- Zinnen: "The ship was the
pride of the American side." - Audience: "Coming back
from some mill in Wisconsin." - Tonight it's my great
pleasure to get to introduce to you Steve Ackerman. He's director of the
Cooperative Institute for Meteorological
Satellite Studies. He's one of the two weather
guys along with John Martin. He's been here
three or four times. It's always packed.
I appreciate that. Tonight is a special occasion
because we're commemorating the 40th anniversary of the
sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10th, 1975. I think it's an important moment in Wisconsin history. I think it means a
lot to a place such as the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, which is one of the cradles of invention of
meteorological satellites and a leader in
weather forecasting, to remember this event. Tonight, Steve's
going to talk about the ship, the
storm and the song. He told me he's been
waiting 20 years to be able to give a talk with that title. (audience laughs) Please join me in welcoming
Steve Ackerman back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. (audience applauds) - Thank you very much. Thanks Tom and everybody here. I really enjoy coming to these
Wednesday Nite @ the Labs as both a speaker
and as a participant. There's always lots
of good conversation. So I'm gonna go through
this, hopefully not too fast but I'm gonna be talking
about this great legend, the sinking of the
Edmund Fitzgerald, the ship, the
storm and the song. So we're gonna talk a
little bit about everything, all three of those things and
how they integrate together. It is a great
historical activity of the Great Lakes
but also of Wisconsin. I grew up in New York. You'll be able to tell that
when I say a couple of words like water, so we'll get
that out of the way now. And I was actually
just switching and becoming a major in
weather, meteorology, at the time when this happened. And so I kind of remember
snippets of this and wondering, holy mackerel,
what kind of storm can do that kind of
sinking of a huge ship? And then coming here and
moving eventually to Wisconsin and becoming an advocate of
Wisconsin and a Wisconsinite, there are two historical
events that just amazed me. This is one of them. And the other is,
anybody want to guess? - Audience: Big fire. The big fire, the
Peshtigo fire, right? You grow up in New York and you
hear about the Chicago fire but the Peshtigo fire is
just so much more amazing. And so I've also
really gotten into trying to understand that, both from the weather and
a cultural point of view. So the Edmund Fitzgerald,
again a great mystery. There's still a
lot of controversy. Maybe controversy's
the wrong word now. I think it's more of a
mystery of what went down and every now and then, when
pieces of information pop up and you're going to
be hearing me say this throughout the
evening, you know, there's something that
comes up and it's like, "Oh, isn't that interesting
and does it say this?" Well no, not really.
Does it say that? No, not really. There's nothing really
that points to the fact of what caused the
ship to go down other than what John Knox, my co-author of our
meteorology book, and I like to say,
it was the weather. If it was a day like today, the ship wouldn't
have went down. So it's all about the weather. So that's why I like to
talk about all three. So you're gonna see a clippets
come in from the song. Apparently you know it, 'cause you wouldn't
be able to quote it. I may actually have you
sing a phrase now and then. As you were coming in,
we were playing the song so hopefully you got
that ballad in your mind. All right, a little
bit about the details. I'm gonna go over this. I just wanted to
tell you where a lot of the information
that I drew it from. This is my primary sources
of where it came from. A lot of good books out there and some not so
good books I think. But these are the
good ones I think. All right, so again this
was memorialized a lot by the song by Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald. And a lot of what he describes
in that song is right. In fact, 95% of it is
right about what happened. There's a couple of things
that are, eh, and I'll point those
out cause after all, I'm, you know, I'm a
teacher. (chuckles) We like to correct things. But again, they're pretty minor. And so do you want to
sing the first phrase, no? Everybody's shaking his head.
You can read it right there. "The legend lives on
from the Chippewa down "to the big lake they
call Gitche Gumee." Ojibwe name for Lake
Superior is Gichigami which means it be a great sea. The story behind that, so
you see, he's calling it the Chippewa and it's changed
its name to the Gitche Gumee. When Longfellow wrote his poem
about the story of Hiawatha, that's what he called it. So he translated it into
that and now that just keeps getting carried down. Of course, he goes
on to say that it "never gives up her dead "when the skies of
November turn gloomy." Kind of an interesting
thing there that maybe we'll talk about later on,
that basically when body, when people die and
they get to the bottom of a really cold water
body, there's no gasses and no biological activity,
so the bodies never float. They'll just stay down there and so it never gives
up 'cause its dead. And of course it was carrying 26,000 tons more than
the Edmund Fitzgerald. So it was carrying
a load of iron ore. So this is about the ship
but described in the song. It was carrying 26,000
tons of these things called pellets, lake, taconite pellets. Somebody gave me one
of these a couple of years ago
after a talk. They're like iron marbles.
All right? This is going to be
an interesting to
talk about later on. They're important to
get into marble shape because as you load the ship, you put them on a slide
and (blows raspberry), they all roll down, cause
these things roll nicely. We'll come back to that. 26,000 tons and it's off down
to be, it's 1975. Auto industry's going
really good, right? So they're gonna be
making autos out of that. Of course it sank
on November 10th. All 29 crew members died. We'll look at the names of
who those folks were later on. And at the time, it was
the worst shipping disaster in the Great Lakes in 11 years. There's a lot of ship
wrecks on the Great Lakes. And I had a slide that
outlined them all, but we're not going
to talk about that 'cause we're talking about
the Edmund Fitzgerald. And many of those
ships that went down, they don't have a
song after em, right? So nobody remembers them,
which is kind of sad, but we do remember the people. All right. So again it was carrying
26,000 tons or more. This was the route that
the ship ended up taking. So this is the ship. It left from the
Duluth-Superior harbor, went up this way, and
was heading towards the Sault Ste. Marie
to unload its load. This is not the original plan that it actually
filed when it left. It really, right,
cause it's kind of, oh that's kind of a long way. So initially it was going
to go this way, right? 'Cause that's shorter.
