The Edmund Fitzgerald Disaster of 1975 | Episode 96

The average lake around the world is about the size of a large parking lot, the kind of thing you might try to skip a stone across. The current world record for stone skipping is eighty eight skips, but if you were to skip a stone across the lake that we are visiting today, it would have to beat that number by about four hundred and six thousand, nine hundred and twelve and it would be bouncing across the water for about three hours. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and awe inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll hear about the most boat hungry lakes anywhere in the world. You'll see why you would rather be beaten half to death in the face with a baseball bat than visit the site of today's story. And you'll find out how a cherished keepsake from our tail was recovered by a bright orange alien shaped robot Monser made out of airplane grade aluminum. And if you were listening on Patreon, you would figure out if flat earthers are just the dumbest people in the world or the dumbest people in history. You would get to walk through the deadliest things to ever happen on the greatest lake system in the world, and you would hear a sode inside a sode about a storm from nineteen thirteen so powerful that when they needed a name, they just settled on Great. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So with all that said, shoe the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Fifty thousand to seventy thousand years ago, as early groups of humans first left Africa and began spreading to every corner of the globe, a holy new facet of the human experience was invented, travel tourism. They traveled because something inside of them refused to stay still. They had a hunger to know what lay just beyond the edge of the visible horizon. Since the first people packed a go bag and started hoofing it into the great unknown, stories of their journeys have made the world feel bigger, which in turn makes us feel smaller but somehow more rewarded, if that makes sense. Every day they faced a choice turned back to save or keep walking into the unfamiliar and the potentially dangerous. Is this very poisonous? Does that cave entrance have teeth? They had no idea what they were walking into. Today, most of us think of travel as a way to momentarily escape the routines of our daily life and recharge, to collect some strange stories, maybe eat something questionable, and just get lost enough to feel alive. Historically, people did it to get rich or famous. So imagine Europe in the early fifteen hundreds. It was crowded and smelly and hungry and restless for new things to do and see. And then one day Christopher Columbus just sails his way into Spain with news that there was a whole new world sitting just across the Atlantic, a whole new world jam packed with untold treasures and mythical monsters, and furs and minerals and naked ladies, you name it. Suddenly everybody and their brother was dreaming of becoming a beaver Pelt billionaire. Or plotting some unknown course to Asia and maybe take an arrow to the skull for their effort. But it was worth it, so off they went. So imagine traveling across the ocean and then marveling at and putting a bullet through every new and interesting thing that you see when you round a bend in a river and see nothing but water. By sixteen fifteen, French explorer Samuel de Champlain did exactly that. He had finished exploring up the Saint Lawrence Seaway and the Trent Severn Waterway, and continuing west, he became the first recorded whitey to see the Great Lakes Lake Huron. To be exact, he just stood there with his jaw hanging open, collecting flies when his Native American guides closed his mouth for him and sat him down looking out from the shore. The horizon was nothing more than a clean blue line with no sign of land anywhere. When he finally spoke, he said, what the fungou? Where's the other shore? And if you, like Champlain, were not familiar with the Great Lakes of North America, there was nothing else like them in the known world. The Great Lakes got their name because the Holy Lakes wasn't family friendly, and these aren't even really lakes. They're five interconnected freshwater inland seas, and Europeans had never seen anything like them. They were set thousands of miles from the nearest ocean. And I have a handy acronym to help remember them, homes Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. The native peoples of the region had lived among them for thousands of years and treated them especial and mostly took them for granted. But to Europeans, who were used to europe sized lakes, they were truly in pants wedding flabbergasted. These things are so large that create their own weather systems. One in every five gallons of fresh water on the planet's surface, from every river and lake and reservoir, all of it combined, sits in those five lakes. That is about six quadrillion gallons. That is enough to fill about five point seven trillion Dodge caravans. Lake Superior by itself holds more water than the other four combined. It alone contains ten percent of all the fresh water on the planet. If you drained Lake Superior into the Grand Canyon, you would actually need two more Grand Canyons just to hold it all, and that is where we will be spending our time today. You would think that the name Superior would have come from its great size, but no, the French called it lacks Superior, meaning upper lake, because it was the uppermost of the Great Lakes in relation to the Atlantic, where they started. And over the centuries, these lakes have been a lifeline, first for the indigenal peoples who traveled them by canoe, then for fur traders, then settlers, and today for massive freighters ferrying