The Edmund Fitzgerald Investigations

world that you're supporting the library I'm telling you libraries need your support it's very very important that you show up to these things because if you don't pretty soon they'll start to disappear believe it or not the museum in Bay City Michigan almost failed its millage by 200 votes they almost closed it so your vote is by coming here showing up when the millage has come around - that's how you vote to show that we need these resources and we really do especially for the projects that I do so let's get started and talk about the Fitzgerald we may be bring down the lights a little bit here you don't need to see me you can see this ship what what happened that we built the Edmund Fitzgerald why was it actually created well the truth was it really wasn't a standard route for the ship to be built in the fact that it was actually designed and built by a company for the Northwest Mutual Life Insurance Company now this is it sounds like a stretch you know why wouldn't life insurance company really care about building a freighter but it really isn't a big stretch because as you went into the mid 1950s iron ore and coal transfers on the Great Lakes were big dollars and Northwest Mutual bought into some old ships and they were running four of those ships and doing very well with them so when the Soo Locks were actually modified to allow a maximum size freighter at 700 feet long they basically said let's be the ones to build it they were going to build what is essentially the largest object ever dropped into fresh water and they were gonna build it near Detroit at River Rouge with Great Lakes engineering work so if you look at this policy it's kind of interesting who's the president of Northwest Mutual Edmund Fitzgerald so it's not a big stretch to figure out where the name came from the the rumor goes that Edmund Fitzgerald did not want his name on the boat that he fought the Board of Directors and said I don't want to be on there but when he went for a bathroom break they voted it in him I don't know that's true but it makes for a fantastic story it also another story I heard from Elizabeth color Fitzgerald his daughter is that he never heard Gordon Lightfoot song that's another thing to me that seems not possible he died I believe in the early 80s to think from 1976 when this became the number two song in the nation all the way up to then playing it every fall I find it hard to believe that but let's think about what a maximum size freighter was going to be it was barely gonna squeeze through the Soo Locks 729 feet long how big would that be that actually would be big enough to put several different famous ships on its on its hull take a look at this the Mayflower the Nina the Pinta the Santa Maria and the ironclad monitor could all fit on the deck of this massive freighter seven hundred and twenty nine feet long and this footage wasn't available until I made my documentary I actually went to a library at the University of Michigan as I always do I go through the old card catalogue I found one that said GL e W which I knew was Great Lakes engineering works and has said 301 ship that's haul 301 and I'm like oh this has got to be the Fitzgerald so I brought the movie up to the lady at the front desk I said can you transfer this to videotape for me show so yeah what is it I said oh it's nothing don't yeah it's nothing so she calls me up at the TV station afterwards she was you stinker this is the Edmund Fitzgerald and I told her it's the only footage ever shown of the complete construction of the Fitzgerald it was actually filmed by Willett Spooner who was one of the engineers on board the actual creation of it so literally from the hall this is the keel being laid down in the first plates this would be the ceremonial beginning of any ship when they lay the keel down they call it the keel ailing and there's the keel right through here and there they are laying it down this would be the backbone of the Edmund Fitzgerald as this piece goes down all the bigwigs come out they have they're known by their white helmets and they come out get their pictures all taken you can see 1957 was a year that they were going to build it again the biggest ship that they were gonna build here after this they built two more ships the the Homer and the Jackson and there was a lot of talk about the Fitzgerald because the the way they put this together was using a new type of weld that was very very quickly done and people thought maybe that's why the Fitzgerald sank was because of this production weld the truth is the Jackson is still sailing today we see it come up the Saginaw River it's still of you know very viable freighter on the Great Lakes they turned it into a self unloader like a lot of people believe the Fitzgerald would have been converted the homer though was involved in a horrible collision on the river and once it it was in that collision the the bottom fell out of the market and they basically decided to scrap it now Fitzgerald was actually launched a bunch of times and that's because the Fitz was built in sections and then the huge gantry crane actually picked up those pieces and moved them into the slip and launched them and then they moved them over and put them into pieces like giant modules of a ship so watch this this is one of the early sections this would be the cargo hold up here and watch it splash in and in the big gantry crane here that 65 feet tall would pick up these massive sections of steel and put them together until they all lined up and then the side of the ship would go up so the slope that you see right there would actually be the slope of the inside of the ship where the cargo coal iron or sometimes grain they would haul in freighters like these but for the most part it was iron ore that they were gonna haul now let's take a nice shot of the skeg this is where the propeller and the rudder so the middle part there is where the Prowler would go through the rudder would be right there a massive piece of steel and you really don't get a scale to look at the people it's massive and it filled the entire slip there has anybody been down to the Yacht Club that's down by River Rouge to where there it is now that the Fitzgeralds launch basin is actually a yacht club now so you can you know go through there on one of the anniversaries we went out there to actually go through the slip and somebody gave me a giant rivet that they found down there and though Fitz had a couple of rivets but for the most part it was welded I'm sure it wasn't from there but there was so many ships that were built that Great Lakes engineering works for sure here's the hatch combing starting to come in this is going to be significant because there's 22 of these hatch combing x' that the freighter would go underneath the ore docks and these pockets are essentially open because they would take this massive train tracks on the deck and a big crane would come across the top and it would actually pick up those covers and then the chutes would allow gravity to feed the iron ore inside and I'll show you some of that in the footage there but let me bring it to the next one here here's Edmund Fitzgerald taking a look at the ship making sure everything was going okay now if you look up here let me go back and I'm gonna show you this this is the Homer of sistership before I show you the fits going look at how big that rudder is and the giant propeller that's here and this is a launch right after the Fitzgerald and you'll see when it goes in the place you don't want to stand is right where all those people are that's because it's going to make a very large splash you'll notice that it's largely red there that's an antifouling paint and then here's the engineers coming out to check it out and then they have it up on these blocks and they knock out the Timbers and then it slides down these greased ways so it goes right into the water from here it's a big to do when the Fitzgerald went into the water there was well over 10,000 people that showed up there there's always been this rumor well because it was the largest thing ever launched there was a rumor that there was a heart attack by somebody that was there and I keep hearing stories of that but I cannot find a newspaper report or a coroner's report for that yet so I'm hoping to verify it's a sad story but I do want to know if it's actually true because it showed up in a couple of books and I've heard other lecturers talk about it as well watch this splash think they're too close just amazing Fitzgerald didn't have a sister ship there was nothing that was exactly like the Edmund Fitzgerald but the Homer was about the closest that you would get to it it looked very similar to it when the Fitzgerald went in there were guys that rode the ship in and this guy right here is Edie dumansky and Edie is gonna tell us exactly what that ride was alike as he went down the ways and why he was onboard there our job was to we'll go in with the boat was launched sideways and as I've shown and there's some of the pictures on the guy with the DIF grip on the Statue and when she went in because when that flat slab or a side hit the water she keeled over to about a good 35 degrees after it stopped bobbing around I said asking nothing what do we do now I says we're in the water what did we do now then the foreman says well now we go down into the double bottom then to there the tanks down there and listen for running water to see if the sea might have given away when I hit the far side of the slip yeah I says I'm gonna pee if I hear running water you're gonna hear running footsteps that's me getting out of here but no we didn't have any problems at all through the long no built boat and then we never did you need any water and it takes you know what I did mention to him hey what's the possibility that the Fitzgerald might have been built too fast as he said you know what Ricky said we knew here's the Fitz going in we knew that men would be on board this freighter we knew that their lives depended on it here we go as we splash in and notice of Fitz isn't fit out yet a lot of the material is missing on the back in the front of the ship the pilothouse and everything but it did have its engines its motor inside of it so the engine was in there and the boilers too which was rare for a launch normally that was done afterwards but that's the the big splash that it made is a Gwen inside let me show you here it is squeezing through the Soo Locks I always get people at my talks come up to me and they say I've got a picture of the Edmund Fitzgerald Nasu locks and would you like to you know buy it from me it's in a safe at my house and I said you know I appreciate you know that but the Fitzgerald was one of the fastest ships in fact they called a Toledo express for the speed that it made going from the Duluth or Minnesota Silver Harbor all the way down to Toledo with iron ore for making steel there it went through hundreds of times to the Sulak so there's a lot of footage there's a lot of movies I'm always surprised by people bringing