SS Edmund Fitzgerald Tragedy

I remember when the song came out i the mid-70s, I thought it was about sn old time ship from long ago, not a fresh wreck of ten minutes before.

That monotone song always gave me the creeps when I was younger.

Good subject. A terrific documentary on the sinking was quite frightening re: the surprising danger of sailing on the Great Lakes. Apparently worse than ocean danger by factor of hundreds.

I also thought it was about a long-ago event when I heard the song in the 70s.

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[quote]Good subject. A terrific documentary on the sinking was quite frightening re: the surprising danger of sailing on the Great Lakes. Apparently worse than ocean danger by factor of hundreds.

There used to be some great video of Ted Turner back in the days when he was a serious sailboat racer. He starts off by making fun of the Great Lakes and bragging about how he's sailed in ocean gales. It then cuts to him absolutely losing his shit when a sudden storm came up in the middle of a race on Lake Michigan.

All that remains is the faces and names of the wives and the sons and the daughters

R7-And Gordon Lightfoot, grasping a bottle of Jack Daniels.

R5 According to Wikipedia, no bodies were recovered. Twenty nine victims perished.

Wasn't that the wreck that divers found and photographed, and said the bodies were so well preserved they all still looked alive and were at their stations?

r3 yes and no.

It's worse if you're out in it because of the wave seche effect (the water behaving as if it's in a bowl).

The good news is there's no reason to be out in it with the technology we have now.

The Fitz was not in good shape, according to several men who worked on her before she went down. That was a major factor; her sister ship Arthur Andersen made it to shelter that night.

I know Lake Michigan can be a killer...you have to watch the weather reports, the same as sailing the oceans. No real sailor would make fun of the danger.

Edmund Fitzgerald Crewman Discovered

I googled the ship when I saw this thread, and was greeted with no warning by dead body pics - glad they found the ship, and I guess glad they found the bodies too for some closure - but wow that was a gruesome sight right off the bat.

Such a spooky song. Also, I always thought it was creepy that one of the Great Lakes could be so dangerous.

I remember when this happened. I live near Lake Erie--not Lake Superior--and the weather was just wretched that day. Gale force winds, sideways sleet, etc. The waves were coming up onto the road and quite a few lake front houses lost their backyards.

The lakes used to be full of the big, red iron ore freighters from U.S Steel, Bethlehem Steel, etc but now you hardly see them anymore.

My father LOVED Great Lakes history and he was fascinated with the Fitzgerald wreck.

Here's a pic of Edmund Fitzgerald hauling a load.

[quote] Also, I always thought it was creepy that one of the Great Lakes could be so dangerous.

Lake Erie is the most dangerous of the Great Lakes because it is so shallow--only 210 feet at it's deepest point. BAD storms can come up in a split second.

One minute, it's a beautiful, blue calm lake and the nest it's a churning grey mass of huge, crashing waves. Even the most experienced sailors have had some close calls out on Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes.

"Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?"

The Findadeath thread on the wreck:

The best tribute video, includes radio comms between the trailing ship and the Coast Guard as while as an evening news report (which I remember seeing as a kid).

Lake Michigan it's said never gives up it's dead.

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R20, R21, it's Lake Superior that doesn't give up its dead. The water at depth is too cold for the bacteria that bloat bodies, so the bodies won't float at all. They're well chilled fish food, I suppose.

The wreck site is formally designated as a burial site so there isn't supposed to be any more recovery expeditions to it. It lies primarily (if not fully) in Canadian waters.

"A legend lives on, from the Chippewa on down, about the lake that they call Gitcheegoommee....." A very spooky and sepulchral song, and arguably Gordon Lightfoot's finest. He made it sound like it was from long ago, and many of us never thought it was quite a recent disaster. Hail and peace to all who went down with the Edmund Fitzgerald.

R23 - Though I like The Wreck, I think Gord's best is If You Could Read My Mind. You seldom see such depth and honesty in a pop song and the melody is beautiful.

Oh my god, that song. That fucking song. Growing up, my siblings and I just wanted to listen to our music (ABBA, Frampton, Bee Gees, Captain & Tennielle, all the pop songs) and my father would listen to Edmund Fitzgerald NON-STOP.

If that weren't bad enough, he would always tell us to turn our music down so you could barely hear it, but when he played that goddamned Gordon Lightfoot song, it was on volume 11. Even my mother acknowledged it at the time.

