The Sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald

Introduction

0:00It was really a sign of things to come that I, like, heard this, like, spooky story about a ship going down and everybody drowning, and I was like, this is for me. This is my favorite song now. This is my jam. Literally.

0:16I'm Paige. And I'm Megan. And this is Spooky Science Sisters. Hello, you're listening to Spooky Science Sisters, a podcast where we present to you a science-based and probably very giggly discussion on all things strange and unusual.

Edmund Fitzgerald Episode

0:35So tonight we are going a little bit rogue, and I guess you guys don't really know the difference because you don't know what we were planning originally. But we decided sort of last minute to do an episode on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which is a very famous shipwreck in the Great Lakes region, for those of you who are not familiar, but you're about to be. Mainly because literally today is the 50th anniversary, so I felt like we had to.

1:06And it just seemed like a sign that we needed to do this because there was a big winter storm that just hit the lower portions of the Great Lakes regions last night, which is, like, when the Edmund Fitzgerald started its journey and things started to deteriorate. So, I don't know. Kismet, I guess. We had to do it. We had to do it. But before we do that, I know you guys are so surprised.

Book Discussion

1:35We are going to talk about our book. Yay! Yay! So, in case you've missed us talking about it the last, I don't know, year, we wrote a book. And the name of that book is Spooky Science, Dissecting the Mysteries of Ghosts, Cryptids, Aliens, and Other Oddities. And if you've read it or if you're going to read it, please, please, please review if you can. It does a lot for us little baby authors. There's, yeah, so please go out and say good things to your friends or at least let us know what you think of it.

2:07And the last couple episodes, we were telling you guys all about the different events we had. Well, we just wrapped up our last one, so no more events for now. But if you want to and haven't yet, you can watch our Skeptical Inquirer Presents talk, which was so much fun. And it's both on the Skeptical Inquirer Presents website and then it's also on YouTube. Yeah, and we'll put the link in the show notes like we did last time. Yay!

Spooky Story Sharing

2:37But next, Megan, you have something spooky to share? I have such a great something spooky. You do, you have the best something spooky. Listen, I have the spookiest something spooky.

2:53Okay, so I'm going to keep it mildly spoilery for the movie Weapons. So if you have not seen that movie yet and you were like, I want to avoid all information about it, time to skip forward in the episode and not hear it. But anyway, my husband, Steve, and I were just watching it and two weeks ago, something like that. We were watching it two weeks ago. And if you've seen the trailers for the movie, there's like a lot of kids running around in sort of spooky ways and people running around in spooky ways.

3:29So we get to an exciting part of the movie when there's a bunch of kids running around being crazy and all of a sudden we hear upstairs Alice get out of bed and we hear her like little footsteps pounding around upstairs and she's like wandering around. She's calling for us and she's like, I need help. I need help. Like, what the hell? Like, this is like the Weapons 4D experience. Yeah, terrifying.

3:59Yeah, it was like just the worst timing or I guess best timing, if you like want it to be extra spooky, that she could have done this. Like, literally it matched up with the movie perfectly. So we go upstairs and this is like the second time, sort of second time that she's done something similar, but we think she's having sort of mild, like she wakes up because she has to use the bathroom in the night and then she sort of like never really totally wakes up. And, like, has a little sleepwalking episode about it.

4:31So she, like, wasn't really awake and we get upstairs and she's like, Stephen's trying to get her attention and she's like, keeps like kind of pulling away from him and she continues just like running around the upstairs, like just trying to figure out what's going on. And she's not really awake and we're trying to get her to just stop and chill. We're like, this is so freaky. It was so weird. Yeah, and they're, like, texting us about it and I had seen the movie already. Yeah. So, like, you know, I kind of, like, knew what the feel was. I just had, like, chills the whole time they're telling us the story.

5:04Yeah. Long story short. Absolutely not. Alice decided that we need to have the immersive experience and she needed to just act like one of the kids in that movie. And run around our upstairs while it was also happening on the TV screen downstairs. Uh, yeah. So that's mine, which is probably the spookiest one I'll ever have. Paige, has anything spooky happened to you recently? Um, I don't think, like, nothing new, really. The other night we were sitting downstairs watching TV and had been down there for, like, a couple hours, I would say.