You go shorter, you save fuel. But this was the
actual way it went. This is where it went down. You can see not very far
from where the shoreline was. It was, I think as
Tom had you sing, it was known as the pride
of the American side. It was the biggest ship on
the Great Lakes at the time when it was first launched. So it was bigger than
most when it went down, but it was the biggest when
it actually was launched. Again, here's some phrases
of him concluding some terms with a couple of steel
firms when they left fully loaded for Cleveland,
'cause they really weren't going to Cleveland, but that's okay. And then later that
night, again, this is from the Lightfoot song. "The ship's bell rang," and it could be "the north
wind they'd been feeling." And so what he's hinting here
is that in his ballad here, he's giving you what's going
to happen in the future. They're going to take off,
they're going to hit
a lot of weather and it's going to be because
of something's changed. Could it be the north wind? And as it turns out, that
was part of the problem. Of course their
destination was Detroit. That's where they were heading. That's where they wanted
to put the pellets. Again, a little bit more
about the Fitzgerald itself. It weighed 13,000 tons. It was 729 feet long, 7,000 horsepower steam turbine which allowed it to
go 16 miles per hour. Again, you might not think
that that's very fast, but that's a lot of
mass to be moving. So that's a lot of energy. Hard to stop something
that's moving that fast. It was launched in
1958 and at the launch there were 10,000 people
that went to that launching. That's how cool that ship was. Again, it was labeled the
Pride of the American Side and in 1964 it became the
first ship on the Great Lakes to carry more than a million
tons of ore to the Soo Locks. It's named after the president of the Northwestern Mutual
Life Insurance Company. They had a big history of Great Lake captains
in the family. And actually there's
a nice exhibit if you go to the
Milwaukee Public Museum, they have some really nice
stuff about the family and about the ship
there as well. So, if you're in Milwaukee
and got the time, I'd recommend going
to see that as well. It's kind of a nice exhibit. These are all the hatchways
I should point out, right down in here. This is where they loaded up. We'll be talking about the
hatchways in a little bit. And there are, I didn't take
these down off of the web, but actually if you
search on the web, they'll show you some
animations of what it looks like to load these hatchways
with these pellets. Well, they just kind of
come sliding down slides. It's really kind of
cool and amazing. Fun to watch.
You can see I'm kind of
hooked on this. (chuckles) So you know a little
bit about the ship, a little bit about the song. Now, about the storm. Let's talk about the
storm 'cause after all, it's the storm that
sank it, all right? Again, if we go back
to when it left, if I go back quickly to this, you can see that their
departure was at 2pm on the afternoon of
November 9th, 1975. So what was the weather
on that particular day? It was great. It was like today, right? So you should be scared (all laugh) for next week, (chuckles) right? 'Cause it turns out-- There's a lot of things
going back and forth on-- On the Internet system
that we're all on. You know, like what, we've
had three 70-degree days in a row in November. That's pretty rare,
what's the record? Well, it turns out 1975 is the
record for the number of days in which the temperature
was above 60. Did I get that right, Tim?
- Sure. - Yeah.
(all laugh) So, beautiful, absolute weather. This is what the map looked
like at 7am Eastern time, 6am our time, Central time, on November 8th, 1975. So, the morning of when
they're going to take off. You can see if you
read weather maps, basically, this stuff up here
where you see it highlighted like that, that means
there's precipitation there. Where there are open dots that
means that it's not cloudy. And if you could read the
temperatures really well, you can see it's
in the 40s and 50s. And in Chicago it's
like almost 60 degrees at six in the morning. So it's actually
a beautiful day. You know you look to the
east, to the west, right? 'Cause systems
move from the west. Red sky at night,
sailor's delight. Red sky morning,
sailor's take warning. That's telling us
that systems move from the west to the east. Then you see this thing
and it doesn't look threatening. These purple lines, by the way, are stationary fronts,
generally not moving. Blue lines with the
triangles are cold fronts and red, we don't
have any on there, but we'll see, shortly. Red lines with half-moons are indications of warm fronts. But if you look at this
weather map, you think, "Ah, not much going on here."
Beautiful day. Unless you know a
lot about weather. Then you look at this
little lull right in here and you go ooh, I wonder
what's going to happen to that? Because it's these things
that, as we'll see, can often develop into storms that head right to
the Great Lakes, particularly in November. But otherwise, it's a
beautiful day in November, just like today. This is why, again, in
his phrase he talks about "when the skies of
November turn gloomy," this is, if you look
at weather systems, mid-latitude cyclones,
we call them, or systems that have cold
fronts and warm fronts attached to them, and
you look climatologically how they travel
across North America, this is a region of genesis. They begin here in the
panhandle of Oklahoma and just east of the Rockies. Then they do a little hook, sometimes they're
called a panhandle hook or the panhandle
hooker. (chuckles) But it's not, but
it's a weather term, not a, not another term. And then this is the path
they will often take. They head right towards
the Great Lakes. And basically the weather, beautiful November weather's
gonna turn rather gloomy as these storms come
and head our way. There are other paths,
this is another one where it forms in Alberta and that's called
an Alberta clipper. They generally move really fast and don't give us
a lot of snowfall. These guys can give us a lot
of snowfall, the hookers. Day two with the Fitz.