cargo. And as much as they are useful, they are also unpredictable and wild. They are capable of whipping up hurricane force winds and thirty foot waves with little or no warning, which can make travel by boat an exhilarating but hairy outing. They call Lake Superior the Graveyard of the Great Lakes, where thousands of ships have taken the long Bath, the long cold bath. You see, ships are astonishingly well preserved by the cold water, because cold stunts bacterial growth and slows decay. At the warmest time of the year, the surface of Lake Superior barely passes sixteen degrees celsius or sixty fair night in the winter. It's closer to maybe half a degree celsius or thirty three fairrenheight. So you're listening to a podcast tell you how incredibly cold the biggest lake in North America is, and you're all, well, I'm sure I've swum and colder. So the host pushes you in because he's ninety seven percent concerned for your safety but also has a three percent mean streak. Would you know what to do? You might be thinking, whoa, we literally just started and you're already telling me I should be boning up on not drowning. What the hell's going to happen to me in this episode? Yes, this is early, but I wouldn't read anything into that necessarily. If you've been on my social media, you've seen that I have done my fair share of cold water swimming. But you're not going to catch me swimming in Lake Superior. But let's say that you did in water round fifty fahrenheit or ten degrees celsius. The average person isn't going to be able to wind a watch or flip you the bird. After about five minutes, drop that temperature down to forty degrees fahrenheit or four degrees celsius, and you are facing muscle failure in maybe ten minutes, and you will probably be dead in about half an hour. So how do you keep yourself on this side of the surface long enough to tell your story to the news. Well, in that first minute, you're going to experience an uncontrollable gasping and hyperventilating cold water shock response, and if your head is underwater at the time, this can and will drown you. That panic breathing response will pass, thankfully, and now you need to focus on breathing slowly and deliberately. Some people in this situation immediately panic and start kicking it for shore, but they almost always immediately exhaust themselves and drown mid breaststroke. I was going to say mostly because it's really hard to judge distance in the water, but mostly really because they burn up all their heat and oxygen and strength. Shouting is also a good way to burn up precious energy, which is why I tell everyone to always carry a whistle with them. They make more noise and they can serve more energy. And I'm just now thinking I should really be making doomsday emergency whistles. What you're going to want to do is float or treadwater calmly, clinging onto anything buoyant that you can find. Ideally, and we are going to assume the HELP position. HELP stands for heat escape lessening posture, and it's so easy even a snowman could do it. You draw your knees up to your chest, then cross your arms around them and hunch forward to trap warmth around your core. And as long as you can keep some air in your lungs, you can remain buoyant. If there are other people in the water with you, Huddling together with your arms stretched around each other's shoulders and torsos helps you to be able to share body heat in a way that could potentially double your survival time. And your clothes may feel freezing and awful, but they are actually more insulating than you would think. So you want to zip up your jacket or tighten your cuffs if you can, and don't lose your shoes. Anything you can do to preserve even a little warmth can help reduce circulation loss and hypothermia. There is an old saying that no one is dead until they are warm and dead, and people have survived incredible things. I'm not gonna lie. You are not in an enviable position here, and I am sorry if this ever happens to you. But this is not an automatic death sentence. And let's say a helicopter or a boat or even a submarine pops up underneath you to save the day. Hooray am I right, not entirely. The thawing phase can actually be the most dangerous part of recovery. People suffer from rewarming shock and heart attacks and organ fits and all kinds of things. What you're going to want to do is move slowly and stay horizontal. Standing too quickly can put stress on your heart. And now that you're no longer in the water, those clothes are only leeching heat away from your body, so it's time to strip. And as a man, you may feel embarrassed because your oudie has turned into an innie, but honestly, don't even worry about it. It will come back. Wrap yourself in anything you've got. Blankets, a sleeping bag, towels, even a hat scarf are great for keeping heat in your head. Just like your nana always told you, trying to massage a body part to warm it up after the fact is an easy way to create tissue damage. If you are lucky enough to have something warm to hug. Keep it on your chest or your armpits or your groin. Just don't worry about your hands or your feet. Your core is all that matters. That said, introducing too much heat too fast is too hard on the body. Hot showers or baths. Once a victim is able to hold a cup without shaking it empty, offer them something warm and sweet. But remember that alcohol and caffeine cause blood vessels to dilate, which speeds up heat loss. If there's any confusion or drowsiness, or a weak pulse or shallow breathing, seek medical tension immediately. In fact, just seek it regardless you were going to want reporters to have a doctor to speak to about your news story. Sorry, we were just talking about Lake Superior. In sixteen twenty two, an explorer named Pierre