5:38And all of a sudden, the dog, mid-nap, jumped up and started barking her head off and sprinted upstairs and was freaking out about something. And that scared the shit out of us. But I'm pretty sure she's had, like, a nightmare or something. One of us, like, moved and woke her up or something. But scared the crap out of her. Because it was, like, pretty quiet down there. And then it was, like, all of a sudden. Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof. Yeah. Well, apparently the fur children and the regular children are just, like, waking up randomly and deciding to do terrifying things.

6:14All right. So that is something spooky.

Edmund Fitzgerald Story

6:17Now we're going to talk about the Edmund Fitzgerald. Because so this is, like, this is, I think I've talked about this before. I think I may have mentioned this when I did the Spooky Lakes episode with Geo. But the Edmund Fitzgerald is very much part of, like, my kind of. morbid little spooky growing up time because my second grade teacher played the song the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald by gordon lightfoot for us in class because we were doing like a

6:47great lakes unit and this was part of it and he it's like a the song is a ballad and he basically tells the entire story and all the major points of what we're going to talk about so you know if you don't want to hear the long version just go listen to the song but it like made this huge impression on me i remember thinking it was so interesting and it was like the first piece of music that i requested that my parents find and buy for me i love that yeah like i came home and i

7:18couldn't remember the name of the song but i remembered what it was about and my mom was very interested and i was like i really want to hear this song again and so i remember like we went to a record store and asked the guy and he knew because it's a very famous song but we like bought the cassette tape that had it on there and yeah that was history but anyway long story short page did your teacher play this for you in school well okay first of all that story is 100 something else would do oh yeah come on be like oh i really liked this song about a shipwreck at school can we go find

7:52it yeah um fingers crossed she continues my legacy yeah i don't remember ever talking about this in school like i've known this song for a long time and i don't know where i first heard it but i don't recall like ever actually talking about it in school which is weird because the captain lived in toledo which is where i was born and raised so you'd think right like yeah you would think that

8:26it would have been talked about more or maybe it wasn't i just don't remember i don't know i mean mine was like such a like it was like a foundational memory yeah i asked elliot too and he also doesn't remember ever talking like about it at school okay but i mean like regardless though if you live and or grow up in the great lakes region you're gonna get exposed to that song and you're gonna get exposed to the story for sure yeah i just like i said i'm sure at some point it was like mentioned i just don't remember it being like big like a big thing that we talked about yeah well it's funny

8:59because i think one of the i can't remember the exact nickname it might be like toledo express or toledo special one of those two toledo express because that's also what the name of the airport is okay yeah so like the one of the nicknames for the ship was the toledo express because yeah there were one of its ports was toledo but also there was a bunch of people who like lived and lived there you know when they weren't working so anyway yeah you guys should listen to it in school but i was just way cooler or we did and i just wasn't cool enough to get excited about it at that age

9:32it was really a sign of things to come that i like heard this like spooky story about a ship going down and everybody drowning and i was like this is for me this is my favorite song now this is my jam literally uh okay well great we can talk about what happens so that if anyone is not familiar you can learn about it with us yay okay so we'll start by talking about the ship which megan's

10:08already mentioned the ship's name is ss edmund fitzgerald also known as the mighty fits but it also it had like so many nicknames or has so many yeah there were several nicknames so she's the largest freighter on the great lakes of its day and was originally launched in 1958 so it had been active for 17 years when she eventually sank in 1975 yeah for a little bit of context of what because i don't

10:38know if they call the big ocean ships do they call them freighters i don't know well because they just call them cargo ships right yeah i think so i mean yeah i think i don't think they're called okay well for people who are not in the u.s or like not familiar with this idea of a freighter it is like it's basically a smaller version of a cargo ship like they're not as long they're not as massive because they're ships built for lakes and they have to be able to go through locks so they tend to be like a

