SS Edmund Fitzgerald

1975

When the gales of November came early Location: Lake Superior, 17 nmi NNW of Whitefish Point, Michigan · Coordinates: 46.99°N 85.12°W · Casualties: 29 · Survivors: 0 · Depth: 160 m · Cause: storm · disputed — Lost in a severe Lake Superior gale on 10 November 1975 with winds exceeding 80 knots and waves of 10+ meters. Exact cause disputed — possibilities include hatch cover failure, topside damage, shoaling, or rogue wave. No distress signal, no survivors. · Fate: abyssal · located 1975 · Type: Great Lakes freighter · bulk carrier · Tonnage: 13,632 tons · Crew: 29 · Flag: United States · Launched: 1958 The largest ship ever lost on the Great Lakes. Went down in a Lake Superior gale 17 miles from Whitefish Bay with no distress signal and no survivors. The wreck broke in two. Immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 ballad, which did more to sustain the memory than any maritime commission. Exact cause of sinking remains contested fifty years on. The Vessel The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a 13,632-ton bulk freighter, 222 metres long, launched at River Rouge, Michigan, on 8 June 1958 by the Great Lakes Engineering Works for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. She was named for the company's president at the time, and at the moment of her launch was the largest ship ever to have sailed fresh water. She was classified as a "footer" in Great Lakes terminology, the first of the 700-foot class that would transform the Lakes iron-ore and grain trade in the 1960s and 1970s. Single-screw, single-boiler, single-rudder: the standard Lakes configuration, with cargo holds arranged fore-and-aft and accessible only through twenty-one hatch covers along the spar deck. She was chartered throughout her career to the Oglebay Norton Corporation, which operated her under contract to the U.S. Steel Corporation's Columbia Transportation Division. For seventeen years she held and broke her own Lakes seasonal tonnage records. Her captain from 1972 was Ernest McSorley, a Nova Scotian whose Great Lakes career reached back to 1939; he was due to retire at the end of the 1975 season. He was said to be proud of her but also known among Lakes captains for complaining that she worked hard in heavy weather, that her hull flexed visibly at the deck seams in big seas, and that he sometimes heard her hull panting. Every Lakes freighter of her class did. The Disaster The mechanism of her loss has been the subject of four formal investigations, dozens of expert reports, and fifty years of Great Lakes argument. The four prevailing theories are hatch cover failure (the 1977 Coast Guard report), topside damage (the 1978 NTSB report and most maritime engineering analysis), shoaling (the Shoal theory, favoured by some of the Anderson's crew), and a single rogue wave or pair of waves breaking over the bow and stern simultaneously (the "two-boarder" theory). The Coast Guard concluded that ineffective hatch closures had admitted progressive water into her cargo holds through the afternoon and that her stability had failed without warning. The NTSB, dissenting, argued that the progression would have been visible to McSorley and reported, and that a sudden structural failure aft was more consistent with the loss pattern. The subsequent surveys of the wreck by Jean-Michel Cousteau's Calypso in 1980, by the Canadian Navy in 1989, and by the ROV expeditions of 1994 and 1995 all found the ship broken into two sections roughly twenty metres apart on the bottom, bow section upright and largely intact, stern section inverted, cargo spilled across the seabed between them. What is indisputable is this: at some point between 19:10 and 19:15 on 10 November 1975, a ship 222 metres long carrying 26,000 tons of cargo slipped under the surface of Lake Superior without a distress call in conditions that Anderson was riding out without distress of her own. She broke