SPOKANE, Wash. — Several Lime scooters have found their way off of the sidewalks and into the Spokane River.
Since the spring of 2018, the metal fishing club, H2O Metal Fortunes, has pulled 16 scooters and one bike from the river.
Thomas Waller, one of the club’s members, said he found one of the scooters floating near the Post Street Bridge.
“I was magnet fishing down by the lower power plant. I saw a scooter down there, and we went to get it,” he said.
Waller joined the club in 2018. He said he is used to finding street signs and small metal pieces in the river. But finding a scooter wasn’t one of his proudest finds.
“They run on lithium-ion batteries, and that can’t be good for the water,” he said.
In 2018, the group fished about two scooters from the water, said Paul Swanson, the club’s founder.
But in 2019, they started working with Lime to return the sunken bikes and scooters to the company.
“Since then, we’ve been making more of an effort to find and recover them to Lime,” Swanson said. “Seeing them in the river is an eyesore, a huge problem. We’re just lucky that we’re on top of it.”