11:09lot skinnier but like they're pretty big impressive ships like page is going to talk about the size of the edmund fitzgerald uh in a minute but yeah think of like a big ocean cargo ship and then like shrink it down and make it skinnier and shorter yeah that's a good way to describe it so yeah it had sort of a spooky launch so there's usually like this this like tradition of smashing a champagne bottle on the bow of the ship sort of as like the the start or like right before it takes off for the

11:43first time and for this ship they took three tries to break the champagne bottle and then while they were actually like getting the ship in the water one spectator was apparently so surprised by the big splash of water as she entered the water that he had a heart attack and died um yeah i only found out that detail today when i was sort of filling in you know what i knew and i was like that is crazy

12:14that is like a wild yeah so yeah yes very sad but it's just like wild yeah they're weird coincidences and yeah even just the champagne thing like people would say oh well you know it was cursed from the beginning so right yeah uh and so the edmund fitzgerald carried iron ore from mines in north northern wisconsin and minnesota to ports associated with the steel industry like toledo and detroit and

12:45cleveland and in 1960 she became the first ship in suloc's history to carry more than one million tons in a single season which is what earned her the name of big fits or mighty fits i lived in sous saint marie michigan when i finished high school so there are literally moved there because she was like i have to because yeah no that's not accurate but yeah my both my parents were in the coast guard my dad was at the time that we moved there and there's this like set of locks when you're transitioning

13:19between well it's on the saint lawrence river but like it's between lake superior and like huron so you see these big freighters go through all the time but the edmund fitzgerald i guess was a favorite because the captain always used to like play music over the loudspeakers when they go through the locks so yeah like people loved this captain that we're going to talk about yeah and like people still get really into like freighters and watching them go in and out like you can follow whole instagram accounts where people just like take photos of them going in and out of port i mean yes i do

13:52follow them because i'm 100 sure if that was like something we could do on the daily that is what elliot would be doing yeah but like and i can't decide it's like sort of like train people like people go out and watch trains like you're really excited when they see certain engines stuff like that and i was like i don't really know which one is nerdier but whatever people are excited it's fine

Great Lakes Geology

14:14so yes as we've already alluded to multiple times she famously sank on the night of november 10th 1975 so 50 years to the day and almost to the hour of when we are recording this and like actually almost to the minute because it was like literally five minutes ago 50 years ago we maybe planned this i did plan this i was like listen we're gonna take the like dramatic route and we're gonna record

14:47at the 50th anniversary if i couldn't release the episode on the 50th anniversary then i'm at least gonna record it at that time okay part of the reason that this shipwreck is a big deal and that like it continues to be a big deal is that the great lakes and specifically lake superior is kind of a big deal um and geo and i did talk about lake superior in the spooky lakes episode but i did want to come back to some of it just to refresh people's memory and give some extra context for the fitzgerald and yeah

15:21we're gonna do a little bit of geology so people can just deal with it this is spooky science we're gonna do the science part okay so when it sank the edmund fitzgerald was carrying a full load which is 26 000 tons of taconite iron ore pellets that were mined from the minnesota iron range and they were bound for i think it was like zug island but it's like basically it's a little island that's near detroit and it's associated with a steel mill and again we're gonna be a little dramatic we're gonna

15:55be a little poetic about this because i think it's worth noting that like the setup for all this the fact that they're hauling this ore we've got this huge lake like we're talking about like billions of years of setup to get to this point of the ship sinking 50 years ago i'm sure you could say that about anything but like whatever this was a big deal for me you guys but she's gonna say it for this uh okay and it's just interesting okay so the ore that they were carrying came from some of the oldest

16:27rocks in north america we're kind of talking about like the core of the north american continent so it comes from these formations called banded iron formations which are basically just layers of iron rich minerals and silicates and they formed from the deposition of iron rich sediments in ancient pre-cambrian seas about 2.2 billion years ago when mountains in the region were like eroding into these ancient seaways and listen people are all you're talking about how ancient the

17:01appalachians are and how spooky that makes them and whatever and it's like all right but the northern midwest of the united states is hosting like the remnants of the oldest mountain ranges on earth so suck it i love geology time with megan we should get some credit for like weird things going on up here because it's way older okay so yeah so that's the ore that the ship is carrying right where it's 2.2

