Today Josh and Chuck delve into the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Not the song, but the maritime accident. Though the song makes an appearance.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio AHOII and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here with us too, and this is stuff you should know beginning Oh the year edition Hainbird here heard Bob? That was great? Was that the sweetest chef singing? Gordon Lightfoot? I think it kind of nailed it. You totally nailed hey. Before we get going, I want to make a quick announcement, very sadly, Emily's grandmother Mary, as we referred to her as the the general of the stuff you senior general of the stuff you should know, Army. I don't like where this is going, Chuck. I know she finally passed away about two weeks shy of a hundred and two, so, you know, don't feel bad about the life short changed. She got every bit of it and about a hundred and maybe a half of those years were pretty darn good. I'm not gonna get on my soapbox about you know the fact that we live in a state where our loved ones can just slowly dwindle into nothingness, which is awful to see happen. But uh, we finally lost Mary and it's always sad, even though you kind of pre grieve these things, but I have. It will be up on Facebook now and the Stuff you Should Know Army Facebook page. Something we always did for her at her birthday was gave her a shout out, and she loved more than anything. Sitting around and reading the hundreds of well wishes from all over the world just tickled her pink. So we're there's an in memorium post up. By the time this will come out, I'm gonna get it up there on the Stuff you Should Know Army page via Aaron Cooper somebody. So it would be great if people as a as a final gesture, I said a couple of words about it. Yeah, well r I p Mary, Yeah, Steph, you should know Army general, if not like five star general even maybe absolutely it was rough at the end. So it's always good to see someone very old that's not doing great too to pass along, you know, to go home, that's what they call it, once you get to that age, going home, like Motley Crue saying that. Yeah, I think that's what they were talking about. That wasn't Motley Crue. Who'saing that? My mom go oh, that was AUSSI yeah, but Motley Crewe had one about going home to yeah, Home Sweet Home. We saw them play that. I think you're thinking of smoking in the boy's room. I was, wasn't that thin, Lizzie? No, well originally yeah, I think so. Well, there you go. I'm a O G. Speaking of O G s Chuck, I feel like we should talk about one of the O G Iron freighters of all time that met a tragic end, and it was called the Edmund Fitzgerald. And I just want to say, I promise for the rest of the year my segways will be much better than that. Well, I hit everyone with an obituary right out of the gate. It's true. I think you did a pretty good job. Um here's how dumb I am. I knew about the song because it's a song I hate more than almost any other song. Why it's terrible? Why no, it's not what about it's terrible? You know? Like folk stuff? I love folk music. I'm not a big fan of sea shanties, and this is a classic. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot is a classic sea shanty because they don't have like, they don't have a chorus. They don't have a hook, they're not written for that purpose. It's just sort of this repetitive thing, over and over, take me to the bridge. There's no bridge, there's no nothing but that repeated Swedish chef bit that I did. So I knew about the song, but I never looked closely at the lyrics, um because I hate it so much. So I so dumb. I always thought that Edmund Fitzgerald was like the Titanic or some classic old ocean liner from like the nineteenth century or something. I did not know that it was a a you know, fairly modern day uh like metal or shipping vessel. Yeah, that's exactly what it was. It was a Great Lakes vessel. Didn't know that. I thought it was probably like nineteen ten or something. Yeah. No, it's sunk in nineteen seventy five. And it wasn't even a twinkle in a um shipmaker's I in nineteen ten. It wasn't created until I think nineteen fifty eight was when it was finally launched, so it was fairly recent. I would say. Yeah, And to my uh defense, I'm gonna defend myself here because you're not stepping up, uh, when you raised in Atlanta, you don't like the shipwrecks of the Midwest of the early seventies. You know, it's just not something that a kid really learned. So okay, So the reason I wasn't stepping up was because that it is what kids learned. When you grow up in Toledo or Detroit or Cleveland, you probably did right, Like, yeah, I was raised knowing about the Edmund Fitzgerald anything about it, And I didn't have a seagoing member in my entire family, and my whole family knew about the Edmund Fitzgerald for some reason. Because if you sit down and look at it on paper, uh, you you will wonder why it actually you know, it was a very famous shipwreck, and there was some some things to it. There was a huge ship. It was a very beloved ship before it saying, so there were a couple of things that could make it, you know, memorialized a little more than the average shipwreck. But it is at least around the Great Lakes region, it is second only to Titanic