So that's day one. Okay, they're taking
off, beautiful days. They got ore pellets. They're sliding down the
huge chutes as I mentioned, like marbles, they
roll really nicely. I drop these every now and
then and then they roll away and I'm chasing because I
don't want to lose them. There are 21 hatches in
the middle of the boat. We'll come back to
that in a while. It's interesting that
the anchors each weigh about seven ton, I'm sorry, no. Not the anchors. The anchors that weigh down the
hatch covers are seven tons. A car is what, a ton, two tons? So very, very heavy
types of activities. They leave shortly before 2pm on the open waters
of Lake Superior. This is how many automobiles the ore that they
carry is gonna make. 7,500 automobiles. A lot of cars. A colleague of mine
who's really into trains, when he saw how much it was
and calculated in his head, if you put that much ore in a
freight train and carried it, that freight train would
be like six miles long. So that's a lot of iron
ore that they're carrying. 'Cause they gotta, they're
gonna make a lot of automobiles. I wonder if anybody ever bought one of those automobiles. All right, later on, I
mean, so there's been a lot of interviewing right
after the tragedy. The National Transportation
Safety Board, of course, interviewed a lot of people
and even as time went on, more and more people
would get interviewed, and Bernie Cooper, who was
the captain of the Anderson, would recall that that
Sunday, and we quote, "was one of the special
days on Lake Superior, "just ripples on the water,
sunny and warm for November. "As we departed we could
see the Edmund Fitzgerald." So, two of them were leaving,
Edmund Fitzgerald's out ahead. At some point, they're gonna
decide, let's go together. Okay, so eventually they're
gonna sail and you're gonna see, there's gonna be communications
throughout the next two days between the Anderson
and the Fitzgerald. What did the weather look like? This is the surface weather
map for November 9th, 7am in the morning and, again, what do we see? There's the cold front. I mean, there's the warm front,
now we're seeing the warm front. Here's the cold front.
Here's where it's precipitating. If you know your
weather symbols, you start to see that there's
thunderstorms around here, and you'll notice that
that low that used to be right in here and you
could hardly see it has now developed nicely
and you could see a nice, well-developed cold front
dipping down into Texas, and this nice warm
front that's heading up towards the Great Lakes. Then that low I think is 900, it's less than a thousand
millibars, 999 millibars. We like to think in millibars
not in inches of mercury, which is another way that
pressure is reported. But we can see by
looking at this, by our history we know that this thing is probably
gonna develop, right? This is the classic
type of situation that's gonna head up
towards the Great Lakes. This is what it looks
like on a satellite image. This is one of the few
satellite images currently. And I say currently. This is from the defense
meteorological satellite. This is when the
storm was over Kansas. You can see the warm
front developing nicely. You get this nice, dry slot. There's no clouds in here. That indicates, again, that
this is gonna be a strong storm. This is a developing storm. We call this the comma head 'cause when we first
got satellite imagery, we could start looking at
the storms from up above, and these storms, as they
developed, look like commas. If you just look at the
white, it looks like a comma. So, being as creative
wordsmiths as we are, we call this the
comma head. (laughs) There it is, this is the comma
tail that hangs down in here. But this dry slot,
again, is telling you that the system is
going to be developing. It turns out we just got
a bunch of data from NASA. So we think we actually
have the geostationary data that goes with this which will
allows us to run animations at really high resolution. The problem is that
the crates of data that we got from NASA,
they're not labeled. So we kind of just have to
say, "Maybe it's this one!" It's like, "Oh,
maybe it's this one!" (chuckles) No. Someday we're actually
gonna see it and we'll show it in animation. Maybe when we do the 45th case. Hopefully not longer than that. Here's another thing that our
weather people like to do. So again, this is what the
weather was looking like on November 9th, 1975. Here's the cold front.
Here's the warm front. And then each one of
these stations in here, you know, like
Tulsa, are stations that are making
weather observations. And so what we like to do is
what we call a cross section. So we take these observations
from each one of these cities and we put them on
this map down in here. If it's a solid circle,
I don't know how many of you know these
meteorological terms, but if it's a solid circle, that means it's
totally overcast. These barbs are telling
you the wind direction. Where I'm pointing here,
that's a southwest wind at 15 knots. This tells you this is Tulsa so it allows you
to go look up here. So this is due south
going north up to Duluth. If it's raining, there's
some other marks in here. These first number up
here is the temperature. So it's 45 degrees and
down here is the dew point to tell you it's dry. This up here is where we
just kind of drew in clouds. This is from mine and
John's book on this, the chapter on this storm. Cold air mass back in here. This is where the cold front is.
This is where the warm front is. Again, not too
spectacular, right? Just kind of,
interesting kind of day. This is the classic type of
cloud systems that we get. When you see a warm
front coming towards you, you get these nice cirrus
way out ahead of it and then eventually you
get these low level clouds and as the front develops,
eventually it'll turn into stratiform, steady
precipitation-type activity. That's the weather. This is what the
weather looks like later on in the afternoon, 4pm. So not too much longer.
Same day. Notice now when we
look at that system... boy that's really developed. That's a classic case
now where it's not quite at its most intense form,
but there's the warm front, there's the low pressure system, and here's the cold front
that trails all the way down. When we do the cross section
again through these states, I mean, yeah, through
these observing systems, this is what it
looks like again. You can see the cold front
now is really pushing north. We're getting some precipitation out ahead of the warm front. This is the warm front right
in here replacing cold air, and this is the cold air
replacing the warm air. A lot of times in front of the
cold front as it's moving in, it's generating thunderstorms
and clearly enough, that's what we're
beginning to observe. So basically, if you look
at the classic situation of how these storms develop, this is the classic
type of situation. The main difference
is it's intense. It's a lot more intense
that your average weather system
that's moving along. I want to remind you, 1975. It's a long time ago, right? We had these satellite
imageries but you would never find a satellite image on
your TV television news. They couldn't get it to them. Radar images. You look at radars now,
they're really high resolution. You get all these
different colors. Radar images in 1975, if
you had access to them, were just a blob of white
where it was raining. That was it. The computers back
then were less, so as I said I was a
undergrad at the time. I was running a numerical
weather prediction model the next year. The computer that I ran it on is less than the power I
have on my smart phone. So, a lot of difference. And we'll talk about
that at the end in terms of the
forecasting of that storm. But the National Weather
Service knows it's happening. They see that it's developing and they have some predictions,
but a lot of it is still by looking at models
and by experience. So, by November 9th 7pm, the National Weather
Service issued a gale warning for Lake Superior. So the storm hasn't
even hit it yet, but they know it's going
towards the Lake Superior. So a gale warning means
that the winds are gonna be like 34 to 40 knots. - If you declare a course and it says east
to northeastern, is that where it's coming
from or where it's headed? - So, when we say a north wind, that means it's coming
out of the north. - Audience: Heading south.
