” Robinson said. 

However, once a vehicle is removed from the water, the dive team’s work is done. It either gets passed to investigators, or as in this case, it's simply a recovered vehicle that gets towed away.