17:35billion years old when this is formed and the history of lake superior goes back over a billion years as well because it's about 1.1 billion years ago so also in the pre-cambrian that we get 25 million years of volcanic eruptions in the area that is now lake superior that occurred during this failed attempt to split or rift apart the north american continent so like basically what's going on in the middle of the atlantic ocean right now you've got the mid-atlantic rift we had like a failed one that

18:10happened in the northern midwest and kind of stretching into the middle of the united states but that shuts down things get kind of quiet for a very long time we've thinned out the crust a little bit we've got this basin we're filling it up with sediments and that goes on until about 2.5 million years ago when we start up the ice ages and that's when this big ice sheet north american ice sheet called the laurentide ice sheet starts sending these massive lobes of glacial ice into the region

18:42and this these glaciers which are like again a mile thick two miles thick of ice start gouging out the depressions that ultimately become the great lakes after the ice sheet's final retreat about 10,000 years ago and lake superior is the largest of the great lakes by far it is over 1300 feet deep it is the largest lake in the world by surface area and it can actually hold the water volume

19:13of all of the other great lakes combined there are five total so it can hold the water volume of the other four plus three additional lake eries so it's like a massive amount of water it is a massive lake like standing on the shore of really any of the great lakes but like especially like superior and michigan and huron like it's like standing on the edge of like an inland freshwater ocean yeah for sure yeah people don't know yeah so because it's so big you get big waves you get big storms it's

19:49capable of sustaining 10 meter high waves which is about 35 feet which is about the height of a three to four story home so it's like things get crazy and the other factor here is that the waves because it's a lake it's not the ocean the late waves are less regularly spaced than what you find in the ocean so you can get slammed by like multiple large waves in quick succession and from different directions so like it's very it's a volatile environment in lake superior yeah and i think you did but also the

20:25documentary that we watched did a good job of describing that because i think a lot of people who haven't been to the great lakes just think it's like i don't know this like calm small body of water that it's not you know like people who haven't been right just like don't really understand yeah yeah they just don't get it okay they don't get it we're very proud of the great lakes i know i've said it i'm sure i've said it several times before

20:57in the past yeah so you got this huge volatile body of water there have been hundreds if not thousands of shipwrecks that have occurred and i just want to note that there's obviously a lot of indigenous history uh surrounding lake superior and legends about lake superior the indigenous name or sort of it's i think it's like the americanized version of the indigenous name is gichigumi which shows up in the gordon lightfoot song i think it's more accurately gishigami uh in

21:29the original ojibwe but it means great sea or big water so you know they're basically treating this like it's a big inland ocean uh for them no one goes to hank's for his spreadsheets they go for a darn good pizza lately though the shop's been quiet so hank decides to bring back the one dollar slice he asks co-pilot in microsoft excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it co-pilot shows hank where the money's going

22:00and which little extras make the dollar slice work now hanks has a line out the door hank makes the pizza co-pilot handles the spreadsheets learn more at m365 co-pilot.com slash work when you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work use indeed sponsor jobs it gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills certifications and more spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes listeners of this show will get a 75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast that's

22:36indeed.com slash podcast terms and conditions apply need a hiring hero this is a job for indeed sponsored jobs okay so that's our context right we've got this really big lake we've got this volatile

Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

22:51environment you know we've got everything coming together until we reach the day of november 9th 1975 the drama page the drama so now we're going to go through the timeline of events leading up to and sort of following the sinking of the ship so the edmund Fitzgerald departed superior wisconsin on the afternoon of november 9th 1975 and it's got 29 crew members on board led by and including a captain

23:23ernest m mcsorley who is like he's an old hand at this like he's very experienced he's got a lot of experienced crew members with him like they know what's up when it comes to navigating the great lakes and dealing with you know everything that goes on there so they start out their journey though and they are missing one of their radars and as soon as i like wrote that detail down in the notes i was like safety pages safety radar is going off right now yeah obviously here's the thing though is like