as far as shipwrecks of import go. Like that is how big the Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck was around there and still is I think to this day, and they love that song up there too. I know that for a fact. So I'm sure there's people who hated out there though too, that a lot of people are mad at me. Yeah. He Gordon Lightfoot, the guy who's who sang the song. He was known as like the Pride of Canada. I think I don't know if he's still around or not, but he was definitely a beloved songwriter. So we definitely have lost a few Canadian fans. Things to you, I like Gordon Lightfoot. I liked that other big hit he had, which one? What was it? I saw that there was another hit and I could not figure out what it was. Didn't he sing? Uh Sunday b b d DP dude, dude to see about even be yes, I don't know if that was him. I know the song you're talking about, then that's that's a great song. I agree, clearly don't know these lyrics. So let's let's get into this, okay, because there's probably plenty of people outside of the United States, outside of the northern Midwest, UM and Northeast, who haven't really heard much about the Edmund Fitzgerald if at all. So let's talk about the Edmund Fitzgerald. Shall we sure, uh? And you know, I kind of gave away a little bit of the story and when I said it was it carried metal ores, specifically iron ore. They found a lot of this stuff in the eighteen hundreds in Ontario and Canada and Wisconsin and Minnesota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and so all of a sudden an industry was born where these great lakes all of a sudden saw these big ships and they were like, hey, we got these uh, this iron ore. We're gonna ship it in the form of Taco nite pellets all over the Midwest to wherever they need steel. And it was so lucrative that other companies got in the game because they were like, hey, you can invest in the ship. You don't. You have to be in that business and you can make tons of money. And that's what happened with the Eddie fitz Yeah, because the Edmund Fitzgerald was owned by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. Weird, and there's no like, whoa wait a minute, what's the catch here? There is none. Northwestern Mutual UH commissioned a ship builders on Lake erie Um to build a design and build a ship for them for the purpose of of transporting or across the Great Lakes, just as an investment. Yeah. And one of the one of the reasons why it became such a attractive investment for for anybody, including an insurance company, was that the St. Lourd's Seaway was opened, I believe in nineteen nine, and at that point the Great Lakes were connected to the Atlantic Ocean, so now you had even more of a market to export to your iron ore too. So um, it wasn't a bad idea, and there was really nothing wrong with their ownership from top to bottom. From what I could tell. It wasn't like some insurance scam. No, I don't think so. As a matter of fact, it would have been pretty audacious to have named the ship after the president of Northwestern Mutual if the whole thing was a scam. You know that's men Fitzgerald was right, Yeah, for sure, And apparently the legend goes Edmund Fitzgerald, the president of the insurance company, did not want the ship named after him. I could not see why, but at a board meeting he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and the board voted and went ahead and overruled him and named it after him. Anyway, as the legend goes, it was, he was probably just uh, sort of demurring and being like, Hey, I'm gonna step out, but make sure this happens. Oh I heard when he came back he went and bonkers and broke some chairs and the water pictures. Now, he seems like a pretty mild bannerd guy from what I could tell. Sure to have a ship named after you. Uh So, should we go over a little bit of the nuts and bolts of the or I guess not really bolts, because you'll soon learn this thing was welded man. That was chef's kiss of the Eddie fits the s s. Edmond Fitzgerald was seven ft long thirty nine ft tall from the top of the keel to the bottom of the deck, and had three and this you know, some of this stuff you'll you want to put a pin in. Um had three cargo holds that were separated by bulkheads or they're called screen bulkheads. In other words, they're they're not watertight. So if water comes in one of these cargo holds and fills up enough, it's or tilts a certain way, it can go into the other cargo holds and you know there's three of them, and if they you know, it's just bad news if something starts filling up. But it wasn't like a weird design screen bulkheads or it wasn't a weird thing. No, because this ship was designed and built to sail on the Great Lakes. It wasn't intended to be an ocean going ship. Um. And on the Great Lakes, yeah, I think get some pretty bad weather from time to time, specifically in November. Apparently. Um, it's nothing like an Atlantic storm or even a Pacific storm, I'm sure. UM. So yeah, it's not very weird that it was built like that. Um. It was also designed to hold up to third thousand tons tons of tack knite pellets. Um. Normally it would handle something around twenty six thousand, but it could. It kept getting rated. The company kept going to the Coastguard and saying, it can hold more, it can hold