ispri Ratison was all, tell me more about all these indigenous stories about a great water to the west. The Ajibwe and Cree originally called it Kitchigami or Kitchigumi, meaning great sea or huge water. Ratison led what became the first documented European expedition to reach it Insane sixteen fifty nine, and he did it with Ojibway guides in simple birch bark canoes. European built boats wouldn't appear for another few decades, not until the fur trade really took off and permanent trading posts started popping up. When I said it was big, Lake Superior is about three hundred and fifty miles or five hundred and sixty kilometers from side to side, one hundred and sixty miles or two hundred and sixty kilometers from top to bottom at its widest point, and one thousand, three hundred and thirty two feet or four hundred and six meters at its deepest point. That is deeper than the Empire State Building is tall. People have long said it looks like a wolf's head, But hear me out google it and tell me it doesn't look more like a goblin shark. In an awkward turn of events, the first real ship known to have sailed on the Great Lakes also held the distinction of becoming her first shipwreck in SIAD sixteen seventy nine, on her maiden voyage, No Less, the Griffin vanished somewhere on Lake Michigan. She was never found, making her one of North America's oldest unsolved maritime mysteries. And if I asked you to guess just how many ships lay at the bottom of the Great Lakes, what would you guess? Twelve one hundred, four hundred and twenty. While at best count, the Great Lakes are said to hold over six thousand shipwrecks. That's based on shipping registries and historical records. But if you toss in undocumented and smaller craft, some estimates push that number as high as ten thousand. With over thirty thousand lives lost since the sixteen hundreds, the Great Lakes hold more illegally parked boats than any other lake system on Earth. Actually, I believe they contain more shipwrecks than all other inland lakes combined worldwide in the eighteen sixties. Today the eighteen eighties, early wooden hulled freighters plied the waves, ferrying everything from iron to coal, to lumber to grain, mostly to feed North America's steel and energy and agricultural industries. Back then, they were only about two to three hundred feet long and powered by simple steam engines. By the nineteen hundreds, they reached as long as seven hundred feet, and after World War II they started passing one thousand feet that's as long as sixty Dodge caravans. They moved over one hundred and sixty million tons of cargo every year. It's estimated about twenty thousand cargo and freight vessels traveled these waters in a year. But of all the countless vessels to traverse these waters, we are going to spend our time with one very special ship, meat the SS Edmund Fitzgerald Registry two seven seven four three seven, and to toot her massive horn. But she was the largest ship to ever be built or sail on the Great Lakes. She sat at seven hundred and twenty feet or two hundred and twenty meters long, seventy five feet or twenty three meters wide, and thirty nine feet or twelve meters tall. She sat low in the water with a long, unbroken deckline that is about three acres of boat. That's enough room to snugly fit about four hundred and fifteen Dodge caravans on deck. She was sleek yet massive. She sat low in the water with a long, unbroken deckline. Her hull tapered towards an imposing, almost bulbous kind of a bow, kind of what you might think an icebreaker in the Arctic might look like but twenty times longer. In fact, if you want to get an idea just how long it was, go outside, pick a direction, set a starting line, and don't sprint, but don't jog. You just want to run for about a minute and a half without stopping. Now look back to your starting point, and that is basically the length. Her hull was painted a familiar deep oxide red. Above that, she was clean and white. And if you've ever wondered why, you've probably recognized that red color from one hundred different ships before. It's actually an anti corrosive coating that's happened to become the signature color of ships like these. The wheelhouse, perched high at the bow, was boxy with wide slanted windows. The aft cabin and the smoke funnel sat at the stern, acting like a kind of counterweight. They gave her a kind of a balanced geometry, kind of like a Q tip, but not exactly. The mast and the radar tower rose from the centerline like a spine, and her deck was a repeating patchwork of catwalk hatches, hatch cranes, deck winches, and vents. When she launched in nineteen fifty eight, she was nicknamed the Queen of the Lakes. She had a seventy five hundred horsepower cold fire Westinghouse steam turbine engine capable of pushing her to fourteen knots that's sixteen miles or twenty six kilometers an hour, And if you were unfortunate enough to fall overboard and found yourself face to face with her propeller, it was almost twenty feet or six meters across. When she launched from the Great Lakes Engineering Work Shipyard in June of nineteen fifty eight, she was christened by Missus Edmund Fitzgerald. Being the biggest ship that they'd ever built, this was a bit of a big deal, and christening a ship is a ritual that dates back about five thousand years. The ancient Babylonians used to offer sacrifices to the sea gods before new ships sailed. Ancient Greeks and Romans did it too. Even the Vikings used to smear their holes with blood to bless their ships against misfortune. People made the switch from blood to champagne in the eighteen hundreds. Traditionally, they break a bottle across her bow to imbue her with good luck, save voyages and protection for her ship and crew. But if the bottle doesn't break, that