Things that Come to Light when the Lake Falls

In Texas, the drought has caused the water level in some lakes to fall by more than 20 feet, and all sorts of sunken things have come to the surface:

On a recent Saturday, Mr. Mewbourn, a longtime rancher in this rural unincorporated community about 90 minutes southeast of Dallas, took a boat to the middle of the lake with two of his grandsons. They confirmed that the small object they thought at first might be a barrel was indeed a car. Mr. Mewbourn called a local constable, and with the help of a diver and a tow truck, the vehicle was slowly dragged out. Inside, still buckled into the driver’s seat, were the remains of Brenda Kay Oliver, who had been missing since July 2008. . . .

In East Texas at Lake Nacogdoches, which has dropped 12 feet in the drought, residents stumbled onto a much larger object in late July. It was a spherical aluminum tank, four feet in diameter, that was cracked on top and sat in the mud at the lake’s edge. NASA officials later determined that it was a piece of debris from the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated during re-entry in 2003, killing the seven astronauts aboard.