movies to me too I found so much footage I probably have the largest probably library of Fitzgerald footage certainly of underwater footage I know I do too but as they squeeze through here it was barely going making it through on each side it was quite a quite a squeeze to get inside there for sure here's some footage of the Fitzgerald when she was light and this is going to be significant this is freeboard the distance between the water and the distance between the deck now in the winter time they tried to limit how much cargo they hold held so it would sit real high this is unloaded that's why it's so high right now and that's because the waves would come up there's the hatch crane right there that's because the waves would come up at the coast guard at that time believed that the Fitzgeralds 22 hatches had a seal around them and 96 clamps on each one called Kestner clamps they believed it was watertight and from what everybody said after they were unloading there was never water found inside the whole of the ships and they believed that they were watertight but the truth is once they took a closer examination after the accident that they did leak that they had where they could actually go inside the homer in the Jackson and look on the inside and see light coming through there water did come through those here's another interesting thing - this is a Hauser on the front of the ship it'll come back up again I've only seen this on the Fitzgerald it's a massive Hauser whether I believe tug boats could actually tow the ship and I don't know why other freighters don't have that except the fact that this was owned by an insurance company and they wanted every safety feature they could possibly have on board so that's what I believe why it had that instant arresting Hauser on the front this is what it was Halim this is called taconite by World War two most of the iron ore the high-quality iron ore had been used up and if somebody came up with a process to take low-grade iron ore called taconite and break it up and actually sort it out so that the high-grade iron ore would go in and they could get rid of the waste rock that was there and then they'd roll it into pellets and the pellets were really great for loading because they would go into the train cars spill out and go into the the gravity-fed loading docks so that's what they look like magnified very many times today I'm very humbled to hear that there's actual cargo from the Edmund Fitzgerald in the audience today if that could you guys hold it up real quick this is actual taconite from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald that was given to them during one of the expeditions that happened in 1989 they took a robot submarine down there and also the clea went down there and they accidentally scooped up some taconite and brought it up to the surface now a lot of us are like whoa wait a minute we know that you're not allowed to take anything from the Edmund Fitzgerald but the story goes from one of the guys that was on there he told me well Rick we brought it up we had it and we called the Canadian government and said listen we've got this illegal stuff can we throw it back and they said no that would be polluting you so whether or not that's true I don't know but that is an amazing thing to have and I'm so honored that you'd bring it and it's brought by a former crew member of the Edmund Fitzgerald so it's great to have you anybody else here with a personal connection to the Fitzgerald with a show of hands usually we see it what and what was your connection sir third mate fantastic to have you in the audience the arm Agha's family were actually yes the arm Agha's family actually came to the church before our expedition in 1994 during the blessing of the plaque that we were the first ones to mark the crew and we got to talk with them just so briefly but fantastic family in a terrifying loss for for the family involved that's for sure Gordon Lightfoot was wrong I'm gonna tell you that right now many parts of his song are incorrect and the one of the main ones was when they left fully loaded for Cleveland no now we could stretch and we could say they were fully loaded for Cleveland because the company that was chartering the vessel ogle Bay Norton was based in Cleveland but that wasn't where she was making her final voyage in fact picked up cargo here in superior Wisconsin and was going down to Zug Island and Zug Island is within a mile or so of where the Fitzgerald was actually launched and because she was coming down to Detroit River she wasn't carrying as much cargo as she could they would put 30,000 tons on board but 26,000 long tons is what they had on board for the last journey so they take off from here it's a beautiful sunny Sunday and the first mate has a job he has to decide how many of those hatches he's going to dog down he's going to order the deckhands to go out there 96 clamps on 22 of those clamps so do your math it's a lot of work and it's a lot of overtime and he decided not to put them all on and I get people in the audience always that tell me there's no way that they did that the truth is it happened all the time and I'll prove it by the end of this lecture did that sink the ship I don't think it sank the ship was it a factor it certainly was a factor and many of the accidents that we see it's never one cause it's a series of unfortunate decisions that were made the biggest one being that captain McSorely knew that a storm was coming when he left here and by the time he made up by two harbors where the Arthur Mehmet Anderson came in and started to head up to the root bomb up the lake he made the first bad decision at Isle Royale there were several freighters that were sitting there including the Blau it was a hundred feet longer than the Edmund Fitzgerald so they didn't want to go on to the storm they decided to stay drop their anchor and hide behind here because over Oklahoma a massive low front was coming in and it was rushing to Marquette the guess was how long would it take to go from here to here and McSorely was a very seasoned skipper he was a heavy weather skipper he didn't mind storms in fact when the Coast Guard did their investigation of the Edmund Fitzgerald they looked at what ship had been through the Soo Locks during the worst storms over the last decade and guess what ship it was and what captain the Edmund Fitzgerald and Ernest McSorely so he was used to big storms he made a decision not to pass he went on go straight for whitefish point he was going to take what they call the scenic route they call it scenic as you can see more of Canada by going up here now I don't think you really see that much but he made a second mistake when he hit on her head and could have dropped a hook right up there and stopped where the waves would have been small and I remember if you're looking at waves on Lake Superior let's see northwest winds coming down here the waves up here would be small where would be the worst place you'd ever want to be on the Great Lakes during 70 mile hour gales pushing the waves higher and higher and higher this is ground zero right here so he gets up here he could have stopped but instead he told the Anderson Anderson he's going to go for and they start going past mr. pocket and they to go between caribou and going through here and at this point in here that's where the Anderson is tossing in the waves back and forth back and forth and he looks at his radar and he sees the Fitzgerald closer to caribou and he makes a comment to his crew member and says wow she's closer in there than I'd want to be here's the big storm coming in and here's the low-pressure system now coming over the U P you can see the U P here's key went out here and the winds are starting to pick up you can see the barometric pressure is dropping allowing those winds to build and here's where they tried to come through as they came through here he looked at this now on the Canadian maps this looks like a six in many cases this one actually looks more like an eight and that's a surer reading so when they came through this they call it six fathoms Shoal horse chummy bank as they came through here that's where the anderson thought that they hit bottom he thought that that if it's a you know 30 feet of water the ship is drawn that much it goes up on a wave and hits its bottom when the Coast Guard tried to reconstruct this course that would have taken an extra half half hour to get there there's no way that they came close here and the Canadian government actually came back out and surveyed all of this area around caribou and found out it was deeper I talked to actual crew members on board the Bayfield that were in here and I said what did you find nothing they found nothing but still we hear all kinds of rumors about divers who've been down there who saw red paint and all kinds of other silliness that has no factual basis at all here's the deck of the Fitzgerald as they're going through the storm they say to the Anderson we've got some damage and the damage was to the vents see these mushroom caps that are here here and here that's to equalize the pressure in the hold and they're loosened or tightened up depending on how much air pressure they need to let out as the water goes in and out of there so one of these are two of these were down we don't know which one he said he had a fence rail down to now we don't know if it was on port or starboard if he's riding with this side to the waves and it's a you know starboard side rail down those waves now can build onto the deck and remember water's coming in through here probably water's coming in through one of these vents and it's going faster than his pumps can take out so he starts to tell the Anderson I'm gonna check down the fits was a fast ship it could go 15 knots so they started to check down and to allow the Anderson to close the distance between them I think nine miles is the closest that they got and as they're going through there again people say well Rick you know the the Anderson must have been worried about the Fitzgerald of they thought I ran aground the captain Cooper on the Anderson went to take a nap he went down and laid down so when people tell me again I'd hit bottom I'm telling you a hit bottom Cooper did not believe that and there was a lot of things that happened after that that started to build the case for why it was a better idea if the ship ran aground and I hope I'll convince you by the end of it now where'd that damage come from we don't know some people thought it was a stump that might have hit the vent it could have been the propeller blades that were there because we don't know if they were still stowed on board at that time or not it could have been damaged from anything now if it was the hatch crane coming off I've heard from different divers I never saw the hatch crane when I was down there but I did hear it was in the middle debris field it could have also calls that kind of damage as well but here's each one of those hatches every one of those clamps on there you can imagine what a job it would