The saga of the 55 failed drones at the bottom of Angle Lake continued Wednesday. Divers spent much of the morning searching, and they found 48 of them and their batteries.
"There will be no future attempts of recovery," Matthew Quinn, founder and CEO of Great Lakes Drone Co., of Coloma, Mich., said in a statement released Wednesday. His business owns the drones, and he contracted to have them retrieved and returned.
What became a disaster had started as a brand-new Fourth of July experience: A drone light show. The city of SeaTac spent $40,000 for the event.
But shortly after it began, drones started dropping out of the sky. At $2,600 each, that adds up to $143,000 worth of drones. There were no reported injuries.
The bottom of the lake has a large amount of sediment and silt, which obscured vision for divers on Wednesday.
This urban lake is squeezed in between Interstate 5 and Highway 99 in SeaTac, a city associated with the international airport with that name. The city said it will look for the remaining lost drones in upcoming lake cleanup operations.
In an earlier interview, Quinn said the drones won't be used again and that his company has insurance.
Regarding a possible refund of the $40,000, SeaTac released a statement about Great Lakes Drone, saying, "We are communicating with the vendor to come to a mutually acceptable financial arrangement."
Quinn said the Federal Aviation Administration is investigating the incident. He said his company had filled out all the necessary FAA paperwork.
He said his company puts on 150 to 200 drone light shows a year across the country and nothing like this had ever happened.
"There was nothing wrong with the drones, nothing wrong with the software. So, it's pointing to outside interference of some type. We don't know what it is or what it could be. There could be a cell tower that's off-frequency. It could be somebody with a drone-jamming gun."
He said "select drones" suffered a sudden loss of the GPS signal and they "didn't know where home was."
Flying Magazine reported on Monday that an FAA waiver filed by Great Lakes Drone "noted, among other safety precautions, the show would be performed with a two-layer geofence that keeps the drones in confined space in the event they malfunction. Flight termination protocols were also established, namely sending the drones into the lake."
In his statement, Quinn said a review of the recovered drones showed them "consistent with low velocity impact with the water," meaning "a controlled landing into the lake versus 'falling.' "
As for a rogue use of a drone jammer, they certainly are advertised on the internet.
The Federal Communications Commission says on its website that such devices are prohibited by federal law. It says they're only allowed "in certain limited exceptions" for use by federal law enforcement agencies.
A March 20 story on NBC News quoted the FCC as saying that it had several ongoing investigations into jammer sales.
Scott Shtofman, of Tyler, Texas, a licensed drone pilot and director of government affairs for the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, says that it's also possible to build a drone jammer from legally available parts.
But it's a small group of people who can do that.
The skill necessary, said Shtofman, "is like building a drone from the ground up. You must understand how to physically put the parts together, and the knowledge on how to overwhelm the drone signal that you're trying to jam."
The city likely would have stayed with traditional fireworks at the lake if not for the indefatigable research done by a local resident. Indefatigable citizens are an American tradition.
In this case, he is John Lucas, 74, an events manager.
He was not a fan of the annual races at the lake featuring small hydroplanes. "It was the noise," he says, and "the closing of the beach and the swimming areas at the park."
Angle Lake is a private lake owned by property owners around it. Lucas went researching and found a 1932 state Supreme Court ruling that he interpreted as saying the city couldn't close the lake to everyone "except those taking part" in boat races.
The city gave in.
Better be safe than sorry when it comes to potential legal action.
But SeaTac went further, also ending its traditional fireworks show at the lake.
Lucas never wanted that. "I hope that the city reconsiders and decides to present the fireworks," he wrote SeaTac officials.
Too late.
Anyway, the city reasoned, besides that pesky 1932 state Supreme Court ruling, with traditional fireworks there was the potential for "air and noise pollution," and "toxic chemicals and plastics," and "potential danger to staff and community."
What's up for the 2025 Fourth of July? The city says, well, it has an entire year to ponder that.
In all this, what commenter Anthony Warren wrote seems appropriate.
He's now of Charleston, S.C., but "born, raised, lived in and retired from Seattle until 2009."
He wrote in the comments section of the story about the drones crashing, "The largemouth bass in Angle Lake now pass down a story from bass to bass, and sometimes to the trout and catfish, about the July night in 2024 when the lake was invaded by a strange alien army of unmanned UFOs.
"Those doubting the veracity of the story are led to [a] deep ledge in [the] middle of the lake where the broken and rusted remnants of one of the spacecrafts still remains unretrieved to this day."
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