- Heading south, right. - Northeasterly is--? - A northeasterly comes
from the northeast. And a northwesterly means it's
coming out of the northwest. And you're gonna see
a map of Lake Superior and we'll talk about why
that's so important, okay? Why the forecast
actually was a little off in forecasting the
track and the timing of how fast this
storm was moving. All right, so they predicted east to northeasterly
winds, right? During the night. So coming this way and then
shifting to northwest to north by the afternoon
of November 10th. Now since I'm a weather guy, I gotta show you the
upper air maps. (chuckles) You may not be familiar with it, but it's a lot easier
to predict the upper air than it is what's
going on at the surface because there's no friction
up there, so it's easier. But basically this is again
a classic type of situation where we get these troughs. This is the jet stream
where it's going and low systems at the
surface always tend to be to the east of where
these troughs are. The great thing is
that it's easier to forecast a movement
of these troughs than it is to forecast
the movement of low pressure systems. So, around 2am on November 10th, the National Weather Service
upgrades the gale warning to storm warnings, right? Which means winds are gonna
be sustained at 48 to 55 knots with the prediction of
northeast winds 35 to 50 knots becoming northwesterly
28 to 38 knots on Monday. Waves, eight to 15 feet. Okay? You know, I think
of a 15 foot wave, I mean, I've been in five
foot waves on a fishing boat and you know, tried
not to throw up in my brother's boat (chuckles) 'cause he'd never
invite me back. 15-foot waves.
That's a big wave. And as we'll see, some
of the estimates are even that they actually even
got up to 30 feet or so. But 15-foot waves to
these seasoned sailors? Probably nothing, you know? They're probably
like, "Ah, darn it." But that's the way it goes. So around 2am, so
again, we have the logs of the talking of the,
from the Anderson anyway, talking to the Fitzgerald. The two captains talk about
the weather that's coming and how it's gonna
be nasty on there. And they decide to
change their route, okay? And they're also deciding
now, hey, let's go together. Misery in company,
something like that. That's how it goes. So this is, again,
this is the route that they ended up taking. They initially were
planning to come this route. Shorter, save fuel, get
there faster, right? But they decided to take this
route to go the northern route because the winds were
predicted to come this way. So they would be
shielded by the land. If they stayed with
their other route where they would
be down in here, then they would be
pummeled by these winds coming over the open lake. And as we'll see, winds
over the open lake generate big waves and
there's no friction to slow them down. Winds over here, and you can
see it in our lakes as well. Coming off the lake, they're
slowed down by the land itself. So they're shielded by it. That's why they decide
to take that route based on the National
Weather Service update of its forecast, 'cause
they're expecting north, northeast-type winds. Smart thing to do. All right, November
10th, 7am in the morning. By the way, we make these
maps every 12 hours generally. That's why it's always at 7am. And these are the
only ones I could get and get our book
people to redraw. So these are, again, now
you can see the system. It is very well developed. When you get a system
where you have this nice, long cold front, the
warm front attached to it and then this occluded
front that hangs out and touches low, you know that
you're at your peak storm. So, the steam, the
storm is at its peak and guess where it is? Right over Lake Superior where it's reading
its maximum peak. The other thing I
forgot to mention is that these lines
right in here, those are the isobars,
lines of constant pressure. And when these things
are packed together, the wind is really,
really strong, okay? Out here you can see
this in Oklahoma. They're not there
at all so the wind, there's basically no winds. They're very very light. So strong packing
means lots of winds and you can see this whole
area shaded in as well, indicating that it's all
precipitating over there. We don't know necessarily
if its rain or snow, but actually we'll get
some reports later on of snow and rain, all right? So the storm's full blast now, Nine in the morning,
November 10th. Seven in the morning, sorry. November 10th. Six in the morning Central time. Seven in the morning
Eastern Time. That's right. And here's again a quote
now back to the song. "And late that night
when the ship bell rang, "could it be the north
wind they'd been feeling." Okay, so now the problem
is they've changed, they've gotten up there
but oh my goodness, maybe the wind isn't from
the north and the northwest, maybe it looks like
it's gonna back and come out of the northwest. And if that's the
case, that's not good. And we'll see what that is if you can't picture
that in your mind. So again, his song
is reflecting a lot of what's going on
with the weather. I had to throw this
satellite image in. I'm going to go over it
just to let you know that, to remind you and
remind me to tell you that, yeah, we're great with
regard to satellite imagery, but it's really hard
to pick the storm out. This is what the
storm was looking like so it's a little bit
difficult to pick it out on November 10th,
which this is for. All right, so again, the
storm is still evolving on November 10th, so at
3am the winds are reported coming from the
northeast at 42 knots. They're going together, the
Fitzgerald and the Anderson, with the Fitzgerald
ahead of the Anderson. And they're in radio contact. And they could actually
have radars on the ship so they could actually identify
where each other is as well. They're not just talking, but they have radar so
they can pick it up. 7am, the storm passes
over Marquette, Michigan and starts across Lake Superior. More poetically, that's the
meteorological explanation, more poetically
Lightfoot says it as, "The wind in the wires
make a tattle tale sound "and a wave broke
over the railing." He's saying it's getting nasty. Winds get really bad
and you gotta wire up. (imitates vibrating)
It vibrates and makes noise. So things aren't looking good. And they're gonna get worse. And the reason why is there's
gonna be a wind shift. Okay, so on the afternoon
of November 10th, a wind shift is evident. By 2:45pm the winds have backed, which means they have
moved counterclockwise, That's what meteorological
term back means, to the northwest and they're
steady at 42 knots, 43 knots. Waves are observed to
be 12 to 16 feet high. And that's reported
by the Anderson. At around this time,
the Fitzgerald, again, is talking with the
Anderson and they tell him and this is a quote out of the National
Transportation Safety Board, "A fence rail down,
two vents lost "or damaged, and a list." A list means
(imitates knife slash) that it had gone
like this, okay? So they know they're
taking damage. They know that
something's wrong. And at this time, the
storm's gotten so bad that it actually
closed the locks. But they're on their way. Back to the weather. These are the sea level pressure as a function of time going
from November 9th on the left all the way over to
November 11th on the right. And you can see, you know,
12 midnight, 6pm, etc. And then the different colors
represent the different cities in Wisconsin and in Michigan. And so when you see
the storm approaching, when the storm starts
getting to you, you can see that the
pressure rapidly drops. And then as the storm passes, the pressure generally goes up. If you're a meteorologist, you
know that when you're doing this rapid dropping, that
means that the packing of the isobars is tight,
which means the winds are really, really strong. If you're a folklorist,
you know the saying, fast rise after low
foretells a stronger blow. What's that saying is that if the pressures rapidly
rises after the low pressure that means your nasty weather
is yet to come, all right? So it's not over yet, even
though the pressure's going up. And again, these are
on the land surfaces. This is when the
Edmund Fitzgerald sank, at around this time. So again, remember
this is the west, so this is what's
heading their way. Really, really strong winds. The other information we
have that we plotted up was to look the
Marquette wind speeds and as well as the Sault Ste.