have been to make sure they were all buckled up and it's bringing in water here's the Anderson before its crane was put on the deck the Anderson's about nine miles behind waves start to build and they take a 30-foot wave that hits their lifeboat way up here damages the lifeboat Cooper said there were 12-foot water on the decks they call it green water because it's so thick you can actually see the color in it otherwise it's just kind of a clear spray from Lake Superior but once you get four to seven feet on board it's starting to be a problem they thought a 12-foot wave came on board here NTSB investigators believe a four-foot wave on the Fitzgerald would collapse those hatches the main hatch is going in and the Fitzgerald would go down if that happened here's the route that they came down where the Anderson joined in and they came down and here's where the Jerald wreckage was found so they made it past here look at that the time that it took to go from here to here to I think that if it really bottomed out it would have sank in here rather than down here to if that was even a possibility the captain of course on the Fitzgerald never said anything about hitting the bottom never said anything about having any kind of a problem from that just that a hatch rail was down the first mate was the last one to talk to the Edmund Fitzgerald on board the the Cooper on board the Anderson and he said how are you doing with your problems and McSorely said we're holding our own and that's when they vanished there what was another transmission that was made before that was to some ships that were at Whitefish Bay when they first started to look at whitefish you know they've got that big exoskeleton lighthouse that's there the light had gone out and the Fitz couldn't see the light so he was trying to call the ship's to say hey what's going on with the you know our our lighthouse there and that they heard don't allow anybody on deck was what McSorely had said off mic so they know that something was going on on board and there was some some wreckage on the underwater stuff that we found a rope that was around the steering pole that looked like that's where people would have went on deck to put that rope around there I don't know how else it would have been there so that might have been part of what McSorely was saying during that so Fitzgerald goes down it's a massive snow squall comes in Anderson's watching him from behind they look out they see a big snow squall no lights on the Fitzgerald they look at their radar the radar gets blinded out blob on the radar and when it clears the Fitzgeralds gone and they start calling the Coast Guard and saying you know sue we're suit control we're we don't see the Fitzgerald and the sioux is like saying well hey there's a 16-foot fishing boat out there would you keep your eye out for it they didn't believe that the Fitzgerald could go down and half of the recordings that I've heard were basically of Cooper trying to convince the coastguard that the ship had gone down and there's a couple of issues that were happening for the Coast Guard at that point the first thing is there wasn't a ship available for them to go out and do a rescue so as Cooper's going through with these 30-foot waves he's busting through the waves and makes it to whitefish point figures out that the Fitzgerald sank and now the guards trying to convince him to turn around and be the ship to go look for survivors after he thought his entire crew would be lost so unfortunately nobody would be found but for those crew members they knew that they were the only hope I mean realistically there was no Gumby suits or survival suits on the Fitzgerald at that time in 1975 there the lifeboats were inflatable I don't think that they had a snowball's chance in getting through that sadly so should they have turned around and quite frankly there were three saltwater vessels there too and the Coast Guard asked them would you turn around and they said no and before anybody says all they should have their responsibility is with the crew that that's their responsibility is to keep themselves alive I was on the sheriff dive team in Saginaw for five years the first thing you do is protect your own safety otherwise more people will drown so you've got to make sure your Safety's first to go what was a good they went absolutely the highest tradition was to try to save those you know those those comrades of the seed to get out there and help them and they were the only help but here's some of the radio broadcasts from my documentary that I have back there on the Edmund Fitzgerald this is the first documentary to actually share the radio transmissions that were found and it'll kind of explain to you what the mindset for Cooper was when they actually asked him to go back the Coast Guard didn't have a cutter anywhere near whitefish bay with the nearest being 24 hours away in Duluth the Mackinac and sundew were in repair status for the upcoming ice season and the Naugatuck suffered an oil line failure and was unable to leave until that next morning the Coast Guard made a desperate plea to the Anderson to turn around and go back into the storm [Music] [Applause] they were making normally 12 knots would be a good speed for a freighter can you imagine two or three knots busting through 30-foot seas in 70 mile an hour winds and it took them hours to get back out there the William clay Ford also turned around and went looking as well but didn't get out there till one o'clock Coast Guard had different airplanes different aircraft out there but they couldn't land a safe you know grab somebody even if they found somebody so there are people on the scene right away but they weren't finding anything the Fitzgerald went down and just plunged in seconds and was vanished I mean literally gone they found a couple spray bottles they found some some damaged lifeboats which are pretty amazing I'll show you a picture of those in a second and they also launched a Coast Guard Cutter from Duluth the would rush to go out there and help and the would rushed is designed to go through these heavy seas it's actually designed to be on the ocean and the captain that was there his name is Jimmy Hoban and what a hero this guy was going 24 hours through that storm to try to pick up any survivors this is an interview I did with Jimmy before he passed away about 23 hours to get here the thing that people can't visualize a lot of people have gone to see on in the oceans these lakes are just riding in these lakes are totally different that night when we got there even though it was 24 hours later number one that the storms up here lasts at least three days that one lasted about four I've been in in the ocean in North Atlantic storms and yeah it's rough but the the period between the swells is long in the Pacific it's even longer up here in the lakes it's just it just hammers you up here also that night for instance when we got here the seas were coming down from the northwest hitting the Canadian Shore and ricocheting off they're hitting the US shore and ricocheting off so you got three seas coming at you from three different directions and remember that the well deck on a buoy tenders relatively low even though we had the shutters in we were taking green water right over the bow right over the sides of the ship and course the freeing ports are big enough that it would free itself but I mean the point is there's no way that you could turn the ship where you were riding this way you were either normally in the ocean you can either pitch or roll out there you pitched and roll at the same time and she would just snap on them and they're they're constant and they're they're very short period between seas was a weird eerie time and you don't sleep and we were out there for four nights and three full days we came in at on the fourth day we came in in to the suit but people just needed to lay down sweet it's pretty amazing you think seventy foot near 70 mile an hour winds that's actually Lake Superior storm every year I mean we've get that even in the summertime on Lake Superior I went out to Specter or to a standard rock lighthouse where there was a massive explosion in the 50s I actually found the guy that survived the storm the explosion and I went out to the lighthouse to work with some guys that were putting some weather equipment out there and they walked home they said well that's not good and I went what you know 30 feet off the water is the deck of the lighthouse and all of their gear had been stolen by Lake Superior justtake and I said you know I've got my scuba gear he goes now we're we're College we'll just get some more thanks dude let's see here's one of the lifeboats and this is really hard for me to understand cut right in half and we've seen them drugged below and crushed there's some flotation in there it would kind of make sense but the only thing that makes sense to me and again as I stand up here I am a television journalist a documentary reporter I have no clue about metallurgy I've never sailed the Great Lakes as a sailor I can't say end up here and tell you exactly what happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald because I don't know that even an expert could I can just tell you what I know and what I've seen and this looks like a propeller cut it in half is what it looks like and when we looked at the damage on the propeller we saw a lot of things a crane the the stewards crane which is where the Cook would load groceries on board the Fitzgerald in the back of the ship was wrapped around the propeller there was ropes around the propeller that was a violent time when it went down and flipped over and crashed down into the bottom here's lifeboat number two with a split right down the bow of the ship and of course no one was found on the lifeboats or the two inflatables those two lifeboats are at the valley Camp Museum in the zoo I highly recommend you to go see them the inflatable is now at the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo which I'm gonna be talking I think next month so look for a big they call it reca Palooza that's going on down there and I'll be talking about I think I'm talking about the Gryphon which is another one of those amazing mysteries on the Great Lakes here's some of the oil here's gordo a couple things about Gordo it turns out that in Detroit when the Bell started to ring in in Mariners church when Father Ingalls ran down there and just started to ring at 29 times for all the guys that some journalists had heard the bell tolling and they thought what's this all about and it spurred them to know that there's you know something that happened on the Great Lakes and every newspaper took the story and in mostly because you know 1975 this modern 700 foot freighter vanished and even bigger was the fact that not one crew member body or alive was found after this in 1958 when the Bradley went down the largest freighter on Lake Michigan they found most of the crew there were two survivors in 1966 when the largest vessel lost on Lake Huron the Morrell went down is split