more, and the Coastguard kept signing off on increasing the load limits to up to I think about thirty thousand tons at one point. Um. And again this is not this is not unheard of. It's not super weird. Um. But the Edmund Fitzgerald was like known as a record breaker, and usually it broke its own records. So it was a very well known, beloved, well thought of ship on on the Great Lakes. That's right. Uh. And I mentioned that it was welded. Most ships at the time, and I think still most ships are riveted because you know, welding. Welding is great, but welding doesn't hold up like rivets hold up. But again, this was a ship for the Great Lakes. Uh. It was launched without even being finished completely. It's not like they had big holes in the bottom or anything like that, but they it was like, wait, white, we forgot to put in the plug, which I've forgotten actually on a boat before. Um. Yeah, yeah, it's no good water comes in. Is that where the rope trauma came from? But all right, you're getting closer. Awesome, Okay, we're getting there. That's a big hint. So they had these um this was sort of unusual for a ship like this, for an ore shipping ship. Um. They had a really sort of styled out pilot house and crew quarters and mess area because and this is the stuff that wasn't quite finished when they launched. Because this insurance company owned it. They kind of it was a bit of a feather in their cap to own this at the time largest ship on the Great Lakes. I think for about a year or so it was the largest one. And wait, I have something about that, Chuck. The ship that overtook it the next year was one foot longer. Wouldn't that just dry view bananas? Yeah, that's clearly on purpose, for sure. Yeah, definitely. Although I'm looking now, the Edmund Fitzgerald was nine ft long. Maybe they should have just surrounded that off. I don't Yeah, I don't know why they did that. Maybe they were like, well, that's how how much iron we have to build this kind of asking for that extra foot though, you know, I guess so. But they could have made it two ft bigger. Yeah, it's any ten feet bigger, he knows, but one foot that is a thumb in the I I think. Uh So. The long and the short of it is these insurance executives were super proud of this ship. They thought it was kind of cool and they like to go out on it and like right along on these runs. So that's why they had sort of extra nice accommodations for the ship. That was kind of I mean the welding design was I don't want to say weird, but it was definitely not UM what they usually did. But again it wasn't like some big red flag, No, I was like an accepted way to build a ship. From what I could tell, Yeah, those executives would go out on these voyages because the UM Edmund Fitzgerald was so fast. One of his nicknames was the Toledo Express because it could make it from Duluth, Minnesota to Toledo, Ohio and back in five days. So if you were an executive could just basically go for a couple of day voyage and you would be eating like lobster and steak from what I understand, like they were styled out for sure. So it's a really fast ship. It could hold a lot of ore. Uh. There were frequently insurance executives partying on it. It was. It was again a well regarded ship on the Great Lakes. I can't stress that enough. It was very well regarded long before the song. So these uh. One thing we do mention uh that you should also put a pin in is hatch clamps. Uh. They had those three cargo holes and in order to load the iron ore into the cargo holes. They had twenty one hatch innings I guess seven apiece and they were very very large hatch openings eleven ft by forty eight feet and the doors were made of a single steel slab and they had a rubber gasket to keep it watertight. But there were sixty eight clamps per hatch and you had to manually like crank these things down. So every time you're loading unloading these things, that's almost fire clamps that have to be engaged by human power. And we say that because apparently when uh the day of the Faithful Voyage, it was reported that they don't think all those hatches were completely down and if like the weather was really good, it sounds like they did that kind of thing where you're like building ikea furniture, you know, like I don't need all eight screws. I can probably just get by with the three, right. I've seen both. So this is a really big point of contention because it it either places the blame on the crew for their fate or unfairly places the blame on the crew for their face. UM it does seem like it was totally within the role of possibility that UM under fair Weather. The captain of an iron carrier or carrier um would have set sail without all the clamps done, but they wouldn't have been like just forget, let's go watch some MTV. They would still they would just be putting the clamps on while they were setting safe that then then they would finish as they were making their way out to sea. So it's possible that they did leave port that day, I think November nine, Sunday, November without all of their clamps hatched um or all of their hatches clamped, But that doesn't mean that they weren't clamped within the next couple hours exactly. One other thing we'll mention before we go to break is that, uh and this this kind of is somewhat noteworthy. A lot