Rentable electric scooters have cast a beam of hope on cities and urban areas looking to curb roadway congestion by offering commuters another easy solution of getting about. Unfortunately, though, some of the services have backfired, creating more problems rather than fixing them. Case in point, police recovered more than 50 e-scooters and a few bicycles from the Willamette River in the vicinity of downtown Portland, Oregon, earlier this week. Divers began reporting about the scooters last month and when the recovery effort concluded this past Tuesday, crews found e-scooters from likes of Lime, Bird, and Razor littered in the river. But other than an accident or under vandalistic pretenses, nobody knows why or how they ended in the Willamette River.

“We advise those people not to park scooters in the river,” Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office’s Stg. Brandon White told reporters. White said that the River Patrol and Dive Team were training in the Willamette when the noticed the scooters. They brought attention to the matter over fears that the batteries could leak into the waters and become an environmental problem.