can be a bad omen. Back in nineteen eleven, at the Harland and Wolf shipyard in Belfast, Ireland, the White Star Line didn't believe in christening ships, so they dry launched their newest and most unsinkable ship, which then sank on her maiden voyage, and most people remember her as the Titanic. I wouldn't read anything into that, though. It's just naval superstition right. Anyway, during the christening of the Eddy Fits, they couldn't quite get the bottle to break, but third times the charm and when she finally did slip into the water for the first time, one observer died of a heart attack. I wouldn't read anything into that either. At this point, our story begs the question who was Edmund Fitzgerald? Well, Edmund Bacon Fitzgerald was the chairman of the Northwest Mutual Life Insurance Company out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. That title put him in an upper crust of American business people. But why they would name a ship after him? Well, Northwestern Mutual financed the construction. They weren't just an insurance company. They had been quietly using your insurance money to invest in America's industrial infrastructure. You know, freightliners, iron ore plants, cold war missile silos, that kind of stuff. Anyway, shipbuilders honoring muckety MUCKs by naming vessels after them was a slam dunk way of getting your financed. But don't think of Fitzgerald as just some kind of vain, self interested business jackass. He was a well respected philanthropist who never went full Palpatine. Northwestern Mutual owned the Fitzgerald and chartered her to the Columbia Transportation Division of the Ogo Bay Norton Company, And I promise that will not be important unrelated. You know how some men of means go by their middle names as a point of distinction. While there is a version of the story where the ship could have been called the Bacon Fitzgerald, the date of our story, set in our home universe today is November ninth, nineteen seventy five. She was sailing out of Superior, Wisconsin, towards Detroit with a crew of twenty nine on board. She was chasing the tail end of year end shipping before the weather and ice made things too dangerous and shut down traffic for the season. At the helm today will be Captain Ernest McSorley. I'm not saying you'll find his picture in the dictionary beside the description for sea captain, but by all accounts you could Ernest McSorley was excellent at it. Cruise described him as quiet but solid and unpretentious and trusted as a leader. He was the kind of man who knew what it meant to be responsible for others. He was stern but fair, and he never lost his temper with the sea. They say he was one of the best, not just because he was fearless, because he went on in spite of fear. Four decades of sailing can do that. His crews loved him, and there are plenty of stories of him bending over backwards to accommodate and help them professionally and personally. By the time he took command of the Edmund Fitzgerald, he'd also become a bit of a legend amongst other sailors. One said he could park a seven hundred foot freighter like he was backing a pickup, slipping a ship the size of an apartment building into a harbor berd with inches to spare. The thing was his mind had turned to retirement. See his wife was in poor health and he decided to spend more time at home with her. But before that, there was just this one last run of the season, carrying just over twenty six thousand tons of taconite pellets. That's a very dense kind of ore, and this should be a pretty routine trip across the lake. We'll part from Burlington Northern Dock number one in Superior, Wisconsin, head through the Sioux Locks at Sussaint Marie, continuing along the Saint Mary's River into Lake Uron, and finally unload at Zug Island at the head of the Detroit River. The weather forecast was calling for a bit of a storm, which was no great surprise. See November is known for gales. Typically in November, cold dry air from the Arctic meets up with relatively warm and moister air just hovering above the lake, and this temperature difference fuels powerful low pressure systems capable of creating snow and waves blown by powerful winds. It happens every year, and sailors call this kind of storm the Witch of November, and they are said to eat ships alot, just another one of those nautical superstitions. The Fitzgerald was no stranger to November storms, and mcsorlely had an unshakable confidence in his ship and his crew. For this journey, McSorley opted for a more northerly route versus a more straight line approach to avoid the worst of the storm. Some thought that this might bring her too close to shoals, but McSorley was willing to push limits. This was the nineteen seventies, after all. This is a time where kids rode on the floor boars of cars while their seat Bella's parents cracked a cold one. Also, if you don't know, shoals are basically like submerged sandbars that act as tripping hazards for boats. This night, the Fitzgerald will be accompanied by another ore carrier, the Arthur m Anderson, captained by Jesse Bernard Bernie Cooper. She followed from the rear. She shipped out only about twenty minutes behind the Fitzgerald. Weather reports back then were limited by the technology of the time. They didn't have satellite radar loops, there was no real time wave models. Captains relied mostly on Coast Guard bulletins and marine radio forecasts, and of course their experience in the wheelhouse to get by the marine forecasts the day before said, low pressure system over the Central Plains will move northwest into Lake Superior by Monday morning, increasing east to southeast winds by twenty five to thirty five knots today, becoming northeast thirty five to forty five knots by late evening, rain changing to