into two the stern section kept sailing for five more miles and not one guy got off of that Stern but on the bow Dennis Hale survived and he survived in just a peacoat a lifejacket and his underwear it was a miracle for two nights in November that he survived on that but they found most of the crew so why was it on the Fitzgerald why was it so sudden that it happened but that's why Newsweek made a huge article about it most of the time they probably wouldn't have done anything in in Newsweek in Toronto Gordon Lightfoot read it and started to write his song I know that he read a book by having Hearst called long ships passing has anybody read that book you're at a library you've got to go look it up and go to the Michigan section or go to the local section and long ships passing talks about the Ojibwe legend of Lake Superior not giving up it's dead it has to be what inspired Gordon's Light the Gordon's lyrics because there's at least three or four concepts from that book that I believe went into there there was a couple things wrong with his song we talked about the destination the old cook came on deck and said fellas it's been good to know yeah the cold cook was not on board the Edmund Fitzgerald when I went down the old cook had ulcers and the other cook read Bergner who I knew had a bone spur in his foot and he lived in NACA nosis Texas they called him up and he said read you got to come back for one more run and read said I'm not coming back my foot hurts I'm taking it off I'm not going and they good come on bishops got ulcers and he says he's gonna have ulcers whether he's here or not let him go well neither of them went so a young or another cook called Rafferty went out there Bob Rafferty when I'm bored he knew nobody on the Edmund Fitzgerald he wasn't part of the crew he never said fellas it's been good to know yeah because he didn't know him I mean he knew him for what breakfast lunch and dinner and that was about it so again great song Thank You Gordon it I wouldn't be talking to you about shipwrecks if it wasn't for Gordon but there are so many inconsistencies and the reason I pick on him is because he changed his song and I was so mad about it but I'm gonna get I'm getting ahead of myself now so we'll talk about that in three sisters some people believe that there were three massive waves that picked up this freighter remember 700 feet long three big waves would cause these long ships to break and yes these are longer ships they're designed to fit underneath our gravity fed or docks there's no other ships like that in the world they were designed just for the Great Lakes but the design stunk it was too long and it could break in half and it had happened with ships that had more brittle steel like the Bradley in the in the Morrell for the fits though it wasn't the case and there was a ship right behind the Fitzgerald that didn't sink from the three sisters remember that Cooper on the anderson went through it so I don't put much merit into that at all now there is some rules about ship sinking and how much they can claim and ever since the Bradley went down in 58 the lawsuit started to get really really intense to the million dollars mark eight million was the original lawsuit before they could only sue for the cost of the ship in the cargo so some of the settlements if you look at this one the widows were saying we're gonna sue well that's because that basically the shipping company said we've got eight hundred and seventeen thousand dollars we want to limit it to which is ridiculous I mean that wouldn't be any kind of a you know a condolence to any of those men that were lost and it was obviously settled for more than that but that that's what the shipping company wanted to do here's the investigators that started looking into the Fitzgerald some of them had metallurgy experience captain Wilson was actually a ship captain and they had just different experience that was there and they started to look into the wreck this is our metallurgist and one of the guys that knew about the leaking and he did some computer models early in 1975 that said that it would probably sink in a half hour of just the hatch covers we're leaking with a sixteenth of an inch of gap in there so the numbers that were coming out we're starting to really kind of make sense now how did they look get a look at the Fitzgerald they went over with a submarine finding aircraft and they found two giant blobs on the bottom and none of them were 700 feet long so they knew the Fitzgerald had to be in two different pieces so they called up this robot called the curve three and it was pretty famous and in a tragic accident where a b-52 acts collided with a tanker and went down with a nuclear bomb into the ocean and this little guy went down and found the bomb so it was pretty famous and they brought it up and basically tried to get it down to the ship now in 1975 they had black-and-white TV it was horrible pictures that came out of there and they didn't really get a lot of good detail in it and I've got to be honest the pictures that they actually came up with were pretty bad this is the quality of pictures they saw where you can see a rivet and some of the torn steel in there and this is where they tried to piece together what happened so many of the drawings that we saw out of there were inaccurate including this one where they're actually showing this right-side up but it is an interesting layout of how the ship this is on course for 135 true going to Whitefish Bay this thing is off and it's upside down almost you know completely at a different angle than the ship how did that happen and we still honestly don't know why it's in two pieces that way and why the stern sections upside down there's some people that tell me that when they looked it looked at airplane crashes the tail would flip over I don't know that that's true I do know that for this the propulsion was in the stern and that would have probably flipped the ship over and that's why we kind of had that kind of a you know would steer off because it obviously had no kind of water dynamics or aerodynamics anymore it would have pushed to the waves and went around and it's probably why it's facing the other way here's the Bayfield this is the ship that went out and did surveys around caribou and determine that the water was actually deeper than they actually thought again no one really believes that it went close to there but the headline started to come out here's red Bergner our cook who actually survived sadly about probably 15 20 years ago he was killed in a car crash so the interviews that we did and the time that we spent this is actually a Port Huron he come baked me a new lovely pie which was very tasty but red was a good man and we're very sorry that we didn't get more time with him for sure they talked to a lot of the former crew members on board the Fitzgerald and they wanted to know you know what was a ship like and some of the common themes that were coming out was the fact that the Fitzgerald flexed a lot even in moderate seas it would just rise like a snake if you took a rug and kind of flipped it up that's what the Fitzgerald would do now every ship does that that's kind of the design as they go through the waves they kind of flex out and go that way but when they really go crazy that's some concern and dick Orgel who was a relief made on board the Fitzgerald really worried about that and he actually told captain McSorely that he was worried about it we're gonna take the scenic route and he said we may have to change speed or all the course or something mister to relieve the strain on the hull and usually the captain does that himself you know but so we talked about that a little bit because I said you know I'm not sure when I should do that so he said well I'm just going to be laying on top of her long should call me and oh it's Linda and I and I told us that they're very kinda slamming into a like a 10-foot wave now that not so much of only a snow and you could then you could look at from the little truck cable from there and see that just go down the deck it would like if he had a runner like a Louisville Slugger and you would flip it similar to that and when it did it so much I said to him that couldn't cause of course after I said it I realize it was a good question by said that couldn't pop off them and clams you know no he said I never heard of that so anyway I said but when she does she does Bend a lot for a ten-foot sea and he was gone to his room and he said sometimes it scares me but he never said to you anymore he didn't carry on a conversation just one-liners like that see I thought that sounds funny to him so does he I think people say well were you afraid on her night no I wasn't because it just never dawned on me to ship of this quality and characteristics breaking to come on you know although I thought what is going to happen sometimes they're going to get into a bad storm and they're gonna have a lot of damage to internal structural members that get twisted and bent that's what's good about I that's would be the worst thing that would happen I never dreamed that she would actually break into pretty weird him saying it scares me sometimes here's the report on the sinking is inconclusive so the Coast Guard came out and said listen we don't know exactly what happened we can't figure it out but we believe the hatch clamps played a role in that and the NTSB came out and they looked at the hatches too and here's some of the drawings that were done and the artist told me that he just didn't have enough information and that's why I mean this is all collapsed in here this is all completely wrong all on the top there all the antennas are still up there he said that he just thought that there was nothing there the report said that the Bell was missing and we know it wasn't missing they went back and got it so a lot of the details were that way but look at the hatches as you look here they did get something very very right and that is this hatch here one and two are collapsed inside and some of them are missing and this one is actually sticking up here so we found some off of the wreckage all twisted up that's when the air pressure blew them out and the hatch clamps hung on to what it could and then it crumpled the hatch as it came up and any of the hatch clamps that were dogged down were sheared off because they won't Bend they just sheer completely off and any of the ones that weren't dogged down that we're just laying there would just be laying there undamaged and guess what I saw when we dove it was a lot of hatch clamps that had no damage so you can see really clearly there with some of them this is another interesting thing on the Fitz this is actually the ground level right here and then there's this 25 or 30 foot drop right here so it's buried into the bottom what appears to be a hill or dug in and in this the bow section here hit with such force it bent the entire bow section over almost 90 degrees and here this is torn away the spar deck is torn away from the hull of the ship by almost ten