Norwich ― A white buoy floats at the mouth of the Shetucket River, marking the spot where on June 1, a white Volvo sedan careened down the embankment from the junction of Water Street and Laurel Hill Avenue above and sank into the deep water of Norwich Harbor.

Driver Ulyses Blanco, 42, of 346 Broad St., New London, escaped the vehicle and received only minor injuries in the 5:33 a.m. crash. He told police that the brakes on his 2006 Volvo S80 failed as he drove through the intersection from the Viaduct toward Laurel Hill Avenue. The car crashed through a fence at New Wharf Road, past the Providence & Worcester Railroad tracks and splashed into the water.

Blanco was not charged that day, and the police report about the accident is not yet available, Norwich police Records Division staff said.

And three months later, the car still sits at the bottom of Norwich Harbor. That has irked Norwich Harbor Management Commission Chairman H. Tucker Braddock, who set out to rectify the problem. Braddock said the insurance company was not interested in recovering the vehicle.

“I heard about it and asked what is going on with it, and no one seemed to know about it,” Braddock said. “We don’t want cars in the Shetucket River. The gasoline and oil are probably a long time gone into Long Island Sound. We just don’t want to have this happen and not deal with it.”

Braddock asked a diver to check out the vehicle and learned it is sitting right-side-up on a plateau about 34 feet down at the mouth of the Shetucket River, just before the harbor bottom drops to 70 feet deep. Braddock asked for the buoy to mark the spot.

As Braddock was contacting professional divers and local towing companies in the area to see if they could raise the car and how much would it cost, city Purchasing Agent Bob Castronova had a meeting with officials from Terry Marine, the newly selected contractor for the $1.3 million project to replace the city’s aging floating docks and pilings nearby at the Howard T. Brown Memorial Park.

Jim Terry, principal at Terry Marine, offered to raise the vehicle and place it on the shore at Brown Park at no additional charge to the city. The Taftville Volunteer Fire Department’s dive team will dive down and hook cables onto the vehicle as a training exercise, Castronova said.

“We’re going to have a 95-foot barge with a 100-ton crane on it,” Terry said. “We’ll be mobilized for that work anyway, so it’s not a huge effort. We offered to lift the car out of the water and set it into the parking lot.”

The barge is expected to sail up the Thames River to Norwich Harbor on Sept. 18, and the car could be removed shortly afterward, depending on the weather. Terry said the car first will be placed on the barge and brought to shore to be off loaded.

“It’s a win, win for everybody,” Castronova said. “We get the car out of the river. We get it out for free, and the dive team gets a training session out of it.”

Castronova said no plans are in place for what to do with the car after it is removed from the water.

Terry Marine has been contracted by the city to replace the entire set of city floating docks at Brown Park, including new moorings and pilings. The new docks will be wider and the pilings taller, with new lighting, Terry said. One dock will be handicapped accessible for fishing, with an access ramp longer and less steep.

The project will start in mid-September with demolition of the old docks and pilings expected to take two months and installation of the new docks to be done by the end of December, Terry said.

c.bessette@theday.com