23:58i have a problem with that but i so apparently the radar was taken out by a crane operator and so like they knew how it was why it wasn't there and i don't i just have a lot of questions like how did it happen how did this crane operator take it out but also like how did it just get taken out and then they didn't do anything about it yeah i guess i don't know exactly how far ahead that it happened but you mentioned the documentary that that we watched and like they sort of frame it as like

24:31time is money here and yeah i get as many loads done as possible which is like famously how these things always go right you want to make the most amount of money in the fastest time that you can and that's like when safety things start to slip oh yeah i know all about that it's just like yeah i don't know that was just i had a lot of questions about that yeah but also i wanted to mention so on top of that radar missing there had also been a finding during a coast guard inspection

25:06which had taken place like just 10 days earlier so october 31st that there had been some minor structural damage and it sounds like that was to the hatch covers and they weren't sealing properly which would have meant any water that was spilling on board could have made it to the cargo area and they were like told they had to fix it but it wasn't required to be fixed until january of the following year gotcha yeah so we're towards the end of the shipping season we're trying to like get in you know our last load our last couple of loads and make some money before we you know give up for

25:41the year because i don't think they operate between like probably january or december and february so they also knew when they were leaving superior wisconsin that a winter storm was on the way but it was originally predicted to stay south of the lake so they weren't that worried about it but by 7 p.m that night so november 9th the national weather service had issued a gale warning and then a full-blown winter storm warning a short time later and it also became clear that the storm was not going to

26:15stay south of the lake it was going to hit further north and it was going to especially heavily affect the eastern portion of lake superior and i mentioned before that lake superior is very volatile storms are a big deal on the great lakes like right we just had our first winter storm of this season like with perfect timing we get things like lake effect snow like everything's freaky here when you live on the edge of big inland oceans if you don't live here you don't understand yeah you don't get it okay

26:49you guys long story short though so november was already notorious on the great lakes for producing these large storms or gales and the first storm that happens is sometimes called the witch of november and it's because like conditions are just a little bit weird there's a ton of leftover so the lake is like during the summer takes up a bunch of heat the water gets really warm and it takes a long time to cool down this huge volume of water so in november like the water's still kind of warm but the air is

27:25getting really cold you're getting these big blasts of cold coming down from the arctic we've got this perfect situation for like to brew these huge winter storms that happen in early november and there have been many other shipwrecks that have happened in sort of that second or third week of november sometimes like with multiple ships disappearing in a single storm so like it's known that this is not a great time to be out on the lake and as soon as they find out that the storm is going to

27:55directly affect them the edmund fitzgerald captain mcsorley decides to double up with another ship called the arthur m anderson who i think had left like a nearby port in minnesota but was able to stay close to them the ships decide to take a more northern route through the lake because they're going to try and like get some shelter downwind of islands that are up there and along the canadian coast but unfortunately this choice like may have been part of the edmund fitzgerald's undoing so when

28:31they got into the vicinity of a small island called caribou island um and now we are mid-afternoon on november 10th so we're the day after they left and at that time the captain of the arthur m anderson whose name is captain cooper noted that at least he thought that the fitzgerald got way too close to a shallow area known as six fathom shoal and cooper was actually convinced that the edmund fitzgerald

29:02bottomed out there by this time the weather had also completely deteriorated you've got the two ships facing like 60 mile per hour winds and at least 25 foot waves so it's kind of understandable that you know they might have a little trouble navigating i guess the charts were a little bit outdated for that area so like it's very possible that the fitzgerald hit this shoal hit this shallow area and like bottomed out some but running into that could have caused her to start taking on water

29:33and the timing seems sort of right because just a short time after passing caribou island captain mcsorley reports to captain cooper on the arthur anderson that he has lost part of a railing that the ship is listing to one side so he's probably taking on water the ship is essentially like starting to sink by this point and riding lower and lower and at some point mcsorley reports that he feels like he's in the worst seas he's ever been in and cooper on the arthur m anderson is like yeah