of times you'll have if you're building a ship, you build a couple of them because you're already building that, we might as well build another one. And that's called a sister ship, and it means it's the ship of basically the same design and materials that you're just knocking out in tandem. And even though the Eddie Fits did not have a an actual true sister ship, there was the Arthur B. Homer that was built at the same shipyard about a year later, and they were designed very similarly. And we bring this up because it's the kind of thing where, you know, if you look at the sinking of a ship, you might look at the sister ship and say, well, we're their design flaws, like why didn't this one sink? If this one didn't sink? And the Homer never had any problems it. It fared well until when it was uh scrapped and out of service. But it will come up a couple of times here and there. Okay, nice set up, man, I think it is bring time. All right, let's do it, so Chuck, I think I don't know if he was the original captain, he was certainly probably one of the most well known captains of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the guy named Peter Pulser, and he was well known for going through these locks, like this ship was designed to just barely squeeze through the locks, so it was an enormous thing to see um coming, like, you know, you could reach out and touch it basically as it was going through the locks. And then to make it even more impressive, Captain Pulser would alternately play music from speakers to basically give everybody a show. Well, the Edmund Fitzgerald was going through the locks, or he would use a bullhorn to shout facts about how amazing the ship was. Yeah, he was pretty cool. He was not the ofen when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down instead. Uh, that captain was Ernest m McSorley. And much like the Edmund Fitzgerald, McSorley was well regarded on the lakes as well. Yeah, and McSorley was sort of known, as we'll see later as someone who would kind of kind of go through a storm if at all possible. Um. It didn't seem like he was reckless or anything like that or would you know, relish in putting his crew in danger. But there were, you know, there were times where certain boats would pull back and say, hey, maybe we should wait this one out. The other boats would push through, and he seemed to be the kind of captain that would generally try and push through. Yeah. So, um, if there was a faithful day in the history of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it was Sunday, November because that was when the fits the Toledo Express set sail from Superior, Wisconsin, carrying twenty six thousand, one hundred and sixteen tons of aconite pellets. And I did some math, pretty sure it's right here we go. But that's fifty eight and a half million pounds of muskeet sized pellets of iron ore, or for our friends outside of the Imperial System world, twenty six point five million kilograms. That's a lot. And add on to that fifty gallons of fuel oil. Ye, that that's a lot of weight itself. So but it wasn't, you know, technically overloaded. It's just it was well loaded, yes, And it left it set sail at two fifteen in the afternoon for Zug Island in Lake Michigan, and I was like, Zug Island, Zug Island, it's off off Detroit. But I was like, but that's not what I know it from. And then I remembered, do you remember our episode on the humm people can just hear some people here at home and it drives them crazy. Well, there's a windsor hum, and I remember they associated with Zug Island, and I looked it up and it turns out that during the pandemic, uh U s Steel Company, who had a steel plant on Zug Island UM basically shuttered their operations just for do due to lack of um um availability of raw materials, right, and the HUM vanished. That's right. So they figured it out. It was US Steel, one of their one of their UM components of their whole setup. Like that I knew too. I thought it was definitely worth mentioning. All right. So they're headed towards that island, which is in Lake Michigan. H Like you said, it was two fifteen, About two hours and fifteen minutes later, at four thirty, the s s Arthur M. Anderson set sail from Minnesota headed to Gary, Indiana. And they're going to two different places, but they took a similar route, which we'll talk about why here in a minute. UM. But uh, the sort of again along on the short of this is that there was another boat, another ship nearby kind of for this whole route, and nearby meaning under twenty miles and sometimes even as close as like twelve to fifteen miles away, which is which is not tailgating someone, but as pretty close as far as ship travel goes. Yeah, I mean they could keep their their lights in sight the whole time. Basically, UM, and the Anderson would end up basically being like the the hero of the story. UM. So we just keep that in mind. So, UM, a couple of things about the Great Lakes themselves. Like I said, UM, ships designed to travel the Great Lakes are probably not quite as as hardy as a sea going vessel, but they're still pretty tough because the Great Lakes has some pretty bad weather, particularly in November. UM. And when storms start blowing across the Great Lakes in November, the sailors up there called the Witch of