The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

[Morreion]

40 years ago this very hour, the ship Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Lake Superior in 90-mile-an-hour winds and the worst seas anyone who experienced them could remember. The ship was 730 feet long and sank in 530 feet of water, carrying iron ore to the automobile factories along the shore. I was a kid at the time but remember it well- maybe it's a Great Lakes state thing, but it still sticks with me, immortalized by the song by Gordon Lightfoot.



40 years ago, the 'Witch of November' sank the Edmund Fitzgerald (USA Today)

Forty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a ferocious storm on Lake Superior, killing all 29 men aboard.

The shipwreck was soon to be made famous in the haunting song by Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which was released the year after the sinking.

In the song, the disaster was blamed in part on the "Witch of November," which is the source of memorable and fierce storms on the Great Lakes.

"When the witch angrily stirs her cauldron, no ship, no matter how large, is safe on the Great Lakes," according to a 1998 article in Weatherwise magazine by meteorologist Steve Horstmeyer and geographer Mace Bentley. The Edmund Fitzgerald remains the largest of all the ships wrecked or sunk by bad weather in the Great Lakes.

Incredibly, in the past 300 years, about 30,000 people have died in 10,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, the Rev. William Fleming told the Detroit News.

Fleming is the pastor of the Mariners’ Church of Detroit, which was mentioned in the Lightfoot song. A service was held there Sunday to remember victims from all disasters and tragedies on the Great Lakes, including the loss of the Fitzgerald.

...Storms on the Great Lakes can rival hurricanes in their intensity. The one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald had sustained winds of 67 mph, gusts of up to 86 mph and waves reported up to 35 feet, according to another vessel in the area that survived the storm.

The Fitzgerald was in the worst possible location during the worst weather of the storm. The wind and waves from the west hit the freighter broadside as it tried to flee south to safety in Whitefish Bay.

The ship sank in 530 feet of water about 17 miles from Whitefish Bay, near the cities of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

SS Edmund Fitzgerald (Wikipedia)

S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald Online









Gordon Lightfoot, often considered by many as the "Canadian Bob Dylan" due to his successful songwriting career. This song tells the dark story of the ship wreck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975 . RIP to all who perished on that ship. The song appeared on his 1976 album Summertime Dream.

Gordon Lightfoot - Vocals, acoustic guitar
Terry Clements (RIP 1947 - 2011) - Lead guitar
Pee Wee Charles - Pedal steel guitar
Rick Haynes - Bass
Barry Keane - Drums, percussion

Lyrics:

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early

The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
Then later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
When the wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too
'Twas the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezing rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck
Sayin' "Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya"
At seven PM a main hatchway caved in
He said, "Fellas, it's been good to know ya"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went out of sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Does anyone know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below, Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral
The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

[Regolyth]

I have never heard of this incident. It's a very unfortunate event.

The song is kind of stuck in my head now.

[Morreion]

Technology aims to prevent Fitzgerald-scale disasters (The Detroit News)

In the 40 years since the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank to the bottom of Lake Superior with 29 crew members aboard, advances in technology and weather forecasting have made shipping on the Great Lakes monumentally safer, say maritime experts, investigators and historians.

State-of-the-art radar tracks water depth and GPS systems are so sophisticated, even a person on shore can track a vessel with a smartphone or iPad. The wizardry of today’s weather forecasting lets ship personnel know the conditions they are facing days out.

Just ask Brad Newland, captain of the 1,000-foot James R. Barker of the Interlake Steamship Co. based near Cleveland.

“We have an incredible array of electronics up here that would just stagger (Fitzgerald Captain Ernest) McSorley,” said Newland, who was aboard his ship recently on a trip from Duluth, Minnesota, to St. Clair to load and unload coal. “To come up here and look at the tools that I have ... he didn’t. He literally had an empty pilot house versus what I have. He had his eyes. He had radar that didn’t work.”

“I know where I am every second of the day. I have three GPS units. He didn’t have any,” Newland continued. “Back in those days, it was just your eyes.”

Theories on ship’s sinking

No one really knows why the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank, but there are several theories. Among them:

■The official Coast Guard board of inquiry came to the conclusion that the Fitzgerald sank as a result of “massive flooding of the cargo hold,” saying that this likely resulted from “ineffective hatch closure.”

■Perhaps the most widely accepted of the several theories about the loss of the Fitzgerald is that the ship crossed Caribou Island’s Six-Fathom Shoal, with water as shallow as 26 feet. This contact or a near miss would damage the hull and allow water to begin accumulating inside the affected ballast tanks. Within a few minutes of passing the shoal, the Fitz’s Captain Ernest McSorley reported a starboard list, missing vents and a fence rail down.

■Another explanation is that the Fitzgerald suffered a stress fracture and broke apart on the surface from the effects of heavy seas twisting and flexing the hull in hurricane-force winds.

As a result of the Fitzgerald tragedy, Coast Guard officials now mandate more rigorous inspections inside and outside vessels and the use of depthfinders. Survival suits and life rafts must be stocked on board.

Rick Minnick, an investigator with the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Unit in Toledo, said subsequent technological advancements, such as bilge alarms to warn if the engine rooms or cargo holds are flooding, are on all the navigation systems on board freighters.

“Their pilot houses are like a jet, you could say, compared to what it was like back then,” Minnick said. “They have electronic navigation. They have radars that track their position. The charts that they use are more updated as far as depth of water.”



I was reading about the shipwreck, and do you know how the Fitzgerald knew how deep the water was it was sailing through? Aside from depth charts, it had a knotted rope with a lead weight at the end. That is practically Stone Age technology, and they were doing this in 1975! Now there are depth-finding sonar. It's amazing how primitive things were even in our lifetimes.

The Discovery Channel documentary on YouTube (linked in the original post) is well worth watching.





40 years later, the legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald lives on (The Toledo Blade)

What sank the Edmund Fitzgerald? 6 theories on what caused the shipwreck (Michigan Live)

Diver recalls record scuba descent to Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck (Michigan Live)

[Regolyth]

I remember using a type of sonar to find fish whilst fishing with my dad (probably around 1988 or so). I always thought it as very cool.