30:09it's bad but it's like not that bad but if the edmund fitzgerald was riding really low in the water it would just like make everything seem that much bigger yes so then around dinner time things have only gotten worse mcsorley reports he's lost both radars and he's definitely taking on water so he starts to slow down for the arthur m anderson to catch up and at 7 10 p.m the anderson which was keeping track on radar and keeping an eye on the fitz's lights in the distance radioed again to check in and captain

30:42mcsorley reports back we are holding our own but minutes later at 7 15 the fitz vanished off the radar and cooper could no longer see her lights so cooper calls the coast guard to report he's concerned that the fitzgerald has gone down and after checking in with other ships no one can see her on the radar and so the anderson goes back out and not the only ship that goes back out other ships do go out trying to find if nothing else to find people and all they find are lifeboats and debris floating in the water

31:18and a life ring would later wash up on shore yeah so the edmund fitzgerald has definitely gone down and an important thing about the anderson going back out is that the coast guard had to ask them to because the coast guard did not have like a rescue ship big enough to deal with the weather conditions that night so it was really bad and like they asked the anderson and any other ships who were in the area to like please go check on them i don't know if it was

31:49being repaired or like regardless i know they had something in like duluth but that's you know a day away for them to get across the lake and that's too late and that one i think had been like was in the middle of getting its engine repaired so like it wasn't ready to go out anyway i don't think yeah so like that's why you know they're not able to go out here but man i just like think about being cooper who's like had to sit with the fitzgerald throughout all of this and like listen to this very experienced captain captain mxorley make these radio calls as things get worse and worse

32:24and then like without even sending out a distress signal the fitzgerald's just gone and then the coast guard is like hey can you go look for them hey can you go back out in that yeah i can't yeah that's just like unfathomable bravery to be like yep okay we're gonna go look we're doing it like this just took out a ship that was you know very similar to ours but we're gonna go check it out no thank you yeah i'm not strong enough for that no i'm not strong enough because i've yeah even this

32:57aside like i've seen other videos of people out in big storms on lakes pierre lake michigan or whatever like no thank you i'm not interested in that so yes they go out they don't really find anything but on november 14th so four days after the disappearance of the ship they do find it it is found using a magnetic anomaly detector and it's located at a depth of just over 530 feet

33:29about 17 miles from the safety of whitefish point which like is also heartbreaking they were so close yeah and i've seen it noted that like that distance in good weather and like at its max speed is like a distance that the fitzgerald could have covered in like an hour like they're so close and i've also seen that like had they left a few hours earlier on november 9th or had they left even a few hours later they wouldn't have like gotten stuck in like the worst of it and they potentially would have made

34:05it through the storm yeah so yeah very sad the ship is found in two pieces and there are really kind of two theories on how or when the ship broke apart the first is that the ship is so the ship is actually longer than the water is deep where it sank so some speculate that it broke so deep in the water after a large wave at the front end of the ship rammed into the bottom and it broke apart and sank

34:35and i think that's like one of the more wild theories but it's still that's crazy if that's what happened yeah like to have a big enough wave that it like sends the front of the ship down and just like collides with the bottom 530 feet down yeah but like okay so then the other one is that people speculate that it broke apart at the surface before going down and even that one i struggle with yeah like is that what you think happened i think they probably broke apart at the surface

35:07because i just think like if you know they ended up with the bow like it hit by big waves and they had like the the bow of the ship like on top of one wave and then the pilot house the back of the ship on top of another like then the middle is kind of just like hanging there unsupported and it potentially just gave out yeah yeah i mean i think the point that they make in that documentary is that like the weight would have almost like reinforced the structure some oh so yeah like it should have been

35:42that the weight of the cargo should have like kind of been keeping them down in the water low enough that yeah the waves would more or less like go over but they'd be okay but yeah that's not what happened yeah so anyways regardless of how or when it actually broke people agree that whatever happened at least happened fast and there was fast enough that there was never that final distress call yeah and i guess i say at least not because i'm glad that it happened fast but because like

36:12it means people probably didn't suffer as long yeah it just it just went down so fast yeah like it was there and then it was just gone off the radar and that was it and like you i think people noted that mixorley like he's experienced like he obviously knows things are going bad but he's not going to be the type of guy who's like not going to make the distress call if he's at all able to because you'd want to at least try to like get survivors you know into the water and get people there as quickly as possible yeah yeah which like clearly you know they tried to like launch the