snow by Monday morning, visibility locally one mile or less. By dawn. The lake was described like gray rolling hills building strength by the hour, and there had been a storm morning issued overnight that described northeast winds increasing to fifty knots. These men had plenty to do, but watching the weather was really the only bit of adrenaline they got because of its power and unpredictability. As the day went on, winds screamed to over sixty knots, and that promised snow had appeared in wide out bursts. The winds were blowing up to sixty miles an hour, but they were gusting even higher, and waves began climbing over twenty feet with heavy freezing spray. Both ships altered their courses to hug the Canadian shore, hoping from some protection from the worst of the wind. Waves struck the bough with cannon like booms that reverberated through the hull. Every impact sent spray crashing against the pilot house windows. It was the kind of thing crewmen would have felt in their bones. Snow continued to fall and water froze where it splashed in the freezing wind. With each new wave, more and more spray froze, almost instantly coating the ship in an ever thickening slab of ice that increased with every passing minute. This added tons of weight to the upper structure, and it had to be constantly scraped off the pilothouse windows. By three point thirty, Captain McSorley calmly radioed the Andersen, saying that his ship had taken on a bit of a list to starboard, and she'd also lost her radar. Whether it was on the fritz or the dish had been ripped off, he couldn't say. Oh, and she was taking on some water. Captain McSorley reported that two ventilation covers had torn away under the pounding seas, and water washing over the deck began entering the hull, he asked the Andersen to stay close and be a bud and provide some navigational updates now and then. Now that the Fitzgerald was effectively blind, the Andersen obliged and kept her blipping away on their radar as the storm worsened all around them. Snow squalls reduced visibility to almost zero, and the waves were now topping over twenty five feet or seven and a half meters tick. The Andersen's radar showed that Fitzgerald was making about nine to ten knots, but the blip occasionally disappeared behind snow and wave interference. Every few seconds, her bow would rise, heaving and twisting, and then slamming down into the trough sending a terrifying shutter rippling throughout the decks. Before long, the Fitzgerald was groaning audibly as it continued rising and falling over wave after wave. The best way to picture her was falling to her listing side and then slowly writing herself in a cycle that made her look drunk. Even a few inches of water inside the hold would equate to hundreds of tons of extra weight. The rhythmic thrum of Bilge pumps running full blast, pulling water out of her hole is not the kind of comforting soundtrack you love to hear echoing through a ship, but in this situation, it's better than not hearing it. Just before seven, the Andersen reported a a sudden burst of snow and total whiteout conditions, and the Fitzgerald's radar echoed continued to flicker erratically. She was probably just being obscured by her riding bow in the troughs with giant waves rolling by. The storm continued to intensify, with wind gusts now topping eighty six knots. That's nearly a one hundred and sixty kilometers or one hundred miles per hour. If they were on land, he would be watching trees uproot, and it would be loud enough to cause ear pain. By seven ten, the Andersen was struck broadside by a pair of enormous waves, probably thirty feet or nine meters tall, which rolled her hard to port, nearly rolling her over. A minute later, a third, even more powerful waves swept over her deck, damaging fittings and stealing a lifeboat. She survived, and the waves continued on as far as they could tell, heading towards the Fitzgerald. They radio to Warner and check on her status, and Mic sorely, calmly told them, we are holding our own. And at seven fifteen, the Fitzgerald's green form on their radar disappeared again, no intermittent flashing this time. Seconds went by with no trace of a blip. They assumed she'd simply become untraceable through the snow and waves. They couldn't raise her by radio. Of course, she could have lost her radio mast. They never stopped trying to raise her. They just kept calling her name over and over. Fitzgerald, Are you still with us? Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald, this is the Anderson. But silence, nothing but the crackle of static in return. Five minutes later, the snow squall eased up just enough that they weren't completely snowblind, but they still couldn't see the Fitzgerald, and there was nothing on their radar. She was gone. No distress call, just gone. Her last known position about twenty seven kilometers or seventeen miles northwest of Whitefish Point. They radioed the Coastguard out of Sous Saint Marie to notify them of a missing vessel, and sou Saint Marie thought that there might be some kind of electrical interference or radar issue, but not that that was going to stop them from doing their duty. Their entire job is to go out into weather when everyone else is coming in. They will put out to sea in hurricane force winds with seventy foot waves, basically in the worst conditions you can imagine. Sadly, their rescue choppers were grounded by the conditions and none of their cutters were close enough to respond quickly. The Anderson, despite her own damage and the extreme conditions, turned around and began searching for any signs of survivors or debris. But nothing, no flares, no lifeboats, just black water and blowing snow. Other vessels responding that night searched into the early morning hours, and all