feet so when it hit 26,000 tons of iron ore came forward and split the sides completely off of the ship that's how much momentum was coming down as it went down and as we look at the go over here and show you the hatch clamps real quick here's some footage I took this is not sheared off that's a hatch clamp that's not was not dogged down that one was not dog down that one was not docked down and this is the combing a 4-foot piece of metal that comes off the bottom of the ship the spar deck and then the cargo would go in through here so the lid is gone they believe those gaskets were totally ineffective and of course once the Coast Guard saw this they said well first of all we allow these ships to carry so much iron ore in a winter time no more we're gonna change it so you can't carry that much iron ore in that way you'll ride higher in the waves and you won't be so susceptible to these November storms the shipping companies all went what this is going to be billions of dollars that they would miss out on in cargo right before the lakes freeze up the second thing they said and watch as we go over here this is going to shake the hatch clamps right there all of them are undamaged those were not dogged down and the ones that were sheared completely off I think I might have a picture in a second here as we went around the corner one of our submarines right before me actually dropped down and didn't know where they were and they went into the cargo hold and all of a sudden they're inside and you know it's not like you can get out of there real easily unfortunately Wilson the interview that I did talks a little bit more about the hatch clamps and what they saw he really I mean he believed that it was because of that gasket and the ineffectiveness of the sealing that did cause some stuff once they started talking about the Fitzgeralds loading lines going up to the other thing the Coast Guard said was the Fitzgerald had to screen bulkheads where water could go from four and after the ship uncontrolled remember in the Titanic where the big doors came up to stop it from flooding not on the Fitzgerald it could go anywhere it wanted and then he had the Rose box at the bottom where the pumps would have to pump it out but it would have to filter through 26,000 tons of taconite pellets before it could be pumped out it was a horrible design and they said well let's uh let's make sure we all the water subdivisions on the freighters fixed so they're all watertight so now they're talking about less cargo in the winter and definitely you're gonna be modifying all of your ships to the tune of billions of dollars and the shipping company said whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa were we're not into that we heard you talk about things that sank on the Fitzgerald and what happened we reject your theory of it going the hatch clamps and all those modifications and we say it ran aground I think this is criminal I think honestly that this is this was an easy way to say the captain screwed up we don't need to make any modifications let's call it good and that's where this whole thing came up on hitting the shoal got really popular and I'll be honest with you for a lot of the museums who dealt with a lot of the family members the one thing they didn't want to come in and tell them was oh by the way because your son didn't put down the hatch since the ship sank so they all started to embrace the same theory and it just infuriates me in the fact that there's no fact to set that up except for Cooper looking over and saying wow she's closer in there than I thought and this became this incredible theory of it sinking there were also recordings of Cooper afterwards that said basically what do you want me to say during these investigations we know that he was being coached on what he was supposed to talk about and it's sad to say because the guy is a superhero in my eyes but the truth is he he is the mouthpiece of the company none of those captains are gonna go against their shipping company to do that and that's why a lot of this theory came out I saw the entire bottom of the Edmund Fitzgerald the last 250 feet of it there's not a scratch on it it never hit the bottom and scratched the front and then didn't hit the back it just doesn't make sense and all the other things that add up have nothing to do with that so you can probably tell and then the fact that the first two hatches are collapsed in that ship that big wave that hit the Anderson 30 feet high it raced ahead of the Anderson because it was doing about 40 knots remember the Anderson was only doing 12 maybe with a tailwind and it raced forward and hit the Fitzgerald at 7:15 in seconds it knows dived into the wave and that wave pushed down it blew out all the back windows you can see it in the damage of the the observation it also crushed those to hatch because they're right there pushed its nose underneath and she never recovered so it just kept diving for the bottom and split apart before it hit there's other people that say well it's 700 feet long the waters 500 feet it must have been sticking up like Titanic no it's not possible in my eyes again and not a super trained guy in wrecks and stuff like that but the truth is the stern section when you see the underwater footage is sitting on a pile of taconite it wouldn't have broken like that and rained down and then just fell on top of it it skidded across all of that taconite that have been falling in the water column so I believe that it did go down in one piece and broke apart mid column and skid it off that's the only thing that makes sense to the damage that I saw that was down there and 1980 Jacques Cousteau stopped by Detroit he came by with Calypso Coleman Young came on board they got pictures together and then Jacques took off so he wasn't involved in the dives to the Fitzgerald and part of that was because he had to go back to France there's two ships that were found in Lake Ontario called a Hamilton and scourge there they're amazing war of 1812 vessels with bowsprit sand cannons on board he lost two divers during that dive when the Calypso came they keep it kept it pretty hush-hush because they didn't want you know people to believe that the infallible Cousteau could have such an accident but it was tragic and he did lose too and I think that's why he left so early but he put the investigation into the hands of his son jean-michel Cousteau who was in charge of the dives they only had a one dive and it was only for a couple of minutes they were doing an entire documentary on the Seaway and how it goes up into the st. Lawrence when I called the Cousteau society and I said listen I'm making a documentary I just want a couple pictures of the suit coupe and they said no and I said well come on just a little bit of footage I mean no I said well I can get some footage that good luck and I said okay and I'm an investigative reporter right so I I start looking around I find out that the the su coupe was actually brought in by Westinghouse corporation and torn apart for the technology and they had all kinds of movies of it so when I finished my documentary I sent a lovely copy of it to so and gave them a very special salute - thanks for all your help and but what was it a big deal to them it really wasn't here's his what John Michell said when I asked him you know this is the most famous Great Lakes shipwreck what do you think about it and here's what he had to say about that something happens at home it becomes a Geo subject to people at home the fish shells means nothing to people in Europe or in other countries when the Exxon Valdez went aground it became a big issue in the United States why because it happened in the United States it wasn't the biggest oil spill by any means but it happened in the US so the US was suddenly very very much involved and aware of what was going on had that particular kind of accident taken place somewhere else US would have mentioned it as a small little line in the newspaper and it would have gone unnoticed so it's really a matter of wait happens and and who's there at a time there are ships sinking all over the world all the time we never talk about it but that particular one was right there was the pride of the fleet and a lot of mystery because no calls where we called it then everybody was lost so it became a big deal it was a big deal for sure literally he mentioned it was the pride of the fleet and I should bring that up because we're near Detroit and the fact is that the Fitzgerald was the biggest ship of the early columbia's fleet at the time and if you were owner of a steel company like national steel and you wanted to keep that contract you would let them go on cruises and so they would go on board the Fitzgerald and the best cook in the fleet would be on board to make you know incredible meal steaks and lobsters and stuff the ship was appointed one of the very few was actually completely outfitted with furniture from Hudson's so right downtown Detroit they had beautiful furniture that they normally wouldn't have on board ships that the only problem is the deck of the Fitzgerald is canted it's round so they had to cut the eggs on all of the beds and stuff otherwise they wouldn't fit right so it was all fitted together in a unique way to make it stay that way there's always been a rumor to that Edmund Fitzgerald had a painting commissioned for the for the ship when it was launched and it was going to be the ship of the Columbia which was a very famous little schooner in fact it was the first to go through the Soo Locks with iron ore it was also the first to bring a train car or a locomotive to Marquette and it was a pretty cool ship but the weird thing is that it's sank its sank in a very eerie place on Lake Michigan called death's door so they had a picture of a shipwreck on board the O the Edmund Fitzgerald when I went down and the question was was it was it still there and a lady came to one of my talks in your Lansing and she said if you can tell me the name of the second captain on the Edmund Fitzgerald I'll give you a surprise I said well it was Larsen okay and she goes that was my uncle and she handed me all of his movies on board and here's video of that still you'll see it in the in the in the movie you'll see the footage of in this stateroom the Columbia with a plaque that says commissioned by Edmund Fitzgerald so I believe it's still down there I don't know that any talk of that it was taken out it probably is still hanging on the wall where we can't we were not allowed to put anything into the windows anything that would allow us to go inside and that was to prevent us from seeing bodies and I was totally good with a head I'm like that's not why I got into shipwrecks I enjoy the stories the people who built the ship in many cases the amazing survivals are what makes me just in awe of the lakes and the rescuers the men and the women who put their lives on the line that's the stories that I look for sadly with a Fitzgerald we didn't have that if anybody's read Fred stone houses book on the Fitzgerald it's amazing