Mega Disasters - Edmund Fitzgerald Disaster

on November 10th 1975 the 29 crew members of the 729 port or carrier Edmund Fitzgerald were fighting an intense storm on Lake Superior their destination that day was the protected area of whitefish bay on Michigan's Upper Peninsula we're at whitefish point just in front of the light station today the winds are only about 20 miles an hour can you imagine what it would have been like with 96 mile an hour winds these waves are only about 4 or 5 feet today but there are 35 feet back in 1975 when the storm had passed the Edmund Fitzgerald was to deliver its iron ore to its final destination in Detroit steel mills where the ore would be used to make cars [Music] despite the storm the men were confident in their safety because the Fitzgerald was one of the strongest and most capable ships on the lakes this was a big powerful boat and people really wanted to be on the Edmund Fitzgerald this was the one you aspired to survive [Applause] in fact when it was launched in 1958 it was the premiere or carrier on the Great Lakes setting records for the largest loads carried and the fastest trips the captain earnest McSorely was also one of the most experienced in the business with 44 years of sailing on the Great Lakes on November 10 1975 McSorely was virtually blinded by two critical navigation system failures it reported to a nearby ship that both of his radar units weren't working and the radio direction finder was useless because of an outage at his station on shore that nearby ship a few miles behind was the Arthur Andersen a slightly larger carrier also trying to reach whitefish bay captain bernie cooper using the Anderson's radar was radioing general compass headings to the Fitzgeralds crew the pilot house of a ship nearly identical to the Fitzgerald the William clay Ford at the Dawson Great Lakes Museum in Detroit gives a sense of what the captain and crew of the Fitzgerald were dealing with on November 10th this is the radar unit on the William play forward it's very similar to the one that was on the Edmund Fitzgerald the Edmund Fitzgerald radar unit however that night was out for whatever reason both units didn't work why both of the Fitzgerald's radar units didn't work remains a mystery there were no reports of problems before the ship left port it's possible that the huge waves or high winds disabled the antennas on the Fitzgeralds roof but the Anderson battled the same storm without any radar problems the other option they had was to use the radio direction finder with this they could triangulate their course however the whitefish points ending station without a service on shore the radio Direction beacon at the whitefish Point Lighthouse didn't work the storm had knocked out power and the back-up generator didn't kick in as it was supposed to these failures may have doomed the Edmund Fitzgerald at about 3:30 in the afternoon McSorely reported to Cooper that one of the fence rails part of the sturdy safety fences on each side of the Fitzgerald had snapped he also said to vent covers were missing and the ship was listing to the side evidence that water was entering the Fitzgerald these were all signs of severe damage but the ship's soldiered on pumping out water as it went then at 7:10 p.m. the first mate aboard the Arthur Anderson asked McSorely how the men of the Fitzgerald were doing the response back from Fitzgerald to the Arthur Andersen's we are holding our own that was the last communication between the two ships minutes later the Edmund Fitzgerald disappeared from the radar screen aboard the Arthur Andersen without as much as a distress signal after a difficult and limited search during the storm and a larger search the next day it was clear the unthinkable had happened [Music] [Music] the massive Edmund Fitzgerald and a crew of 29 men were gone six months later the cameras of a remotely operated US Navy submersible spotted the wreckage agonizingly close to safety just 17 miles from whitefish point those first images of the wreck and footage from many other dives over the years showed that the ship lay in two pieces on the bottom of Lake Superior with its back or Stern resting upside-down the ore pellets from the cargo hold were strewn about and the middle 200 feet of the ship had disintegrated into small pieces but finding the wreck didn't provide answers to the questions about what caused the Fitzgerald to sink and why the crew never called for help more than three decades later strong opinions still surround the theories of the ships tragic fate a Coast Guard Investigative board looked into many possibilities probably the only one that they could confidently rule out once the wreck was discovered was the possibility that the Fitzgerald had broken in half on the surface the ship didn't break in half because the ball would have floated for a while longer and the stern would have floated for a while and they have both would have disappeared a little bit further apart instead the two pieces of the ship lay only a few hundred feet apart in terms of official findings the Coast Guard report issued on July 26th 1977 concluded that water crashing on the deck and leaking through cracked and poorly sealed hatch covers was the most likely cause of disaster the seals on freighter hatch covers were often damaged during loading and unloading and crews often skimped on the tedious process of tightening most of the hatch cover clamps still many people disagreed with the Coast Guard's theory if water was leaking in through the hatch covers than the pumps that were on these 7,000 gallon per minute pumps and there was two of them going should have been able to keep up with as much water at these hatch covers would allow threw leaking the lake carriers Association which represented 15 shipping companies protested to the National Transportation Safety Board which issued its own findings on May 4th 1978 the NTSB also focused on the cargo hatches but in a different way it felt the tremendous weight of the water crashing across the Fitzgeralds main deck known as the spar deck forced one or more of the hatches to implode and swiftly flood the cargo home you can tell by the size of these things the 720 nine foot freighter was these things weigh tons and it would take an awful lot of weight to cause them to implode finally the lake carriers Association proposed its own theory that the Fitzgerald struck bottom in the shallow waters around caribou island a plausible consequence of the ship's navigation system failures hitting bottom could have caused a rupture in the hull below the waterline the down fence rail and missing vents the McSorely reported near caribou island seemed to bolster that scenario this was serious how serious not serious enough that McSorely thought he couldn't continue on he had his pumps going he thought he had it under control but as Bernie Cooper pointed out later it's serious when a fence rail comes down that indicates an incredible change in tension in the hall itself the type of tension that would result from the middle of the 729 foot ship hitting bottom in a few hoggish yep meaning cause it to bend up in the middle you can stretch those cables and cause them to snap because their support with stanchions all the way along something's gotta give but since there are no scrape marks on the portion of the whole wreckage that can be seen bottoming out like the other explanations remains just a theory however one thing most of these theories agree on is that the Fitzgerald was taking on water faster than it could be pumped out and the more water that came in the lower the ship would ride in those high seas the waves were actually boarding the Fitzgerald on the starboard quarter rolling the full length of the deck a spar deck and hitting the back of the pilothouse and actually forcing this 40-foot high structure underwater and had come back up and shake the water off the deck and keep going but one of those dives that did under one of these huge waves was the final diamond I just kept going five hundred and thirty five feet to the bottom if McSorely believed the ship would resurface after that final wave then the first sign of trouble and the last would have been a wall of water bursting through the windows of the pilot house from the increased pressure of deeper waters this would explain why there had been no distress call but there's still no single theory about the tragic fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald that will satisfy everyone the bodies of all 29 crewmen remain entombed in that watery grave and at the request of their families divers are no longer permitted near the wreck but those relatives do have two special places where they can feel close to their loved ones just outside the Dawson Great Lakes Museum in Detroit an anchor that belonged to the Edmund Fitzgerald prior to its last voyage is displayed it is a centerpiece in the annual November memorial we put 29 lamps out here around it one for every crew member on the Edmund Fitzgerald and at the Great Lakes shipwreck museum at whitefish point the original Bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald is the centerpiece of the collection known as the voice of the ship it was recovered from the wreckage at the request of the families on July 4th 1995 when this bell broke the surface after 20 years of darkness and silence it actually swung and tolled and everybody around for about a mile could hear it was one of the most hearings experiences I've ever had and the toll itself has such a resonating quality to it that is something that you'll never forget [Music]

Channel: Mega Disasters

Views: 1,057,762

Rating: 4.7971601 out of 5

Keywords: Mega, Disasters, Edmund, Fitzgerald, Disaster

Id: o9ijE_XzW-8

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 08 2016