Marion County Sheriff's Office deputies responded to a report of a possible drowning at Scotts Mills County Park on Tuesday, but the victim was not located when they arrived on scene. The following day, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office Dive Team recovered the body of a 20-year-old man from Butte Creek at Scotts Mills Falls.
In a statement posted to Facebook, the Marion County Sheriff's Office thanked the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office for sending its dive team to assist with the recovery and extended condolences to the victim's family. The office said it would release no additional details at this time, and it asked the public to avoid Scotts Mills County Park while the investigation continues and to respect the family's privacy.
A Plunge Pool With A Documented History Of Danger
Scotts Mills County Park covers 13 acres along Butte Creek and centers on Scotts Mills Falls, a 10-foot waterfall that spills into a wide plunge pool long treated as a regional swimming hole, according to Oregon Discovery. Marion County established the park in 1961 as its second official county park, the outlet notes.
Underneath the falls, decaying concrete and submerged debris from an 1850s dam built to power a local grist mill create serious underwater hazards for swimmers and cliff jumpers, per the Statesman Journal. The dam was abandoned by utility operators long ago, but its remnants still sit beneath the plunge pool where the search took place this week.
Years Of Delayed Efforts To Remove The Dam
Local conservation groups and state wildlife officials have pushed for years to have the crumbling dam removed to cut drowning risks and restore fish passage, though the project remained stalled as of 2023, according to the Pudding River Watershed Council. The Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board had granted funding for removal planning back in 2020, the group says, but the structure remains in place.
This week's recovery was not the first fatal incident at the same plunge pool. In August 2012, a 26-year-old Salem man lost consciousness and drowned after diving off a rock near the falls, with a bystander attempting to help him before he went under, the Bend Bulletin reported at the time.
Life Jackets, Cold Water, And A Statewide Pattern
The Silverton Fire District, which covers emergency response for Scotts Mills across a 106-square-mile service area, keeps free life-jacket loaner stations at Scotts Mills County Park specifically to help prevent water fatalities along Butte Creek, according to the Silverton Fire District.
Oregon has seen a troubling rise in water deaths in recent years. Natural water drownings in the state jumped 160% in 2020 to 57 fatalities, and men account for nearly 90% of drowning victims in regional waterways, per the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Portland District, which warns that warm summer air can lure swimmers into deceptively cold rivers and creeks that trigger cold-water shock. Oregon's youth drowning rate also runs 68% higher than the national average, with drowning ranking as the second-leading cause of unintentional injury death for young people in the state, according to OHSU Doernbecher Children's Hospital.
Why Marion County Turned To Multnomah County's Divers
Rural law enforcement agencies like Marion County routinely rely on inter-agency support for difficult underwater recoveries. The Multnomah County Sheriff's Office Dive Team regularly deploys on mutual-aid requests to perform complex underwater search-and-recovery operations across neighboring Oregon jurisdictions, according to the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office.
Questions That Remain Unanswered
The Marion County Sheriff's Office has not said whether the man jumped from the dam remnants or from nearby rocks, nor whether cold-water shock played a role in his death. It's also unclear whether the county will revisit safety signage or the loaner life-jacket program at the park following this week's drowning.