this is Fred this is at the 1989 they took a stereoscopic robot down there and actually did 3d movies of the Fitzgerald they hoped that maybe the 3d movies would make so we could actually investigate it a little bit better and figure out what happened and the truth was we really didn't find out much more except for this this is the porch side door on the pilothouse of the Edmund Fitzgerald and it's open nothing had been in the Coast Guard report that that had happened and the question is why was it open this would have been the lee side of the ship meaning they were out of the storm so it's totally possible as they're going down past otter head and going past Misha piccata and caribou that it was too hot in the pilothouse many times they've got this boiler system that runs through radiators and it's hotter than heck in these ships I've taken a couple of freighter voyages in November and honestly it is there's no set of that you know 71 and be good it's either really hot or really cold and they vent it usually by opening up a door that's not affected by the wind so that's one way to do it it could have also though been a chance for someone to try to escape they could have tried to get out of the pilothouse when the vessel took the wave and went out whether or not that's true we don't know but it was a significant find in 1994 this was the clea that went down my rival TV station in Flint had a camera guy that sat in that giant dome right there what a view that he had going down there and they basically did a good survey but the best thing for us as they left a mooring right on the wreck so when we showed up a month later in our Delta I'll show you the inside of the submarine we took here's Rick circa 1994 with my cool 80s glasses and a mullet to that kind of rocks the Delta was famous for diving with Bob Ballard who found the Titanic the Delta was used on his expedition of Lusitania it actually got stuck on the Lusitania and had to drop its tail so it's like a salamander can actually has a safety feature drop its propeller this is Dave Slater his dad who invented the Delta submarine we dove on the Carl Bradley in 1995 his dad actually was stuck in one of those submarines at 200 feet and had to flood the submarine the pilot drowned and he swam up with the world's record for a free ascent from a sunken submarine here's what we saw we went on a bow this is a blanket hanging out the window this is when it gets sobering when you go by the name Edmund Fitzgerald and it's this tall and then you start to see things that are human that are blankets and I saw screwdrivers I saw a cup on the bottom in the debris field that had the Columbia star on it and everything inside me said Rick it's not on the fit rack it's off there it could be from another even though it's exactly the same ship line in a modern cup I wanted to grab it after every time we get we go out we do a debriefing and of course I didn't take anything from the Fitzgerald that was our Creed was we would leave everything there only take pictures after my dive there was actually some battery power left over and as we go to dive in here he's going in with the plaque too late leave a plaque and I'm actually on deck putting my scuba gear on because my job was to jump into the water and film the submarine going down I thought there'd be a backup diver normally we do this with all kinds of divers I didn't have a backup diver I get there and I'm okay so where's my backup diver like it's you okay not a good plan but I was a sheriff diver we dive by ourselves and zero visibility in the river there's the plaque with the names of the guys this is well before the Bell came off it also has the name of our crews so my name is down on the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald with the rest of the crew that dovid here's me in the water taking pictures of the plaque going down but during the the dive right after mine the owner of the tugboat that we were leasing said hey I'll give you a break if you let me and my boy go down and take a look and we thought well what could that hurt let's let's go ahead and do that so he dives down and we go to get a sandwich and all of a sudden we get a report that they found a body and we were blown away because the people from the Coast Guard never saw body Jacques Cousteau never two different visits by whitefish point never found one and we could not believe it off of the bow near that open door was a man on the bottom in coveralls in a lifejacket now that was extremely significant in the fact that he had a lifejacket on why didn't it float did he get out when it was too deep in the compression of the water squeezed that cork in that lifejacket so he couldn't float we didn't know but that the sub went around the body and took all kinds of pictures it's in Canadian water so we brought all of those movies to the Canadian government as part of our licence and gave them the footage and then it became my job was how do I tell this story we knew when we got back to the dock that every journalist you could think of there were more headlines that came out from this thing and than anything else I mean maybe the sinking was a little bit worse but the truth is they weren't very flattering either when they thought we were gonna use the footage they started calling us pirates and saying oh my god these people are ghouls the truth is that every museum has done stuff with shipwrecks and even King Tut they put him under glass and they carry him around but this was a modern shipwreck and there were modern families that were saying this is not right so what were we gonna do well I decided if I didn't put something in there people would call us a liar they'd say you never found that so I said I'll use one shot but I used it after the submarine went around the the the victim and came back and put out halo of silt around so all you saw was a bump and we never used any close-ups they were never released they were never sold National Geographic and The Inquirer wanted the footage and we never sold it we also put a song together called it's quiet where they sleep which I felt was the requiem for those men that had never had a funeral and we felt we did a really good job but the government here in Michigan immediately said no it's banned you can't film it you can't do anything with it and we weren't about to fight it so 300 copies of that video were made and that was it my documentary does not have anything in there that I don't have the control of that I only saw the footage once when I was going through it to to decide what shot we were going to do and people always ask you know could you identify who it was and out of respect for the relatives that were there we know he was probably from the forward and crew we'd never described it so other than the life jacket and the coveralls that's all we've really said about it we never showed the face obviously we we have a lot more couth this is the law that came out I actually called the the government in Lansing and said hey I wrote produced and I'm editing this piece together you think I can come and talk to and tell you why we're doing it no no yeah we've already made up our minds we've already passed the law and it's done so I was very upset about that as we talk about hatch clamps I went to a fishing trip with my dad up on in Canada came back through the Soo Locks and this Bay said he built ship was going through the Kinsmen independent and as I came through I looked at the hatches and I thought they must all be dogged down because after the Fitzgerald went down you know who would ever go out into a storm without him dog down on off see it still happens and if you get the new book from the Edmund Fitzgerald Chris winters just put out with Bruce Lynn from the museum up at whitefish which is how many people have been to whitefish point for those hands that didn't go up make me a promise first of all to come go to my beloved you pee where I was born and raised and spend your money up there but see the incredible museum that's there I I'm biased because I'm on their board of directors but the museum is fantastic and the way that they put together the stories is incredible but for you look through that book that they just put together and every picture of the Edmund Fitzgerald has hatch clamps that are not dogged in all that footage I got from Larsen to had birds sitting on unclamped klatch clamps on it too so it happened quite regularly this is what happened in July of 1995 might be a little loud with the [Music] the pelvis to offline underwater diver I'll show you a picture of the nude soon National Geographic was filming there's the they send this to Michigan State University engineers now in the the the Fitzgerald Bell came up it was property of Canada they gave it to our Secretary of State and said here this is you know this is belongs to the state of Michigan and the Secretary of State put it on loan at whitefish point well they brought it to Michigan State they cleaned it all up they painted it with the gray pane and the guys at the Museum said that doesn't look like a showroom piece we've got to buff it out so they polished it and the people at MSU were so ticked off because it wasn't you know legit in honesty I mean yes it's the showpiece of the museum and I think people have an expectation but you know that there's so many things in these shipwrecks stories when I watch these documentaries on Discovery and I've been on two of them people blow a lot of this stuff up and I wonder why these stories are so fantastic to begin with we don't need to amplify that or to change it and I wish it would have stayed the same I'm gonna close by showing you the wood rush the cutter the 180 foot buoy tender is still in service in the African Navy believe it or not it's called the shark now so I guess this would be baby shark DDD today if you know the song I've got two grandbabies and one that's all she sings to us right now it's Hannah's favorite song I thought that Jimmy hobaugh who was the captain on board the wood rush during that that would be you know kind of his swan song and the truth is no he went to Duluth and was actually in charge of the sector there and when the Mesquite ran aground another cutter that looked just like this one ran aground off of Keweenaw he was involved in sinking it for divers and I've doled that wreck it's a fantastic wreck and luckily nobody was killed when it ran aground it they pulled the buoy off where the rock was and they backed under the rock it's like not a good thing but the wreck is down there now and it's salvaged because of Jimmy and he also became the director at white at the valley camp Museum where the lifeboats were so what an amazing treat for people who came to the lifeboats and saw them and then Jimmy was standing there talking about why the buoy was crushed from their self you know the attempt that they made to mark the wreck and I thought well that's probably it once Jimmy passed away maybe his legacy would be over with but the truth is it wasn't because Jimmy's son is an astronaut and scorched hobo