Marie wind speeds as well. That's on this axis and that's the black
line that's going up. And again the dotted
line represents the
time of the wreck. And then this
represents the pressure which is on the right-hand
side of the scale. And so again, you can see
that relationship between, as the pressure rapidly
drives the wind, even though the
pressure's going up, the wind is actually increasing
and getting really bad. These are the maximum wind gusts being measured either at
these stations in Marquette or these stations up
here in Sault Ste. Marie. Biggest gust measured
here is 62 knots. So basically, we're talking
about 100 miles per hour. (chuckles) Not a
fun wind to be in. This is the, again, a
quote from the song, "When the gales of
November come slashing," When they come, man,
it's nasty, right? "When afternoon came
it was freezing rain "in the face of a
hurricane west wind." All right, so they are
like hurricane-type winds. Hurricane category one, which
is the weakest hurricane, has to have sustained
winds of 64 to 82 knots. There's only been a
wind gust so it's really not quite a hurricane. It's more like, in the face
of a tropical storm west wind but it doesn't really flow. That's okay, we give
artists license. Basically, the point is,
it's getting nasty out there, really strong. The other thing is there's no real observations
of freezing rain. It's raining or it's snowing. But that doesn't
mean that there isn't freezing rain happening,
so it could have been freezing rain out on the lake. Temperatures were
below freezing, so it wouldn't be surprising. It's just that,
as far as I know, there was no real
observations of freezing rain. Again, that's not to
criticize the song. It's just to, you know,
be the weather geek. - Audience: You weren't
on the ship. - Yeah. (laughs)
And I wasn't on the ship. Could've have been
freezing rain. Well, neither was Gordon. All right, so again, back
to some more weather, looking at what was going on
in Madison during this time. Again, starting on
the 9th on the left going to the 11th, here's the
weather systems that tell you. The green is telling you
how much it's raining or precipitating and
then again, we're looking at the temperature drops in red. So, this is the Madison
temperature and the dew point. The green is the dew point.
The red is the temperature. You can see that boom, we
got hit by a thunderstorm. You probably felt that when a
severe thunderstorm comes in, a lot of times temperature
drops as you get hit by that gust front
and it brings it down and then the temperature
kept dropping after the cold front went by. Rapidly drops down. Once the cold front goes
by, the pressure begins to rise steadily. And daylight comes. That's another song, right
♪ Daylight comes and ♪ (laughs) And things
begin to warm up again. But again, you can see
that the temperatures are getting around
freezing around Madison. Certainly a big temperature
drop from up in the 60s, down into the low 30s, so that's a 30-degree
temperature drop. You'd feel that if you
were outside, right? And you probably would
be complaining to me rather than thanking
what's going on. All right, so back,
again, to the weather with regard to this wind shift
that we brought up already. The shift of the winds
from the northwest is very important to what
goes on with the weather and its impact on the ship. As this increased the fetch that's allowing large
waves to build up. Okay, so remember,
they took this way because they thought the winds
would be out of the north or the northeast. By the time they're
heading this way, the winds, again,
National Weather Service had the timing off. The winds are coming
this way, okay? So they're coming all along
this open area, open water area. That's not good if
you've been on a lake. And the reason why it's
not good is because when wind blows over the ocean,
it's gonna generate waves, so big bodies of water. And how big those waves get
is a function of three things. One is the wind speed. The wind speed is at
constant 45 knots or so. That's a strong wind, that's
gonna build up big waves. The second thing is the duration
of the winds, all right? That storm lasts
for several hours. Those winds are not dying.
They're constant. And the third
thing is the fetch, or the length of the open water. So as we go back here, now
that the winds are over here, they're strong, they're
steady, that they're continual, and they have a big fetch. So, they're gonna
generate big waves. And the type of waves that
they generate are these guys. So what we did here is this
blue line is a theoretical line of how winds, how big waves
could get theoretically. If the wind speed
was in knots here, this is the maximum wave height if you had an infinite fetch. So this would be, in some ways if you were over
the Pacific Ocean. So if you have a 50-knot
wind, you could generate waves that are about 50 feet high. Pretty big. These Xs right in here were
observations made by ships of the wave heights that
we were able to get. And so you can see a lot
of them are 20 feet high. All right, so again remember
the prediction was 12 to 18. Some observations were
even getting up to 30 feet. So these are, you know,
think of this building. You know, this is only maybe
15 feet from where we are. And imagine it moving. That's a lot of mass. And again here's the quote, "When suppertime came,
the old cook came on deck, "saying fella it's
too rough to feed ya." So, you can imagine rocking
in these big waves, right? We don't know if he
actually said that, but again, it tells you what
they're probably thinking. "At 7pm," so again, this
is from Lightfoot's song. "At 7pm a main
hatchway caved in, "He said, 'fellas it's
been good to know ya.' "The captain wired in,
he had water coming in "and the good ship
and crew was in peril. "And later that night when
the lights went out of sight "Came the wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald." Sounds very romantic.