they found were small patches of debris, some life erings, and an oil slick. The water was only two degrees celsius or thirty six fahrenheit. All twenty nine crew members were missing and presumed dead. So what happened? Almost immediately sailors began invoking the name of the Three Sisters. It wasn't a metaphor or three vengeful spirits or some monster of Lore from the sea. The National Weather Service recognizes the Three Sisters as a pattern of rogue waves that haunt the Great Lakes. In rough seas, multiple wave systems can align and voltron into a kind of constructive interference pattern that you don't really need to understand, because there is no test at the end of this episode. Basically because of a lengthy hydrological explanation, I am sparing you from the energy of these waves temporarily stack them up in a way that makes them abnormally large and fast. Regional mariners have reported massive waves arriving one after another in close succession, almost simultaneously, each slightly higher than the last, as if set in motion by Poseidon himself. The first wave Knoxi ship off balance, the second floods or disables it, and the third punches it to the sea floor. Within days. The wreck was located by sonar about twenty seven kilometers or seventeen miles north northwest of Whitefish Point. As expected, she lay on the floor of Lake Superior, five hundred and thirty feet down, and she had been broken in two. The bow section was resting upright, buried deep in the mud, with the anchorchains stretched out, and the pilot house was twisted but mostly intact. Oddly, the pilot house door was open, which suggested that whatever happened happened so fast they didn't even have time to secure it. The stern lay inverted, separated by a one hundred and seventy foot field of debris, with its deck peeled open. So what exactly happened? Well, to put it simply, with most sinkings, the issue is too much water inside the boat relative to the amount outside. The boat weight is crucial. So what happens when a ship at sea becomes weighed down awkwardly and unexpectedly with water and ice build up? Sailors often have to brave the elements to chop this stuff and get it off their decks before it swamps them. But in this case, we are talking about several football fields of deck space in conditions so poor, no one was ever going to break off a fraction of it before they were blown to Minnesota. And as for the water entering the ship, the pumps would have been simply overwhelmed. And I'm not suggesting that this is the reason that she was lost, not at all. I am simply suggesting that the waves did not need any help that night, and weight being an issue I spilled up wouldn't help things. Naval engineers much better at this than I. Reconstructed the events and suggested that somewhere between seven nine and thirty seconds and seven ten that evening, the first wave struck the bow, driving it deep into the water, which flooded over hatchcovers, which may have not survived the experience. The steel hatch covers or their clamps may have failed. And the Fitzgerald was a straight deck freighter, which means the cargo hatches ran most of the entire length of the ship, which was great for really packing in all of that ore, but it left the hull vulnerable to bending forces as waves lifted the bow in stern but left the mid section unsupported, or vice versa. As the second wave arrived to twenty six thousand tons of ore, plus the weight of the water forced it even lower, which put an incalculable stress on the structural integrity of the ship. It doesn't even matter what the third wave did at this point, the forward holes of the ship would have taken on water fast, dragging it down, replacing buoyancy with forward momentum, and that enormous forward momentum forced the bow down faster than the ship could recover. The men on board would have felt the shutter as tons of water rushed in and the lake closed in over their heads and just forward of the midsection bulkhead, the whole thing snapped. It's believed the bow would have sunk like a stone, while the stern lifted briefly before following, not entirely dissimilar to the final moments of the Titanic. Forensic bodeling showed the descent lasting less than sixty seconds from the surface to the lake bed. The largest ship ever seen, an object of unimaginable presence, disappeared from the surface in less than thirty seconds. Every man on board, twenty nine in total, were almost certainly killed instantly by the crushing implosion of steel and frigid water pressure as the ship sank over five hundred feet to the bottom of Lake Superior. The Edmund Fitzgerald had been claimed by the worst storm in decades. In the weeks that followed, investigators and families demanded answers, answers that were not forthcoming. They were going to need to examine the actual wreck investigators, not the families. Investigations were conducted by the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board, and Canadian authorities, and each reached different conclusions about the cause. There was a theory that the ship may have briefly grazed the six fathom shoal, damaging her hull, which could have started a fatal leak, but in the same way you couldn't help it noticing driving over a curb. McSorley surely would have mentioned it. The ship carried no survival suits and its lifeboats were conventional open wooden boats, so even if some crew had somehow made it off the ship, they would have had little chance. Exposed to the gale force winds. One of the two lifeboats was recovered, not entirely intact. Five hundred and thirty feet down might not sound like much to someone who's never used scuba equipment before, but I am about to educate you with a little body horror. A living human swimming to five hundred and thirty