Bernie Cooper of the Anderson reported his concern for the Fitzgerald to the Coast Guard station in Sault Ste. What's obvious is that wind and waves played a big role in the sinking. They . Tweets by @lakesuperiormag !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)? The ship broke in half and quickly sank. Weather conditions continued to deteriorate, Ley wrote. She was already moving slow and was listing as well. Whatever the cause, the Fitzgerald took a starboard list as it passed Caribou. Crafts 3:20 PM Anderson reports winds coming from the Northwest at 43 knots. Captain McSorley told Woodard that the ship has a bad list, implying that it had gotten worse since his earlier report to Captain Cooper. The same problems were reported aboard theHomer. She was under command of Canadian born and highly experienced ship master Captain Ernest M. McSorely. Theorists have sized upon the permanent lay-up of the Fitzgerald sister ship, the Arthur Homer, in 1980 as indicative of structural deficiency both vessels. Without direct witnesses or survivors, every explanation about the cause of the wreck is purely theoretical and, from the very beginning, a rash of theories concerning it were postulated. Within days, the location of the wreck on the bottom of the lake was pinpointed by U.S. Navy aircraft and the following spring the Coast Guard positively identified the wreckage using underwater photography. Size & Medium. 5. "We always had to go down and pump them out.". It happened too fast. In those seas, such a command goes without saying, so why did McSorley have to emphasize it? he asks. Since one theory is that the ship was damaged by grounding, within two years of the wreck all commercial vessels of 1,600 or more gross tons were required to have equipment that would warn the officers of shallow water beneath the hull. TheEdmund Fitzgeraldwas a "Laker" type iron ore bulk freighter launched on June 7, 1958 by the Great Lakes Engineering Works in River Rogue, Michigan for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company one year after its near sister shipArthur B. Homer. Captain Cooper maintained that he watched the Edmund Fitzgerald pass far too close to Six Fathom Shoal to the north of Caribou Island. Because all 29 men aboard the Fitzgerald went down with the ship -- which was there one minute and gone the next -- the best accounts that investigators could rely on were those of sailors in the vicinity of the ship during the storm, or who had contact with the Fitzgerald somehow in the weeks prior to her final voyage. Soon after, McSorely on the Fitzgerald reported taking topside damage and a list. Gale warnings had been issued at 7 pm on November 9, upgraded to storm warnings early in the morning of November 10. The Anderson was struck by large waves which then travelled in the direction of the Edmond Fitzgerald. Caribou Island is an uninhabited island in the eastern end of Lake Superior, 40 kilometres (25mi) south of Michipicoten Island. An entire generation now has no active memory of November 10, 1975, but the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald continues to fascinate, mystify and preoccupy young and old. As originally built,Edmund Fitzgeraldwas a coal burning steamship with a Westinghouse steam turbine driving a single four bladed propeller at her rear. "It was designed to haul a certain amount and they kept getting the Coast Guard to increase the load line." He and his officers watched the Fitzgerald pass right over the dangerous area of shallow water, Ley wrote. Looks like he was right on this one. Will you stay by me till I get to Whitefish? McSorley was checking down his speed to allow the Anderson to close the distance for safety. May god rest the souls of the 29 men who perished that fateful night, The iron ore freighter is only about 9 nautical miles from Pancake Bay off highway #17 Ontario Canada, it sits in Canadain waters. Cities by ZIP Code. The bow lies mostly buried in the mud upright pointing towards Whitefish Bay. Water intrusion came less than 30 minutes later. Caribou definition, any of several large, North American deer of the genus Rangifer, related to the reindeer of the Old World. Contributing factors noted were a lack of internal watertight bulkheads and allowances for more cargo weight during the ship's 17 years afloat. As the afternoon wore on, radio communications with the Fitzgerald concerned navigational information but no extraordinarily alarming reports were offered by Captain McSorley. Conflicting theories about the cause of the tragedy remain active today. Has anyone ever calculated how much shorter the normal route across Superior would have been had the Fitzgerald not changed course? I hear they found the crewmen's bodies and than I heard they never did that this was a rumor. Regis, R.S., Patterson, C.J., Wattrus, N., and Rausch, D., 2003. It was considered a private hunting preserve through the early 1900s. But what caused the ship to take on water, enough to lose buoyancy and dive to the bottom so quickly, without a single cry for help, cannot be determined. Because of a long fetch on Superior that night, the Fitzgerald and the Anderson were in an area of the lake where huge waves were indeed occurring. 'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+"://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); A Great Lakes Information Network partner, 2020 Lake Superior Publishing LLC. On