And it is, right? But it's a little bit misleading
in the following ways: There's probably, well, they knew they were
having trouble, right? I mean, they were listing,
they lost a railing, they lost, as
we'll see later on, they lost their radar as well, so they know that they're
in trouble, right? But I doubt, given how
seasoned those folks were, that they probably thought
that they were gonna sink. Okay now, there's evidence
that came up later on that may point to
the fact that, again, they really knew
something was really bad. But at this point,
there's no indication. They know they're
having a tough time, but there's no indication
that they're worried about sinking at all. So, it's very unlikely
that anybody said, "Hey, been good to know you." (chuckles) Like, you
know, say goodbye. The other thing about
this is that he, the phrase there, "a
main hatchway caved in." So we went and saw Gordon
Lightfoot come here and sing about a month
ago or a year ago or so. How many people went there?
You could raise your hand. Oh, not so many.
Okay, a few people went there. It was fun to watch people sing. People sang along with this song
and many of his other songs. When he came this phrase,
I just looked around at what people were
doing and they were like, ♪ At 7pm the main hatch... ♪ So, what, uh, hm, huh, oh? ♪ The captain wired in he... ♪ You know, it's like,
oh I forgot the words. And it's not that
he forgot the words, it's that Gordon Lightfoot
changed the words, all right? Because there's no real, while this is the main,
we'll come to the theories of what sank the ship
and one of the arguments is that the hatchways, water
was getting into the hatchways. There's no real evidence that
that's actually what happened. So he said, "Well,
you know what, "I'm not going to put
that in there anymore." So he took it out
and he put this in: "At 7pm it grew dark." It was then he said, "Fellas it's been
good to know ya." This is now the official words. If you go to a live concert,
this is what he'll sing. So memorize it if you want
to sing along. Cause otherwise you're going
to go huh, what happened? And you'll sound
really intelligent, "Oh yeah, I knew he
changed the words." We have this in our book and we were required to
put in the new words. We weren't allowed
to use the old words. And he has good reasons
for it, like again, there's no real evidence
that it was the hatchways and in addition, many of the
families of the people who died didn't like them saying it
was the hatchways, right? Because in some ways that put
the blame then on the sailors which isn't a good thing to do because we don't know
what sank the Fitzgerald. All right, so in the middle
of this howling snowstorm that's going on, things
spraying, you could hardly see, you probably don't
wanna be on deck. Well, you definitely
don't wanna be on deck. In fact, that's another
curious thing that came up. We'll get to it
maybe in a minute. But around 3:20, the
captain on the Fitzgerald calls the Anderson
captain on radio and says, "Anderson, this is Fitzgerald. "I have sustained
some topside damage. "I have a fence rail down, "two vents lost and
damaged, and a list. "I'm checking," which
means he's slowing down. "Will you stay by me 'til
we get to Whitefish Bay? And of course,
they say, "You bet. "Do you have your pumps going?" And he says "Yes, we got
both our pumps going." Okay, so the Fitzgerald knows they're probably
taking on water. That's why they're listing. So they turn on the pumps
to try and get things out but it doesn't seem to
be helping very much. What we do know at
this time is that something has damaged
the Fitzgerald. Don't know what it is, but we know that
something has damaged it. (sighs) And that
dumb weather storm, it continues to intensify! By 4:10pm, the wind,
the gusts are blowing and it takes off the radar
antenna of the Fitzgerald. The winds (blows
air) blow it off. That's how bad they're getting. Power's knocked out at the
remote navigation station at Whitefish Bay. At 5pm, the lighthouse
north of Marquette, which is closet observing
station to the Fitzgerald at that moment, records
a gust of 66 knots, 77 miles per hour. That's wind that's moving. Cooper, whose captain
on the Anderson, estimated that the
wind gusts are more than 100 miles per hour. So again, in a nasty storm. Before 6pm, the captain of
the Fitzgerald, McSorley, tells another skip captain
via radio the following: "I have a bad list,
lost both radars. "And I'm taking on heavy
seas over the deck. "One of the worst seas
I've ever been in." Let's remember that phrase. Very seasoned captain. He's saying these are the
biggest seas I've ever been in. Other captains
haven't said that. So we're gonna use
that again as our, well, maybe what happened. Anderson's, at this point,
just 10 miles behind her. Still can pick
her up on a radar, so they know that they're there. Also, around this time, which
is also kind of interesting, there comes in again another
little piece of information that goes huh, interesting. Around this time, when he's
talking to this other ship, he leaves the communication
on, the radio on, and says, "Nobody goes topside." (chuckles) You know, it's like,
oh yeah, of course, right? But the analogy is
to a weather person, if there's a tornado coming
to me and we're in this room, I'm never gonna
have to tell you, "Don't go towards the tornado."
Right? You know, don't do that. So one of the arguments
is that he saying this but he's just curious because
all the seasoned sailors are gonna know you don't
go on deck, all right? Unless there's
something really damaged and you think you can fix it or you need to go out
and investigate it. Okay, so again, there's
no evidence for that but again, it's another
one of these mysteries that why would he say that? People know that you
shouldn't do that unless he thinks that
maybe somebody's gonna try and do something, given
that he's lost a couple of things on his deck already. This is the mystery
part that just keeps, every piece of
information that comes up just gets mysterious. 7:10pm, the Anderson gives
the navigations instruction to the radarless, right? Doesn't have its radar anymore,
doesn't know where it's going, doesn't know what
it's gonna run into. So the Anderson is
using it's radar to track it and tell
them where you're going. You're getting off track.