feet would experience massive lung compression, making it impossible to breathe, nitrogen narcosis making it impossible to think, and a complete rupturing of the ears and sinuses, the pressure outside your body would crush inward faster than the air trapped inside your skull could compress, which would result in this soft tissue lining being pulled away from the bone, rupturing blood vessels, and in that squeezed up place where the air used to be, blood would race in to fill the vacuum, and this would be accompanied by a sudden, hot, sharp crack behind your eyes. You would literally cry blood. And the nerves of the upper teeth and cheeks run through that same region, so when the sinuses while rupture, you would feel sharp electric pain like a root canal in all of your teeth and eye sockets, to the point where if you had the option of trading this experience for having someone break your nose in the middle of a migraine, you may prefer that at least you wouldn't have to put up with it long you would almost certainly black out from hypoxia and drown. Five hundred and thirty feet is almost nine times as deep as an open water diver could survive. It's four times as deep as a specialty diver might go. Back in nineteen seventy six, just one year after the disaster, the US Navy used a very early remote deep diving vehicle called the Curve three to locate and photograph the Edmund Fitzgerald for the first time. It wouldn't confirm the exact cause, but the grainy footage that it sent back confirmed that the ship had broken in two. In nineteen eighty a joint Canadian and American team used manned, battery powered deep diving research vehicles to reach the wreck, and they were able to film the hull and the pilothouse and the debris field for the first time in color. And then in nineteen eighty nine, the Canadian Navy and a National Geographic documentary crew used submersibles to return to the site and capture it in high resolution, and that turned into a lost which we'll come back to in a bit. In nineteen ninety five, Man returned to the wreck once again, but in a much weirder and more frightening way. Every ear of a new suit. It's a kind of single person submersible, except it's not a sub it's an eerily human shaped robotic suit of armor. It's got hinged metal arms that end in pincer like manipulator claws instead of gloves, and the helmet is a polished dome with large insect like glass portholes to make it worse. It's also painted in a vivid safety orange to help it stand out as man made in this inhospitable part of the world that normally doesn't cater to people. And the whole thing is hung up on thick umbilical cables, and it drags a lighting rake behind it to try to cut through the dark to let it see. Oh, and it stands about seven feet tall and weighs more than five hundred hounds. If you can't tell I don't like it. If I were in murky water and this thing loomed out of the darkness before me, I'm just dead. That said. In nineteen ninety five, this maritime mechanical monstrosity returned to the site and removed the ship's bell. It was one of the most complex dives ever attempted in fresh water and why the families had asked for something tangible from the ship to help them to remember and to heal. The bell was chosen because it carried the ship's name and her spirit and her duty within it. The bell was used to mark the passing hours and to call sailors to attention. So in a way it was very much the voice of the ship. So bringing it back became a kind of way of letting it speak for them again. The Canadian government held jurisdiction over the reck site and granted a single permit for the recovery on the condition that no human remains were to be disturbed. They couldn't touch anything, really, but they would install a memorial bell to replace it. While they were there. Diver lem Olsen carefully unbolted the two hundred pound bronze bell from its mounting on the forward deck on July the fourth, nineteen ninety five. And get this, when the bell was retrieved and broke through the surface, it jostled a bit, and it rang faintly, speaking again for the first time after twenty years of silence. It was a big day. The replica bell had been engraved with the names of all twenty nine crewmen. The original bell now sits on display at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, Michigan, and each year it is rung twenty nine times as the names of the crew are read out loud. The loved ones had mixed feelings of grief for their loss, but also gratitude for those who made this possible. Now back to that lawsuit. During the nineteen eighty nine mission to really film the ship, they kind of filmed what appeared to be a human body lying near the ship's pilot house and the families flipped out. National Geographic cut the footage and it has never been made public, so the lawsuit never actually went all the way through. Then the government of Canada stepped up and declared the Edmn Fitzgerald to be a protected maritime grave site and followed up by making it illegal to film or photograph human remains underwater. Today, the wreck is protected under Canada's Cultural Heritage Act, but managed as a memorial site by both countries. The loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald led to new regulations on Great Lake shipping, including mandatory service Bible suits, new rules for stress loading freighters, new rules for monitoring hatch cover integrity, stricter hatch cover inspections, and improved weather forecasting and weather avoidance procedures on the Great Lakes. And this story may have just become a blip in the history of the Great Lakes. Never ending appetite for maritime blood if it hadn't been for a man named Gordon Lightfoot. He read about the tragedy and was so moved he composed a folk ballad with