November, and usually November is the end of the season. They'll have their last runs of the year in November, try to get as much shipping in as they can before the weather turns. And when the weather turns, it really really turns, especially on Lake Superior, because Lake Superior is huge and long, and there's a lot of room for that wind to blow un unobstructed across the lake and really pick up some steam. Yeah. You know, we've we've talked about this in our hurricane episodes and tsunami episodes. Anytime you have long stretches of water that a storm is riding across is gonna pick up energy from that water and moisture and wind is going to create bigger and bigger waves. I think we did one on rogue waves, which is really cool. And this large stretch of Lake Superior was uh. I mean, it wasn't the most well traveled area. And and it seems like at least at the time, Lake Superior itself, despite being h massively huge, was one of the least traveled of the Great Lakes, at least as far as these shipping lines go. Yeah. I guess just because there were there was more action on the other Great Lakes maybe. Yeah. Think only about three hundred and fifty shipwrecks uh in Lake Superior out of the and we saw different numbers. I think six thousand is what most people around. Six thousand shipwrecks and all the Great Lakes, I saw a size ten, but I think it might depend on that might be like all boats or something. I don't know. Yeah, I'm not sure either. I definitely saw both um, but still that's a pretty low ratio UM. And it's because it's just not quite as traveled. Um. It's in addition to being huge and wide, it's also really deep. I saw somewhere that it's about feet deep, but it's at this point it's also extremely cold. Where on the lake bottom a few hundred feet down, um, there's there's basically no aerobic um life down there. It's it's just devoid of It's like basically a freezer. It hovers at about thirty two thirty three degrees just above freezing um or wait, zero degrees is just above freezing, but still it's really really cold. Thirty two degrees is um and so anybody who falls in the water is going to catch hypothermia pretty fast. It's just one of the parts of the lake like it's always cold basically year round. You just have to know that about it, all right. So I think that's a great setup for what's going on. What these lakes look like. It sounds like I'm going to break, but we just did that. So they they set out the Anderson and the Fitzgerald, and they decide because of this weather coming in, I believe the most dangerous weather there at Superior comes from the northwest. North by northwest, is that right? So they decide, all right, this weather is coming, We're gonna take what they you know, people that sail that area jokingly called the scenic Route, which was basically two to try and stay as far away from the meat of this storm as possible, and it would take a little bit longer, but it was supposedly a safer route if you have bad weather coming in. Yeah, but as we'll see, it would be a very fateful decision. And this was a this happened to be a voyage chuck full of fateful decisions. But that scenic route, and they purposely took the scenic route because the weather was supposed to be bad. I think they left at two thirty pm and by seven pm there was a gale warning for the entire lake. So that's a big storm. I think this one actually came up from Oklahoma, they said, across the plains, hit the lake and just started messing things up. Um, So they took this northern route to try to stay away from the weather as much as possible. But like you said, McSorley was known as a heavy weather captain, so he was definitely the type to push ahead. He wasn't the only one to push ahead through this this storm. There were plenty of others the Arthur Anderson among others, who were just making their way through the storm because they had ships they believed in. But they also passed a handful of different places where they could have stopped and waited out the storm in safety, and didn't. They pressed on another handful of fateful decisions. Yeah, because you can like pull behind an island or sneak into a bay or something like that and ride it up for a little while. Uh. Instead they traveled along that north shore and then made about a seventy degree right turn down the eastern shore toward Whitefish Bay. And this is where, like, if you got to Whitefish Bay, then you were kind of in a safety zone even if it was bad weather. Uh. And then that would like kind of send you on to what's called the Sioux Locks s o O. But in order to get there, they had to cross a big stretch of open water with all this weather hitting them broadside. It was a sort of a dangerous sprint to try and get to Whitefish Bay. And the weather started getting worse and worse throughout the day and they went past. Uh. And I looked this up too, so I hope I get it right, Uh, MITCHI Pecotton Island very nice, and that was where you know, they could potentially find some safe harbor there. But they didn't stop there. They just kept going. Yeah, they kept going, and that was probably the last place that they could have stopped. Um. There was another small island called Cariboo Island, and if you look at it on the map, you're like, I don't think that would help very