The Baker County Sheriff’s Office’s search and rescue team will try Monday, April 21, to remove a car that is submerged in the fast-running Burnt River near Huntington.

Sheriff Travis Ash said search and rescue members and deputies who searched the site on Sunday could not determine whether there are any people in the vehicle.

“The only thing we could see was the top of a white car,” Ash said on Monday morning.

He said crews searched the river’s banks on Sunday but found nothing that seemed to be connected to the car in the river.

Ash said he doesn’t know when the car went into the river.

The crew from a Union Pacific Railroad freight train reported the car around 10 a.m. on Sunday, according to the Baker County Dispatch log.

The site is just below the bridge over the river on the Snake River Road, which leads from Huntington to Brownlee Reservoir.

Ash said the river was too swift to try to extricate the car on Sunday.

He said he talked with tow companies and came up with a plan for today’s operation. Ash said workers will run a safety line from the shore to the car, and a search and rescue member, connected to the safety line, will try to attach tow straps to the vehicle so it can be pulled from the river.

“It’s a high-risk event,” Ash said.

The site isn’t accessible to the sheriff’s office’s jet boat, he said.

The Burnt River is running high with snowmelt. A river gauge near Huntington reported a flow of around 830 cubic feet per second (cfs) on Saturday and Sunday. The flow had dropped to about 680 cfs on Monday morning. By comparison, the current flow of the Powder River through Baker City is about 63 cfs.