Love the song. Eerie and haunting.

R17, I'm not at all familiar with the area so mine is a very naive view. But still, the thought that a lake could be so violent and dangerous ... it just blows my mind. Thank you for your post. DL can be so educational.

R27 I haven't seen Lake Superior but I saw Lake Michigan and it's no lake it's more of an inland ocean.

Mariner's Church in Detroit

Take a moment to listen to the song recognizing the sad event, on the anniversary of the wreck, November 10, 1975.

The song came out in August of the following years. There are other tragedies, yes, but few are memorialized so well.

R6, I remember the Ted Turner comments.

I think he was a participant in the race known as "The Mac" in Chicago.

It is a yearly race from Lake Michigan in Chicago to Machinac Island, Michigan.

First run in 1898.

333 Miles.

Not for the faint of heart.

See below for links about the race.

Gordon Lightfoot was one of the great poet musicians of our time. Just listen to "Black Day in July" about the 1968 Detroit riots. It was banned on most U.S. radio stations.

Lake Huron rolls,Superior sings in the rooms of her ice water mansion.

"The captain wired in he had water comin' in

and the good ship and crew was in peril.

And later that night when 'is lights went outta sight

came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. "

Too soon.

God, I used to love Gordon Lightfoot.

I'm still surprised there hasn't been a movie made about it.

And the wind and the sails and the dangerrrrr

I heard they no longer have cruise ships around the Great Lakes do to falling water levels. Anyone know if they have smaller cruise ships that go around the Great Lakes?

I was a kid when the song came out and also thought it was fictional or maybe a metaphor for something. I do remember the newscaster, Harry Reasoner, Who starts off the video. He did the evening news at the time. The song captures the sadness of the catastrophe. It must be awful for the families to hear it.

I was a kid when it came out, too, and I thought the wreck had happened in the 1800s or the turn of the century.

It's a boring as shit song.

People are fascinated with Edmund Fitzgerald going down.

Is it true that Superior, they said, never gives up her dead. When the gales of November come early?

The crew

Lake Superior storm POV

Thank you, R44, though I can’t look. Too sad.

Part of the music video shows the lake washing over the ship’s deck on an earlier trip, too.

[quote] I'm still surprised there hasn't been a movie made about it.

What would be the point? The song captures everything you need to understand. A movie would be redundant.

The church bell chimed, it rang 29 times. For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

This song is on my playlist in hell.

In hell?

Paul Riippa had big-dick face

Karl Peckol, the youngest

“The Perfect Storm” was a movie where you knew the story beforehand. At least, I did. It did happen just offshore here, though.

My sister named her Cockatiel bird Gordon after Gordon Lightfoot.

Just a fascinating fact you needed to know.

Gordon MacLellan was a trained pastry chef.

There's talk of getting a cruise line started on Lake Michigan, going between Traverse Ciry and Door County. I doubt it will come to pass for many reasons, the weather being one of them. I do enjoy a Lake Michigan storm, watching whitecaps crash the dock as the temperature drops 10 degrees in seconds.

[quote]I heard they no longer have cruise ships around the Great Lakes do to falling water levels. Anyone know if they have smaller cruise ships that go around the Great Lakes?

Not true. Duluth is currently trying to find the money to upgrade its port to allow cruise ships to make it a port of call, and Duluth is as far into the great lakes as you can get.

I used to work at a department store. The music was a typical playlist of mellow music from varying decades. I never understood how this song made it into rotation. Who thought it was conducive to shopping?

There was some foreign fish in the Mississippi River that was moving up towards the lakes. Has it made it to the lakes yet? I recall, they were trying to delay it from spreading to the lakes because it’s an invasive species.

Thank you, R45, that's an interesting clip, because to me the waves look oddly random.

I'm used to waves that roll regularly, in one direction, but those waves don't seem to be moving, they just sort of rise and fall in place and they don't seem to move directionally. Is that what's so dangerous to shipping?

Thank you, R45, that's an interesting clip, because to me the waves look oddly random.

I'm used to waves that roll regularly, in one direction, but those waves don't seem to be moving, they just sort of rise and fall in place and they don't seem to move directionally. Is that what's so dangerous to shipping?

Lake Superior is truly enormous. It is bigger than the rest of the Great Lakes combined, plus room for another Lake Erie. That storm was so big, when the ship was going down they didn't realize it. They thought they had been hit with yet another wave.