much. So, um, Mitch Pecoten Island is probably the last chance that they had. And again MC's oiley said, no, we can make it. But when they made that right hand turn um and started heading along parallel to basically the eastern shore, the weather that hit the far western shore of Lake Superior could have made a straight line right to them unobstructed. So they were turning um their side, the weakest part of their ship into the worst weather of the storm that had picked up in the worst month for storms of any given year. Um, that's what they did when they took that right turn. Uh. So MC sorley radios at three thirty the other ship that Anderson and says a few things that we're going to break down here says I have a fence rail down. I've lost a couple of events and have a list. So the fence rail is what you think it is, and it's held up by cable. Um, you know, going along the perimeter of the deck, and we don't know exactly what happened. There are a few theories it could have just snapped because the the ship might have been flexing at this point along its length, and this is where if a boat is riveted, it's going to be a little stronger. If the ship is twisting, then if you have it welded, like a weld could break loose and not hold. Uh. Rivet is supposed to hold. That's why they make, you know, big ships and jumbo jets out of them, right, And it's too basically put up with a certain amount of flex right, Yeah, absolutely, like you can. For my understanding, like if you lose a rivet, it's not the same thing as like breaking a weld, right, yeah, same same here. I think that's that's correct. So the the upshot of it is if they lost their fence rail because a wave took it off, that's one thing. But if they lost their fence rail because the ship flexed so much that it popped off, that's a different thing, especially for a welded ship. So we don't exactly know what happened with that, but it was enough that MIxS Ortley mentioned it and Again, this is a seasoned veteran Great Lakes pilot Um and anything he mentions or doesn't mention is significant in retrospect. So he mentions that he mentioned the vents being gone UM, and the vents were used to maintain air pressure in the hold, so they might be open a little bit, closed a little bit depending on what was in there, how empty it was UM and that also was to keep the ship intact um in an event, being gone means that there was now a hole in the deck where water could slash in, but it wasn't enough that it was going to sink the ship. But again that was worth mentioning by Mick Sorley. Uh. And then the last thing you mentioned is that I have a list uh. And in shipping, that doesn't mean, you know, uh, go buy milk and take out the trash. That means that the boat is tilting to one side. And that's definitely not a good thing because that means there's probably water somewhere in the hold, like and maybe one of those cargo holds, and it's not evenly distributed. So your your boat is is catti wamp us. Right, That's a great way to put it. So that was what do you say, three thirty pm? Right, That's when he radioed, yeah, okay, so, um, and this was November ten. I'm not sure if we said they set sail on November nine, and this is now about twenty four hours later after they've gone underway, So this is three thirty on November ten, and they're still making their way. McSorley told Anderson that, um, I'm concerned enough that I'm going to slow down to let you catch up, just so you can be a little closer in case something happens. That's significant. That's that he's saying, like I need the help of another ship or I just want to have another ship around for safety. And then also he may him that his pumps were running. He apparently said both pumps, which is quizzical because they had six pumps on board. They had to two thousand gallon per minute auxiliary pumps. Just stop and think about that for a second. Then they had four seven thousand gallon per minute pumps, so if you put them all together, that ship could pump out thirty two thousand gallons of water per minute with its pumps. And he had at least a couple of them running. So he knew that he had been taking on water. I just get the impression he didn't know how much, al right. So less than one hour from that point, Fitzgerald radios again to the Anderson and said, I I've lost both of the radar units. And this just sort of presumed that it was probably just from these big waves crashing over and smashing them. And he said, will you please stay close to at this point because we were gonna need some navigational assistance. We need you close by. Things are getting really rough out here. I'm sure the Anderson was like, no, kidding, like we're in this storm too, but you know, Acquiesced stayed within fifteen miles of the Fitzgerald and as they were headed toward Whitefish Point, Um, the points radio beacon wasn't working. This was later confirmed that it wasn't working, and there was a ship another ship nearby called the It was a Swedish ship called the A Before and Fits called them said hey, I hear there's no radio beacon at the point at Whitefish Point Um, but is the is the white House still operating? And oh yeah, that's exactly what happened. So apparently the lighthouse is still working. But the radio beacon wasn't. And then the other thing