You need go to the east or to the west or whatever. Anderson first mate asks,
"Oh, and by the way, "how are you making out
with your problems?" Like the list and
the moving things. And the Fitzgerald replies,
"We are holding our own." Immediately after
that conversation, another severe snow squall
enshrouds the boats. If you've ever been
in a heavy snow storm, and all the sudden snow comes in
and you cannot see anything. Again, 1975, radars
aren't that advanced. Blocks the radars out as well, so they cannot see
the Fitzgerald at all. Can't see it visually, can't
pick it up on the radar because of the snowstorm. And just as suddenly at 7:30pm, you've probably been in
this as well, the snow ends. Boom. (imitates whooshing)
The skies clear out. Boom, gets beautiful
clear outside. Still cold, still windy,
but the storm's passed. Beautiful skies,
beautiful visibility. They can see from
the Anderson lights from ships going in other
directions, like going north, but they don't see the
Fitzgerald anywhere. Don't see its lights. So they think well, maybe
it's lost its power. Right, I mean, it's lost its
radar, why not lose its power? But it's not on the
Anderson radar as well. So they begin to
get worried, right? What happened? Hadn't been too long ago that they were actually
talking to them. Now big, 727-foot ship is gone. So Captain Cooper searches for the Fitzgerald
trying to find it. You know, wondering how do you
lose a 729-foot ore freighter in the middle of a lake when you were just talking
to it 10 minutes ago. That's the mystery. He called the Coast Guard
to warn them about it and about his worst fears. Again, this is a quote
from the documentation. "This is the Anderson. "I am very concerned
with the welfare "of the steamer
Edmund Fitzgerald. "I can see no lights as before. "I don't have them on radar. "I just hope he didn't
take a nosedive." Basically, the Fitzgerald
is gone, off the map. Where did it go? Whatever happened,
happened fast. You know, they tried to
send some rescue ships out to try and find it,
but one boat went out. Others didn't because
the seas were too rough. So they didn't wanna, you know, they would have been
risking their ships as well. The conditions when they
recovered the lifeboats suggests that there were no
attempts to leave the ship by launching the lifeboats. That probably would have
been really tough anyway, given the size of the seas. But these images that
they found indicate that the lifeboats were
basically just torn away from their holdings
and ripped away. No distress signals
were ever issued. So, they knew they
were in peril, they knew that they
were having problems, but they never issued a warning. They never said come
and get us, SOS. Indeed after, oh no, so, they found, these are
the damaged lifeboats. This was the weather again,
now on November 11th, 1975. It, again, just continues
its classic movement up into Canada. Now it's beginning to die. Its winds are weakening,
the low is filling in, the fronts are all going away. A little indication
that it just, that this maelstrom on
the Great Lakes anymore by the weather in
just 24 hours ago. On Monday, actually
it did do some damage. It actually drowned two people
in Grand Haven, Michigan. Wiped them off,
big wave come in, take people off piers back then. The southwest winds blew
across the entire lake of Lake Erie to Buffalo, generating waters nine feet
above normal in Buffalo, blowing a woman off
her second story porch. So again, strong. This, again, gives you the, can you imagine being
blown off your porch? I mean, that's kind of,
the winds these people were dealing with out on
the middle of the lake. Back to the storm,
you can sing this. "Does anyone know where
the love of God goes." You can sing it on your
own, in your own mind, not out loud. "When the waves turn
the minutes to hours." I mean, you could imagine what
it'd been in on that boat. Probably seemed like
forever going on. They got close to Whitefish Bay. If they, actually,
if the forecast would
have been spot on, they probably never
would have made north and they would have made
it to their destination. "They might have split up or
they might have capsized," "they may have broke
deep and took water." Actually, there's no
evidence and the indications are very much towards
not capsizing. There's no indication in the
analysis of the boat that, they found it,
obviously, on the bottom, that it actually capsized, so
that probably didn't happen. But back in 1976, it was
written a year afterwards, you know, there
was still theories including UFOs coming and
just plucking it away. 'Cause nobody knew
where it went. That was, of course,
was disproven. (laughs) In case you didn't know.
So, what happened? There are a couple of
theories, again, that come out and I'm sure they'll be
always ones that come out. There was a report, as
there are in any disasters, from the National
Transportation Safety Board that investigated in it. There's no survivors, there's
no witnesses that's going on. So again, it's all
conjecture and mystery and trying putting together
pieces of the puzzle, right? Which makes scientists, I mean, this is what we
love to do, right? Take all these little pieces
and put something together. It's clear that
all of the evidence that we point to suggests
that the Fitzgerald was taking on water someway. Water was getting in there. A couple of ways to indicate
that, one of which that, the one that I like to
think of the most is that if you're taking on
water onto a boat, taking on lots of water, what's gonna happen is
as you take on the water, the boat gets heavier, right? And you just get
lower and lower. And now those waves that
everybody thinks are big, you begin to think that
they're the hugest waves you've ever been in, right? Because now, instead
of being 20 foot waves, they're 25 foot waves. Okay, and they're
crashing over the boat and they just look
really, really large. Here are the two, I
would say, theories, that still are, have evidence, evidence is
like the wrong word because there's nothing,
again, to say which is which. There are evidence for each one, although there are
also questions about, well, if that happened then
why didn't this happen? One of those is that
there was a problem with the hatch covers. And this is what the National
Transportation Safety Board ended up concluding,
that water somehow was getting into
the hatch covers by themselves, taking on water. Now you can take on a lot of
water and not know it, right? Because the hatch covers are
filled with these things. Imagine a pile of
sand, pour water on it, where's that water gonna go? It's not gonna come out
for the pumps to clear out. It's gonna fill in the spaces
of all of these marbles. Okay, so if water's
coming into the hatchway, you can turn on your pumps and you're not gonna
get it out of there. It's just gonna stay in
with the iron marbles and that's gonna
bring your ship lower and lower in the water. There's a problem
with that, though, and that is that if the waters
are coming in the hatchways, well, it's coming into
the middle of the boat and that wouldn't cause a list. So, somehow the water
has to be in the ballast off to, I think it was
the starboard side. I think that's the
way they were listing. You need to get into the side and get it unevenly distributed
so that the boat has a list. That wouldn't happen
with the hatchway theory. The other is that
it bottomed out. As it was going by, if you