which I don't know why they called him scorch except that he had crashed an airplane before and Jimmy would not tell me why but three missions on the shuttle what an amazing family what a legacy to have on board and that's pretty much I thought the end of the story until all the sudden I found out that Gordo when he came to Saginaw saying the song funny instead of saying at 7:00 p.m. I main hatchway gave in and the cook came out and said fellas it's been good to know yeah he basically changed it to at 7:00 p.m. it grew dark and then and I'm like why would he do that and the truth was that a Canadian documentary came out and it basically said that they did some computer simulations and there's no way the hatches gave were loose and I went to Sandusky and gave a lecture and was talking and out comes the producer of that Mike Fletcher Fletcher and starts telling the audience about well yeah the hatches didn't do this so I went back up on stage afterwards because I was M seen and I said I saw hatches 1 & 2 I hit it with a submarine there collapsed in the main hatchway there's not a main hatchway there's 22 of them but many of them did collapse in that's part of the story and Gordon had changed it because he thought the family members would feel better about his song the truth is nobody liked this song when it first came out those family members did not want to hear about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald when I sailed onboard the Wolverine which is now called a Robert Pearson The Wolverine we went out in November 10th and I told that the mate it was an algal Bay Norton ship I said did you ever have anything to do to Fitz he goes yeah I was a third mate on board there and I said well what do you think about he as well I don't hate that song you know right away it's because it reminds you of them well now Gordon goes to the museum he's met a lot of the family members he signed things for them and stuff and there's there's so much of a better rapport and I think they truly understand where his heart is on that and I hope that that's what people will understand about me that I've done a hundred and fifty shipwreck dives in 99% of those shipwreck stories from the 1940 storm I'm the only guy to have interviewed two of the survivors from the Nova dock in 1913 I interviewed on wheels Minh who was 18 years old that survived the 1913 storm all of those family members loved the stories and want to hear more there's just two families on the Fitzgerald that we're constantly upset about anything that we did because we found the crew member that was missing my heart goes out to them I understand that kind of loss not from a sailor but from other things that have happened in my family but I do get that the attention is a problem but I also understand too that every November they run out and they do interviews with them and it's kind of become you know almost god I hate to say it almost like a celebrity status for them I could never imagine the grief that they go through but they've get a vocal voice box that goes to these audiences that people hear this stuff and I think they hold a lot of weight because they lost a loved one on board there and sadly it changed it changed the song which i think is ridiculous the other thing I didn't like was when they douve the Fitzgerald to get the Bell Bruce in in the suit went down and one of the ladies whose husband died was on board as a one of the I think wheelman said my dad would really like to have a beer and they brought an Old Milwaukee beer can and they dropped it into the pilot house with the newt suit and I thought this is such a bad idea I mean for archeology from a hundred years now we have shipwrecks that are three hundred years old in the Great Lakes and they'll probably be there for another thousand years we've got trees that we see from after the massive glaciers left 5,000 years ago and they still look like trees so we know these ships wrecked ship wrecks will be there and that story will be there and I hope to heck that somebody doesn't go in there and say we know why it sank the captain was drunk he was drinking Old Milwaukee so I to me I understand why they did it again my heart goes out but there's got to be a limit to saying you know what what input they can have and even closing down the wreck right now to me they basically have a structure in place that you have to have a license to dive the Fitzgerald or the to where the divers were lost with Cousteau the Hamilton and the Scourge those are the only three wrecks in Canada you need permission to go and dive and explore you can't without paperwork and this the wreck is not off-limits it's just very difficult to get permission I guarantee you if Jean Michelle Cousteau wants to go dive it or Bob Ballard comes to the Great Lakes again and says I'd like to go see it I bet you they'll get permission to do it I think that that that's what it's open to will we as private citizens go there again never it's not going to happen again maybe in another hundred years but those clues are still down there and I'm still now with 25 years of research I want to know more I have to know more about what's going on there and they even had a massive huge sonar survey that was done on there I think I have a picture of it yeah look at this this was just afterwards the Canadian government said okay no more dives you can't make any dives and white fish came out with brand new technology and sonar and went across the top of it and said we're not diving this is this is a toe fish we're just cruising across immediately the coast there the the Canadian government the Ministry said no more sonar either that the families were upset that they did it but look at the hatches there's no clear indication of any of those hatches all the way on this forward section I think this is an anomaly I don't believe that this is correct because out of a hundred and fifty shipwrecks I've seen probably four big steel wrecks I've never seen a spar deck collapse like this to where there would be nothing there I think it's a shadow we see good definition in the Texas and the pilothouse right here we see even the the steering pole going up but this just doesn't look right to me but we won't know we won't know because we can't go back and so a lot of us are just chomping at the bit to try to see what we'll find there how about some questions does anybody have any questions about Edmund Fitzgerald yes yep no I mean it's bravado yes and the question was did he have a death wish I mean did a deadline oh yeah did he have a deadline yeah a deadline yes in 1913 when the ships went out the shipping companies gave them bonuses to go in that was all but abolished by the time you know modern shipwrecks came out it's always been the captain's discretion on whether or not he should go and there's been all kinds of nonsense written about shipwrecks like the Cedarville that was involved in a collision where the the author of the book just lambaste the the saying the shipping company forced them to do that that's not true they've got so much money wrapped up into the training and the ship and these guys that they're not going to push them to run one more cargo it wouldn't have made any major difference for them so what was it it comes down to bravado it comes down to a captain that says I can beat that storm and it's the decisions that are made on almost every shipwreck that I've gone to visit where they just made a bad call and sometimes in 1913 the barometer goes down they all waited and then the barometer goes back up and they said oh we're okay but there was a second storm behind it and they got caught out there with you know help they knew what was happening on this ship and I hate to be so hyper critical but the truth is there were a lot of ships that hid out from that and we still see it with our thousand footers today that they're not going to go out there and risk that on the storm because it's not worth it anymore we don't have as many freighters out there they make less trips and when the big waves come up and we just had some you saw well you saw the the big waves come up on the Lake Michigan and Lake Superior they were coming right over the top of the pier most of those ships all went to anchor so literally it wasn't you know it's just a bad call that happened on there unfortunately yes ma'am what fish point yep yeah fantastic our connection is that that's I mean to me knowing what happened you know from what I saw on the bottom it definitely broke up somewhere either surface or mid column it didn't go all the way down in one piece Ramsey a lot of the stuff that he came back up with the design stuff that was issues I think had some valve validity to it read Bergner the cook that was on board to told us a story about how his job at Frasier shipyard was to winter the ship remember if you park a ship in the winter you've got to keep the steam up or everything will freeze and his job was to stay on board as that as a caretaker of the ship and keep that steam up well he would watch as they put the bow thrusters in this propeller system in the front of the ship that allowed them to go into the river systems a lot more effectively and when he went underneath he heard the guys talking that the keel was actually loose that it was breaking loose and they went and put a bunch of junk in there and welded over the top of it and he said the Coast Guard just basically said hey no that's not possible we don't believe it now we're starting to hear more from the shipyard that that's a possibility a lot of guys don't talk about it because they know that they're their pensions can hell ride in the balance to have that so I think now as they're getting older we're hearing a lot more stories the problem is that those stories get tainted as more people talk about it and we don't know what to believe anymore so it's really tough to you know took to qualify that but Ramsey obviously is one of the builders of the ship and designers of it you got to put some validity to it servus yeah and the only thing I would throw against that is the fact that the Jackson still sales I mean they're obviously not taking her out into huge you know 30-foot waves but the truth is she's been on the lakes for all this time and haven't had any issues with it that we know of so you've got to kind of hold that in context a little bit I don't think there was any major design differences because it were only a year apart from when the Jackson came out but yeah I've gotta at least say you know that this one's still sailing today yes [Applause] that's not a fun job is it that would be a hard job any other questions yes ma'am [Music] they call it the shipwreck Coast and that's largely because it's out in the middle of nowhere the only harbor of refuge really they have is a tiny break wall up by Grand Marais and then you get the whitefish bay where the it looks like a shark fin on Michigan and it can get behind there so if you're caught out there it's a real problem they had life-saving stations at least three of them had to harden across the way so they