mcsureley very key told the a before was I've got a bad list and these are the worst seas I've ever experienced. And then on a hot mic was heard saying don't allow nobody on deck. So all of the crew at this point is like sheltering and working. Yeah, but I mean, I think sheltering as much as anything. It had a bad list. It was getting battered by waves that I think that Anderson later reported were up to ft and it was taking on water to some degree or another. We just don't know. Seven ten pm, so this is this is this. The first time he radioed the Anderson saying we got some problems was two thirty. They've you know, made it, made their way all the way along to seven ten pm, and the Anderson this time got in touch with the Edmn Fitzgerald and said, hey, there's another ship heading northbound. Just wanted to give you the heads up. How are you guys doing And the response from the Edmund Fitzgerald was we're holding our own. And that turned out to be the final message from the Edmund Fitzgerald. That was at seven ten pm a squall whipped up and temporarily not only um blinded the visuals from the Anderson of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it swamped their dar too, so they couldn't catch anything on radar for about ten minutes. Then the whole thing cleared up and they could see again. But what they couldn't see was the Edmund Fitzgerald. And it's not that they couldn't see because they could see that northbound ship further away. They could see the lights of Whitefish Point further away. But what they did not see was the Edmond Fitzgerald. So in that ten minutes, the Edmund Fitzgerald went from being on top of the Great Lakes to sinking, which is astoundingly fast for a seven hundred and thirty sorry, twenty nine ft ship. Yeah, super fast. Uh. I think that's a great place for a second break, and we'll talk about some of the theories and what happened right for this all right, So the Anderson has uh looked out their front window ten minutes after they hear that the Eddie fits is holding its own or her own I guess even though I did see one of the people referred to the Edmund Fitzgerald as a he but then everywhere else I look said she, yeah, maybe they were talking about the actual president of the insurance company. Maybe so. Uh, so they get the word ten minutes later, the Edmund Fitzgerald is no longer in sight. And uh the Anderson captain, Captain Cooper started to try and get in touch with the coast Guard and said, hey, that we think this this boat has sank out here. The ship we can't even see it anymore, and the coast Guard didn't believe him at first. I had to get all the way to Whitefish Point, uh and pull in there, and there was clearly no Edmund Fitzgerald there at that point. Before they finally got on the emerge and see response. But again another like you know, and it may have been futile, you know, sort of uh in retrospect, considering how fast this thing went down. Um, maybe there was no chance of saving any lives. But there wasn't much of an effort that could be made because the storm was so bad. Uh. The coast Guard didn't have a rescue vessel available unless it came from I think Minnesota, which was like twenty four hours away. Uh. They had search aircraft, but they couldn't perform rescues. Uh. And they said to the Anderson, Hey, I know you just came in from this horrible experience at sea. Would you go back out there in this weather and look for survivors? And the Anderson, to their credit, said yeah, well we'll do it. We'll do our best. Yeah. Super to their credit because they didn't just ask the Anderson. They asked all ships in the area who would go back, and uh, the Anderson, I think there was another one that went back, but a handful of them were like, now we're not it's just too risky. There's probably no survivors. Were just not doing it. And I saw that you really can't fault them, like that's the smart thing to do if you're a captain. But um, it really is to the Anderson and the other ship's credit for having turned around and going back out there just on the slimmest chance that there was somebody who they could rescue. And what they found was a couple of battered lifeboats, little bit of flotsam, and that was it. I don't even think they found an oil slick um and there was nothing. There were no survivors. There were there was no one Um, there were no corpses. There was just nothing there. Um. What's amazing, though, Chuck, is after just a couple of days they managed to locate the ship, and they located the ship in about five and thirty ft of water about seventeen miles off of white Fish Point. Right when they got to Whitefish Point they would have hit the harbor, they would have been totally safe, and that that boat could go almost sixteen miles an hour at top speed, So they were roughly an hour away from safety and they sank. It gets even worse. This was the last um, the last trip of the season, and the first mate and the captain were both retiring, so this was their last, their last sale, their last trip. So all of those things put together and you're like, man, that was so close and it went down. But when it went down, it doesn't matter if you're one mile or seventeen miles or a hundred miles. That water is so cold you're you're in trouble really fast. That's that's the movie trope. If