36:46lifeboats and stuff but just didn't either didn't do it in time or they were too late or the people who were on them like just got swept off because you know what are you going to do in 35 foot waves and like some people even say 50 foot waves you know who knows okay so there have been a few expeditions that have gone down and kind of a big you know part of the reason this is such a big story and this is so interesting to people is like all these years later 50 years later you know they've been able to go

37:17down they've been able to look at the ship they've been able to like look at this detailed timeline that they have because the Arthur M. Anderson was following them so closely they've got McSorley's radio calls recorded but like we don't really know exactly what happened and sunk the ship so it's like it's just this enduring mystery that's like sort of become this legendary thing for the Great Lakes but one detail that I do like about one of the missions down there is that in 1995 a team went down and at the request of the families recovered the Edmund Fitzgerald's bell

37:53and replaced it with one that had the names of all of the crew engraved on it so that essentially now like the ship is a grave site and there are actually laws in place like you're not allowed to go within just 500 feet or 500 meters but like it's essentially treated like a grave site sort of as it should be because the whole you know the famous line in the song was like Lake Superior never gives up her dead because it's so cold down there it inhibits the growth of bacteria and the bodies you know haven't

38:26really decomposed like they are still down there somewhere in the ship just wherever they were left at the end okay so this happened 50 years ago and it was the last major shipwreck in the Great Lakes

Aftermath and Legacy

38:40and some of that anyways is because of some changes that have been made both improvements to things like weather forecasting but also like changes that were made to safety standards for these freighters so the first of those is onboard emergency position indicating radio beacons or E-B-I-R-B E-P-I-R-Bs which are battery operated radio transmitters that send out an emergency signal when they're either manually turned on or they can automatically send a signal their float activated

39:16and these were not mandatory at the time of the FITS wreck however in 1988 because of this wreck congress passed a law that mandated all Great Lakes bulk carriers and commercial vessels that operate more than three miles from shore have to have them on board so this technology was available at the time that it sank they just didn't have it yeah it just wasn't required so then between 2015 and 2017 the Coast Guards Rescue 21 system was implemented and a part of that is that the radio towers now

39:54include direction finding capabilities for radio signals so while that I don't know if that would have really helped the ship from sinking at least would have helped the search and rescue when the ship is in distress and also like to your point they didn't have a lot of ships like the Coast Guard didn't have ships that really could they could take out for search and rescue and that type of weather and so they have those now that is I don't remember the year for that but they now have like more of

40:26those ships that can be taken out in these bad conditions so the other thing that has been improved upon are inspection requirements and frequency so not only are like user inspections more frequent and the requirements for those have been improved but also the frequency of Coast Guard inspections have been increased and finally survival suits became mandatory for bulk carriers so that was not a requirement until after the fits sank and then additionally there have been obvious improvements in things like

41:02weather forecasting and mapping and observation technology so in 1979 eight data buoys that are used to measure wind direction and speed and wave height were dispersed in Lake Superior and I believe that was like in direct response of this shipwreck and by 2019 the number of buoys on the Great Lakes has increased to 60 so a lot more of those there and just like general like weather forecasting technology improvements like

41:32we can now get a mostly accurate weather forecast up to a week in advance so if they had had that maybe they wouldn't have gone out I mean it's hard to say for sure but if you fire all the National Weather Service people then that doesn't work so good anymore well yeah there's a lot of things that don't work so good right now but well you know um yeah so obviously I have a lot of strong feelings about the Edwin Fitzgerald because for like the last 30 years it's been sort of a special interest of mine so yeah we definitely

42:07couldn't pass up the 50th anniversary and the chance to talk about it because I didn't talk about the last time we you know did a whole spiel on Lake Superior so it was great for me yay we did it okay well that wraps up our episode on the wreck of the Edwin Fitzgerald if you liked this episode hit subscribe and share with a friend check the show notes for links to all of our social media accounts our discord server and patreon if you have any questions about previous topics or ideas for future episodes

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