For the third time since May, human remains have been discovered on the dry shore of Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, an artificial reservoir whose level continues to drop under the effect of a chronic drought.
Authorities were notified Monday afternoon July 25 by a witness who made this macabre discovery on the Swim Beach site, the National Parks Agency said in a statement.
Two bodies already removed
According to images broadcast by local television Fox 5, the human remains were near the shore, flush with the surface of the water.
Rangers went to the scene and evacuated the body, leaving it to a Clark County medical examiner to determine the cause of death, the agency said without giving further details on the state of the body.
Two bodies have already been removed since May from the waters of Lake Mead, which has fallen to historic lows recently.
One of these bodies has particularly caught the attention of the police and the public: the skeleton of a man who was shot in the head, stuffed into a barrel and thrown to the bottom of the lake some forty years ago.
Twenty years of drought
It was on the basis of personal effects found with the body that the Las Vegas police estimated that the murder dated back to the late 1970s or early 1980s, a period when the underworld was particularly active in the capital of the game. The victim has still not been officially identified.
At the time of this discovery, police predicted that more bodies would emerge as the level of Lake Mead dropped.
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The largest reservoir in the United States built on the course of the Colorado River, Lake Mead reached at its highest level an elevation of 365 meters above sea level. But after more than 20 years of drought, it no Tuesday was only 317 meters, its lowest level since filling in the 1930s. The lake is currently losing about a foot every week.