knew that those were areas that were really dangerous was it the worst place on the Great Lakes no we had actually more collisions and more groundings at the tip of the thumb if you go to point out bark that reef system that's out there snagged all kinds of ships but there aren't many left because they literally just went through and picked them up and salvaged them because they were all in relatively shallow water if you go to Alpena there's shipping lines that went through there and there's all kinds of collisions off of Alpena and that's why NOAA has a fantastic museum there has anybody been to the museum there again another promise to me go to the NOAA facility in Alpena and you can walk on a schooner that's sinking and actually go down to a shipwreck as you're walking down the deck it's pretty amazing and it's a repository for all of the artifacts that have been taken off the bottom we now have a better feeling about not taking things off the bottom part of that is because we can buy GoPros for $200 now little cameras and go down and show everybody what we see but back in the 50s 60s and 70s it was commonplace to go out there and steal pieces of the REC to bring it up and go look what I've got and then it would end up in somebody's garage and turn into dust underwater perfectly preserved if you bring it up it dries out and crumbles if you don't preserve it so there's all kinds of pieces of wrecks that are now in people's yards if you go up through Minnesota all the yards have anchors and stuff they brought up a big rudder from the Mitaka which was lost or lost in 1905 they brought it up and as soon as they brought it up and started to rust and they said well who's gonna pay for it nobody had any money so they just put it back down under the water I mean it's what are you gonna do with it so we don't take those things anymore in in what I try to teach people is you know my kids are divers now all three of my kids are divers my little grandbaby her first Halloween costume was a pop bottle painted like a scuba tank so I'm hoping that Hannah is gonna be a diver in the truth is I'm sure with the pressure of her daddy and her grandpa it's gonna happen but I want them to see the things that I see on the bottom and it's terrible to know they were gone in the very back sir when he actually happened November 10th 1975 yep at 7 o'clock 7 I think 7 10 is the last time they looked at the radar and it was over in minutes and that November I mean that's the big date with big storms on the Great Lakes that's why we talk about the gales but in 1940 hundred and 26 mile an hour winds so another lecture for you how's that pitch for yes sir Oh having Hurst buck called long ships passing yep yeah it should be I'm hoping it's here and if not it's definitely at University of Michigan or any of the older ones too maybe time for two more questions yes No thank heavens but the weird thing is when it hit it hit bow on and the dent that it made in the pilothouse looks exactly like the dent on the Edmund Fitzgerald people had talked to me when they saw the collision because the very front of the pilothouse is dented in by almost four feet and I thought oh no that's the water pressure that hit that and it might have been but looking at the Homer it would that pressure of it hitting it could have been from hitting the bottom of Lake Superior and that's why we have that giant dent in there I would definitely put if you look behind it the Texas deck is folded like an S it's supposed to be straight the deck is folded like this from that weight when it hit and that momentum when it hit the stress was intense in the rest of the ship you know the anchor actually fell through you can see where I went through the pocket and just tore up the whole bow it had to have been catastrophic and it was over in seconds really so it that we I don't think we can really fully understand what those last moments must have been like yes sir some people have talked to where it skidded in in this this new sonar that they had had such better resolution that's what we were hoping to get some pictures of unfortunately most of the tours that go down there are what I call glamour tours it sounds horrible because this is a gravesite don't get me wrong 29 guys lost their lives in an instant but the truth is when we went down it was just to get pictures of the pilothouse and some upside down stuff if I'd known what I knew now I would have done a better dive into it I think with the sonar - they get one wide piece and they're really not looking for anything specific the hope is now with the new technology and the price of that technology coming down that we'd be able to do something really you know bring together some real experts on what understand you know what to look for go find that hatch or the tank top the mushroom cap on the vent and see absolutely I never went through the debris field there was nothing for me to capture on the camera but think of all the things that I could have seen and I don't know that they did that when they brought up the bell which would have been that first High Definition scan that they did other ship - yeah yes they did that the command crew would get of the majority and then as you went down in rank less money would come in but they all did but most of them didn't talk about what the actual settlement was but yeah you know nothing could make up for the loss obviously but you have some kind of you know a pittance absolutely wouldn't change I it becomes the mystery you know why do people climb mountains for me what could it help maybe in another investigation I think we might be fooling ourselves into thinking that yeah would somehow bring up something we do differently what we really need to do is talk to the captains and say don't go out there you know this is what we don't do even if the Fitzgerald was the thousand footer that I think mother nature could still sink a thousand footer we see it you know we see him get grounded all the time so accidents will continue to happen we continually lose sailboats on the lakes tugboats we just lost a tugboat that was involved with the Montrose collision remember that big freighter that collided off of the Ambassador Bridge in the 64 62 something like that that little tugboat just sank off of sheboygan not too long ago so it's still happening today and it you know for various reasons but mostly because people don't respect the links one more and then I better let you guys go it's been a long night that's a good question why was it acceptable if it's you know verboten or forbidden to bring things up from the rack why was it okay to bring that up the first was because the family members said it was okay when they said we want to have a memorial we want have a church a place to bring it and there's many of us who are involved in and again Who am I I'm just a documentary guy but my voice was bring it to mariner's Church in Detroit that's where the first bell chimed for them that's where you know you could go but I'm glad they brought it to Whitefish point I mean all they have up there is snowmobiling and hunting you know and and people go up there and pay money to see it and it's a fantastic museum it educates people on not just the Fitzgerald but all of the Great Lakes and the lifesavers in the amazing history that we've had 300 years of sailing on the Great Lakes so I think it's important but it could have went to the church there and I think that's why it came up was the family said this would be a memorial for my lost loved one but then nobody goes back and I get that I understand it but again knowing my body of work there's there's 30 DVDs that I put on PBS I donate them for free to PBS so that they can share this history with people I put them on videos and sell them for 15 bucks so I can put air in my scuba tanks so that you know when I go out I just got back three weeks ago from Manitoulin Island chasing one of the Christmas tree ships that the ships that used to deliver the Christmas trees the roof Simmons being the most famous Christmas tree ship that sank in Lake Michigan well one that was docked next to her was called the knee and the knee was actually sunk up off of an island up there and here's how I found it now this is my last story I swear I I went up there and looked for my wife Sheila who's in the back when dealt with her girlfriends the Traverse City area and she goes what are you gonna do I said i'ma go look for a shipwreck so I want to have Google Earth and I looked at manitoulin island the largest island and the Great Lakes it's all the way at the very top of Lake Huron I packed our traverse full of a sleeping bag and some some beef jerky sticks and some water and my scuba gear and I drove all the way up there when I got to customs I pull out my ID my my passport and I was expired at the zoo and I looked at the guy and I said you're not gonna believe this he goes well why do you keep your old passport and I said because my wife and I went on a honeymoon on this it means a lot to me and he's like okay you know a little tear you let me go through I get to Manitoulin Island it's getting dark and there's no place to stay so I sleep in the Traverse I thought I parked into an area that it was um I thought it was one of those parking saves you know where he can park in in car pool I woke up it was a used-car lot so right across the street from the police station at Julia Bay and I'm like oh my god I could have gotten arrested there but I started looking at these shipwrecks and I could not find the skill this old ship that was called the knee that went down in a big storm and I have all the photographs from an audience member that brought them to all the journey from Chicago past the Grand Hotel all the way into Barry Island where it's saying and I thought how am I gonna find this I'll never there's cliffs there I couldn't get near it I went to the airport they said they'd never seen a schooner up there I said well it's got to be up here so I made a video on YouTube and I put all the shipwrecks on there I put some pictures on there and I said hopefully someone will tell me about it three years later 7000 hits on the video and someone called me and said it's at my dear camp and so I said when can I come see you and it was three weeks ago and my son and I hopped in the car rode all the way up there and we found debris for a half a mile of schooner pieces everywhere so we're super excited we didn't find the bulk of the wreck I found part of the keel but it's another story that you're just gonna have to come back and see me here at the library to talk about I appreciate you coming I'm sorry I kept you long please come see us back here and get some videos and support this amazing library

Channel: RochesterHillsTV

Views: 74,630

Rating: 4.6691728 out of 5

Keywords: Rochester, Hills, Government, city, local, michigan, oakland, county, innovative, library, ric mixter, ric, mixter, edmund, fitzgerald, wreck, dive, investigations

Id: iP3LgvQ1S4E

Length: 88min 26sec (5306 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 15 2018