go back and look at the maps, there's some shoals in there. The water's only 26 feet deep, but there's a lot
of waves there. It's possible that the boat
could have touched bottom. All that weight, touch
bottom, could develop a crack. You got a crack,
water now comes in, it's gonna go into the ballast, you're gonna list, you're
gonna be able to pump it out. Problem is, no evidence that
there's any damage on the boat. As we'll see in the
image that's coming up, the boat was, they found
the boat and the problem is is that in terms of
validating this theory, is that the stern is
flipped over upside down, so you can see the bottom. And there's no evidence that
that bottom hit the shoal or hit the ground in any way. The bow part, the
front half of the boat is sitting in the
mud right-side up. So you can't see the bottom, so you don't know if it
actually hit the bottom. So that's why these
two theories generally have the most
credence, I should say, in terms of what
caused it to go down though there's no shooting gun. There's no loaded bullet that's gonna say
this one or that one. Except for what John and I say. It was the weather! That's what brought
the boat down. It was those big winds
and those big waves and somehow the water got into
the boat and brought it down. There's been a number
of expeditions. I like to look at this one which was from the '76
Coast Guard expedition. You can see them there,
you can read them. Ones that went down to see it. There was actually one, I
don't know if that's on here, there was an expedition,
humans actually went down there to try to find some stuff, but they could only stay down
there for like four minutes before they had to come up. This is a pretty accurate image. So, this is the stern
side of the boat, the back of the boat. You can see,
flipped upside down. This is the bow side of
the boat, right-side up. So this is drawings that
came from this expedition. Other expeditions suggest that this is actually
more parallel, so it actually should be
sitting more like this, more parallel to
where the bow is. So there may be a
little misdrawing there, but otherwise it's pretty good. This is the other drawing that
I like that's pretty good. The things about this and
then the other expeditions as they went through
and looked at it is that there is
indication when you look at how it's sitting
on the bottom, it's deep in this mud, which means it hit the
bottom really hard. There's also evidence, if you look at these
wonderful pellets, they're not just
around the boat. They're scattered all
over a debris field and that suggests that
when it hit bottom, they were not one piece. It had already broken
apart and that when this was on its way down, this
was probably still up at the surface, spilling
out some of these marbles, spreading it out over the site. A lot of this damage
that you see here as well was associated with the
impact when it got down to the bottom and
hit the ground, not associated with damage
that would have been done by waves or water. He ends his song in
kind of nice way. "In a musty hall in Detroit, "they prayed in the maritime
sailors' cathedral." One of the voyages
that went down recovered the bell and that's
now sitting in a museum and on November 10th,
they'll have a ceremony and they'll go there and
they'll ring the bell for the 29 sailors that died. There were 29 people
on boat, on board, that were killed
during that sinking. And this is a list of them. I think it's always
good to put this out because there is always gonna be another
extratropical cyclone. That's what we call this
mid-latitude cyclones, extratropical cyclones. There's always gonna
be these storms and there's probably
always gonna be shippers on the Great Lakes so there's
always gonna be accidents. We haven't had a really
big one recently. In fact, I think
since '75, maybe. We've had boats go
down with individuals or couples on there,
but not a big disaster like the Edmund Fitzgerald was. But people are unique
and irreplaceable, so it's always good to
pause and remember the loss of the 29 people that
were on that boat because that loss is forever. To end more on a happy note,
(chuckles) remember these? I'm gonna play this video. Oh, maybe, hopefully. Oh no, it's not playing. So you know what
happens with this? Yeah it wobbles, it wobbles,
and then it collapses. And it falls down.
Galloping Gertie, right. It's that one. I'm not sure why
it's not playing. It did last night,
it's fascinating. You can see right in
here, it's a little dark but you could actually
see it collapsing. It's a standard thing. Happened in? - Audience: 1940.
- 1940, right, because? What happened here?
(audience speaks off mic) Armistice Day of 1940. Right, this is the storm path of the Armistice
Day storm of 1940. Pretty much took the same track, once it got east of the Rockies, as the storm that sunk
the Edmund Fitzgerald. And look at the dates. Oh my goodness, November
10th, November 11th. Right around this
time, same thing. This ended up killing
about 152 people, I think about that many
people in this area. A lot of them were duck hunters because it was a beautiful
day just like today. And they were out hunting. Beautiful, 60 degrees. You go outside, you
take off your jacket, you go hunting, you
don't know its coming. And then (claps) wham, boom,
temperatures drop 30 degrees and now you're stuck. And there's some great
books about this story and stories about
this storm as well. But again, it points
to the fact that yeah, these storms happen
and they will happen and they cause a lot of damage. This is what the weather map
looked like for that day. So you can see, the
gradient here is huge. So really, really strong winds and really strong
temperature drops. If you weren't around in 1940, I'm gonna guess you
were around in 1998. 1998, we basically
had the same storm as the Edmund Fitzgerald. Here's the path of
the Edmund Fitzgerald, this one right in
here with the red. Here's the path of the
storm on, look at that. 11. November 10th, November 11th. 11, 9th. Basically took the same
path, same type of thing. If you were here for that day,
you would remember the winds 'cause they were
really, really intense. So again, these storms happen. They're not uncommon. It's a matter of whether or
not they actually hit us. Here's the satellite
image from that that reminds us of what
changed between 1940, when more than 150 people died, to 1998 when? to 1975, when
over 30 people were killed, to 1998 when? (students speak off mic) Nobody was killed. Three things happened. One is we have
better radars, right? So we can really
monitor what's going on. Second thing that happens is we got really good
satellites in '98 and those satellites feed the numerical weather
prediction models to tell them where the storm is and where it's
probably moving to. Third is our numerical
weather prediction models have gotten a heck of a
lot better in 40 years. So the predictions are
much, much better right now. Plus all the warning
systems that go with it and plus the access, right? So this was 98, we're due. We're approaching
20 years later. We should be getting
another one these storms and if we do, I'm gonna
bet that a lot of you are gonna pull out this thing and track it on your radar
to see what's going on. So that's why: We've gotten
better at forecasting, better at warning, therefore
better at protecting lives. So with that, thank you.
I really appreciate coming here. Thanks for all the
TV folks and to Tom. (audience applauds)