some twangy rock guitar called the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It's a bit of a dirge and was written in the tone and spirit of songs of nautical tragedies going back hundreds of years. I should mention Gordon Lightfoot wasn't just some guy with a guitar in his living room who got misty about today's story. Gordon Lightfoot is considered one of the most influential folk musicians of the twentieth century. He's in every musical hall of fame we have. He has even been appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada. It's our highest civilian honor. It's as close to getting knighted as you can for a Canadian musician. And he once said that he considered this to be his most important song, and not because of its chart success. I mean it did hit number two on the Billboard charts and Rolling Stone ranked it in the top one hundred greatest Country Songs of all time. In spite of it being more folksy than country. No, he considered it important because it meant something to the families, and they credited with keeping the memory of the event and their loved ones alive, which it certainly has. Fifty years later, it's still beloved, and it's been covered in almost every genre except reggae. Before its release, Today's loss was largely a regional Great Lakes tragedy, but after the song, the Edmund Fitzgerald became one of the most internationally discussed shipwrecks in maritime history. Every November, the bell at Whitefish Point tolls twenty nine times, once for each man, and then once more to remember all who were lost on the Great Lakes. While many ships have gone down on the Great Lakes, the Fitzgerald stands out not just because of her dramatic size, but because of her enduring cultural legacy and for remaining the greatest mystery in the long and storied history of the Great Lakes. I believe, outside of calling the ship the Eddie fits that one time, and then the way I tried to give description to the indescribable physical hell you would experience if you grabbed a snorkel and tried to visit it. I think I maintained a definite air of respect during this episode. The fiftieth anniversary of the disaster just passed and people went crazy for it. I even saw one I dressed up as the Fitzgerald for Halloween. We can only barely understand how frightening this must have been, and I feel a real responsibility to tell their stories with accuracy and respect, knowing there are real people there connected to the story and still wounded by it. A cold short swim from my house, they've actually erected a memorial to Gordon Lightfoot, although I have no idea why he didn't live here or anything. Neil Young lived nearby, but I don't see a Neil Young memorial going up. I guess in some twisted way, it's just the power of the legacy of the story that defies any logical use of my tax dollars. And speaking of complaints, I would like to address my most heartbreaking complaint Comma when people review the show and they complain about the number and the volume of the ads. I cannot stand the ads, but that is what the hosting service does. I have no control over them, their length, their content, their quality, their quantity, their volume, their placement, or positioning. I hate it, hate it, hate it, and I know there's a percentage of you who don't want to hear it. But if you don't want to be bothered by any of that until I can figure out some other way of doing this. Understanding I am only one person, you can always have all of this plus more, commercial free at patreon dot com slash funeral Kazoo. I specifically go out of my way to make the Patreon episodes longer with additional content, and all episodes are available ad free, and frankly, the only reason that I have even been able to do this show for six years now is because of donations from people on Patreon. Every time I see a comment from some listener saying they'll never listen to the show again because they can't stand the ads, I honestly take it like a kick in the genitals, and it makes me want to stop doing the show altogether. Again, I'm only one person, and I'm a sensitive one to boot. So if you are looking for an alternative and you can spare a couple of bucks yet which month, I'm not asking you to join a cult. I'm just asking you to consider helping support the show. So that we can continue for another six years. You can reach out on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or just fire an email to Doomsdaypod at gmail dot com. And I would like to call out Dante Grossman, Leash Tactical Moses, and Cala Clark, who got such a kick out of hearing her name the last time. I'm just doing it again, Hey Cola again. There is no show without you. Guys. Older episodes with ads designed to piss you off can be found wherever you found this one. And while you're there, I'm not going to ask you to leave a review if it pisses you off. I'm just going to say if you respect or enjoy it enough in the form that it's available, maybe tell a friend. And obviously I thank my Patreon listeners for their support and encouragement. But like always, if you can spare the money and had to choose, I always ask you to consider making a donation to Global Medic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations and to date they have helped over six million people across eighty nine different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmedic dot CA. On the next episode. With the Christmas season approaching, we wanted to do something wintry and o doorsy for the next episode, which we will, but sadly we're going to be spending a good chunk of our time learning why frocks and petticoats and ice skates make terrible swimwear. It's the Regent's Park skating disaster of eighteen sixty seven. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.