I believe the storm broke this ship in two.

What's this I'm hearing about the wreck of Ella Fitzgerald? I thought she passed away of old age!

[quote]Not true. Duluth is currently trying to find the money to upgrade its port to allow cruise ships to make it a port of call

But why would anyone want to get off a cruise ship in DULUTH?

[quote]People are fascinated with Edmund Fitzgerald going down.

Well, he did give the best blowjobs in the Great Lakes Region.

I didn't know there was a Californian on board -- the young maritime cadet, David Weiss.

R56 R57 Someone in Erie, Pa. bought a car ferry. Their intention was to establish a link to someplace in Ontario. The plan fell through when the Canadians refused to spend money on a new port of entry. It was then supposed to become a floating restaurant or something. The last I knew, it was rusting away at a dock on Presque Isle Bay.

There are 2 different ferry lines which cross Lake Michigan.

The SS Badger between Ludington, Michigan and Manitowoc, Wisconsin.

Also the high speed Lake Express between Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Muskegon, Michigan.

I don't understand why they didn't recover the bodies. Did they not have the technology at the time? Back then you'd probably have needed multiple divers to swim into the ship and bring the bodies out one by one, and from the sound of it it's just too cold. But these days I would think they could send down the latest James Cameron mini sub outfitted with a crane arm to cut holes in the ship to get to the bodies and remove them mechanically too.

I get that traditionally sunken ships that had people aboard are considered to be gravesites that are supposed to remain undisturbed. But this is a relatively shallow lake, not the ocean. I just find it creepy af that the bodies are too cold to decompose. If I died that's the last thing I'd want; to be frozen in a morbid tableau depicting the terrifying circumstances of my death for decades or even centuries. And for their families to be conscious of that, all the time.

I once saw a documentary about the Franklin Expedition on YouTube and there's a similar situation there, with two of the victims who were buried in shallow permafrost graves disturbingly well-preserved two centuries later as ice mummies. Their eyeballs kind of collapsed post-mortem but are still there, looking like flattened watery fish eyes. The graves have been dug up and examined on site but then reburied the same as they were. I feel like those blokes would have preferred to have their bodies returned to their home country of England for a proper churchyard burial so they could finally have their dust return to dust, or better yet be cremated so they'd finally get a warm cleansing fire and have their ashes return to ashes. To spend eternity as a fish-eyed human corpse popsicle in the middle of nowhere is an awful thought.

R70, shallow? That ship is resting 530 feet down. The families of the dead did not want the bodies brought up. They requested that the bell be recovered, which is was, and replaced with another bell inscribed with the names of the dead.

R70, it must be expensive. That’s one reason.

Will the lakes become salty, eventually? Just curious.

I saw on TV that one side of the lakes has been recorded as lifting up, ever so slightly. The theory is that the land is still rebounding from the removal of the mile-tall and heavy glaciers that covered them 10,000+ years ago, in the last ice age.

I saw the photo of the Captain, still in command, and it was interesting that his uniform also remains pristine.

According to this forum, sonar reveals that the deck of the bow has collapsed:

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

Of the big lake they called 'gitche gumee'

I think the gitchie gumee part made me think he was talking about an old time wreck because of Longfellow's poem Song of Hiawatha was from the 19th century.

Yes. The shores of Gitche Gume were the shores of Lake Superior, the shining big-sea water. The Chippewa are now called the Ojibwe.

R77, will the lakes eventually become salt water seas?

I saw a documentary on Great Lake ferries and they were quite posh. But The First Depression and WW2, coupled with better fares and speed on train, and cars, all put an end to the ferries by the late 40s.

No, R78.

haunting

The lake it is said never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy, r70.

Here’s the video again, on the anniversary.

I love the drawing on Harry Reasoner‘s evening news broadcast that starts it off. It looks like it was drawn by a child. It Is a pretty moving song and video. Who knew the Great Lakes could be so treacherous?

I watched a few documetaries today about Big Fitz. I had never heard that the maps were inaccurate and that the Coast Guard found that the hatch covers weren't secured adequately.

It's frightening to me that someone's inattention or lack of concern may have lead to the deaths of people they'd never even met.

Commemorating the loss of the USS Edmond Fitzgerald on the 45th anniversary of its loss on this date with all hands.

The photo in the video of a grieving family is saddening and disturbing, And the song strikes the right tone,