November 14, a U.S. Navy plane equipped with a magnetic anomaly detector located a strong contact 17 miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point. In the early afternoon of November 10, the Fitzgerald had passed Michipicoten Island and was approaching Caribou Island. The comment that this industry stopped completely are false. His assumption is obviously shared by others in the maritime industry, but changes instituted after the loss of the Fitzgerald are meant to help to prevent some perceived causes of the wreck. Was a bad night. FREE BOXES. Having been a consultant and active member of the original Jacques Cousteau expedition in 1980 along with the raising of the bell 1994 expedition. Images of the Fitz's 1958 construction and launch. He is particularly intrigued by the command that Woodard overheard. Grounded on Six Fathom Shoal. Conjecture by proponents of the Six Fathom Shoal theory concluded that Fitzgerald ' s downed fence rail reported by McSorley could occur only if the ship "hogged" during shoaling, . 43 and 1/2 years later the feeling of that morning is still vivid in my mind. Others overlap in some ways. The following May, 1976, Woodrush was again on the scene to conduct a third sidescan sonar survey. In a similar vein, Paul Hainault, a retired Michigan Tech University professor, postulated a seiche caused the ship to scrape the bottom of Superior Shoal early that morning and the weakened hull eventually gave out. So, what happened? The Edmund Fitzgerald was the longest boat on the Great Lakes. Not long after the search ended, years of arguments and disagreements over what could have caused theEdmund Fitzgeraldto sink have clouded up any hope of truly understanding what occurred the night of November 10, 1975 as the shipping companies, government agencies and sea fairers of the Great Lakes all have different theories and opinions that do not match. See more. At 3:30 PM, Captain McSorely reported to Captain Cooper aboard theAndersonthat theFitzgeraldwas taking on water and had a reported list of 20 degrees towards starboard. Understandably the footage was edited out of respect for the dead and the families. Quantity. The first official report on the wreck sparked a flood of second-guessing. The search turned up no results for the first hour. What if the ship is rebuilt, with more safety features? They believe that caribou is the most significant creature to hunt. it be nice if they stopped talking about White Fish Bay which is 15 (N) miles from where it went down. Let's not forget about the structural failure of the Carl D. Bradley on Lake Michigan in 1958. Eight minutes at the Fitz was all that he earned for his four-hour dive because of the necessary decompression. TheFitzgeraldwould have extra steel plates installed between the hull bottom and her keel which would ensure the keel would no loner move freely from the hull and would stay fastened in place. [1] As the afternoon dragged on, the storm worsened. 906-635-1742 | 800-635-1742, GREAT LAKES SHIPWRECK MUSEUM The caribou were very aggressive, treeing the lighthouse keeper for hours on several occasions. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was also the first commercial early digital multi-track recording tracked on the prototype 3M 32-track digital recorder, a novel technology for the time. My understanding of the dives was showed hatches were closed least belied to be so and was the low ship by full cargo in the water and the sea waves and cargo shift caused her go down- no matter what the cause it's all so tragic- I know not the ship nor any of the crew or families but i can certainly feel their loss- it is a very sad story - and the song very accurate to what is known about the ship wreak- many lost at seas' and many more will- it's just sad. None, of course, were found and only floating debris gave clues that the Fitzgerald and its crew were lost. A small three room cabin was built on the east shore of Lake Superior adjacent to Deer Lake and the Amphibian base. Various cars scatter the bottom of the river covered in grass and zebra muscles. Don McIsaac observed last July that Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is from my hometown, Orillia. McIsaac, executive vice-president and chief financial officer of Cirrus Aircraft, based at headquarters in Duluth, Minnesota, added, From where I sit now, I can see the port the ship last left.. At the time of the foundering, there was no requirement for depth-finding instruments on commercial vessels. She would be travelling in tandem with the ore freighter Arthur M. Anderson under command of Captain Bernie Cooperto the Soo Locks at Sault Ste. The Lake Carriers Association was inclined to accept that Fitzgerald passed over the Six Fathom Shoal Area as reported by Captain Cooper. I have a fence rail down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list. Antlers of males weigh an average of 17 pounds and can reach 29 pounds! In addition to taking on water after *potentially* hitting bottom near Six fathom Shoals earlier this afternoon, the. NARA microfilm publication M1931, Index to Selected City Streets and Enumeration Districts, 1930 Census (7 rolls) reproduces a 57-volume typescript index to selected city streets and enumeration districts of the Fifteenth Census of the United States taken in 1930. dove cremation obituaries junction city, kansas,
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