A three-month cleanup effort involving the U.S. Coast Guard, Canadian authorities, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration extracted nearly 50,000 gallons of contaminated water from the wreck.

[4] Captain Henry G. Fisher of the United States Coast Guard's Cleveland district relayed that the crew of the USCGC cutter Tahoma thought they had located the Argo in about 40 feet of water, four miles east of the shoals of Kelleys Island.

[4] Following the incident, a report by the Board of Inquiry of the United States Department of Commerce made a recommendation to fine W.J.

[6] Research conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2013 as part of its Remediation of Underwater Legacy Environmental Threats program identified the wreck of the Argo as a potential source of pollution.

[3] The assessment led to a joint tabletop exercise simulating a hypothetical spill from the Argo, conducted by Canadian officials and the U.S. Coast Guard in 2014.

[7] On August 28, 2015,[8] the sunken wreck was detected by Tom Kowalczk, a member of the Cleveland Underwater Explorers (CLUE).

[9] Equipped with a side-scan sonar system, Kowalczk had been looking for another wreck, that of the wooden schooner Lexington, that sank in 1846 with a cargo of 110 barrels of whiskey and a safe rumored to contain gold.

[11] The initial dive operations were complicated by the unknown thickness of the hull and a lack of the barge's architectural plans.

[5] A dive team from the Cleveland Underwater Explorers descended on October 23, 2015, and observed an unknown substance leaking from the hull.

[5][3] The barge's eight cargo tanks were found to be intact, with the exception of the leak, which originated from a small rivet hole.

An analysis of the leaking substance indicated that it consisted predominantly of benzene with small amounts of a light petroleum product.