someone mentions retirement, if it's like a cop or somebody or anyone that drives a large thing, like well, there that show that you recommended to me even had that trope. I don't remember that part, but I'll have to go back and watch the Do you like the show, Well, we're almost done. We got one more. Uh. I don't want to give away that part. But we're talking about the Devil's Hour. It's an Amazon Prime Um special original. We're way into it. But I don't want to say anything else. I don't want to give anything away. Well, you're gonna love the last episode because like there's nothing that's left, like unbuttoned. It's it's the opposite of severance. I have a feeling, well, severances continues. But does this show continue or is this a one off? This is it? Okay, I'm about to get Scooby Dude tonight then right, Yeah, you're gonna love it, dude. I'll be very surprised if you're like, this is terrible. Good show, good recommendation. Thank you. So the next Spring six that was a one of those little unmanned robotic diving camera vehicles that did a big underwater search and survey of the record site and what they found, which explains a lot, but also not it doesn't explain really what happened, but they explained how fast it happened when they found two pieces. They found Edmund Fitzgerald basically in two big chunks, uh, the bowl which was upright, but it was listing at about fifteen degrees and it was buried in thirty feet of mud, which really indicates how fast it's basically torpedoed to the bottom into thirty ft of mud. And then they had the f section about a hundred and seventy feet away, which was upside down. So this boat essentially kind of broken half. It did, and um that when it when it hit that thirty ft of mud. Apparently the reason it stopped at thirty ft was because it hit bedrock. It would have kept, yeah, it probably, but it hit bedrocks, so it stopped immediately. And um, if you believe that that ship was in one piece as it was going down and hit hit the bottom, then that means all of that weight, of the twenty six thousand tons of tech nite pellets, all the water is carrying all the fuel it's ill had came barreling towards the front that had stopped, and that the whole thing just came apart. And apparently on the wreck site there's about two feet of the ship missing, and it's not missing, it's just torn into such ribbons that it appears to just disintegrated. But that that's that seems to support the idea that it did go down in one piece, which is there's a couple of theories on that. Well, I guess we should talk about some of the theories. Um. You know, there have been plenty of dives over the years that went down there. I think the the families are always worried that just recreational divers, we're going to go down there and sort of desecrate a sacred spot. So it's in Canadian waters, and over the years, the Ontario Heritage Act has been amended a few times to restrict access, so no one that's not official could get down there. So that's good. Um. But there's a few theories about what happened officially, Um, there are a couple of reports. UM. One was from the TSB. It was inconclusive but basically said there were heavy seas, there were heavy waves, the ship basically became a wash what they call green water, which are waves that are so deep that there they actually have color to them, and that the deck sides held all this water there and the hatches were not fully water tight because those clamps weren't fastened down all the way, and so you just had water pouring in there and pouring in there and pouring in there, and eventually that was enough water to fully collapse one of those huge steel doors for one of the cargo holes for one of those hatches, and just massive amounts of water started pouring in and it sank super fast. Yeah, and those I saw a presentation by a guy I can't remember if it's Rick or Bruce mixed r. He's one of the people who's UM officially been a member of like dives and expeditions to the admin Fitzger and he showed pictures of UM those clamps that were still intact, and he he was he made a really good point. I thought, UM, if those clamps had been shut on a hatch that was torn off or popped off when the UM when the ship like hit that bedrock, UM, that clamp would be in pieces, it would be all twisted. But the fact that it's in tact suggests that it was not attached or clamped at the time that the ship sunk. So they're probably almost certainly were clamps that were not attached that we're not clamped down. But whether that's what caused the problem or not is the that's a big point of contention because again it says this guy should have known better, They really should have clamped the stuff. Maybe they would have survived had they had they clamped their hatches like they were supposed to. Or it's you know that this was a force of nature that was was inevitable. Um, that's kind of what it comes down to. And depending on who you are, you know, especially if you're a family member, because there's plenty of family members still alive. But this is so recent. The Arthur m. Anderson is still it still works like it's it's still out there on the Great Lakes today. Um, and there's plenty of family members who weren't like you know, great great grandsons these Yeah, there are people whose dad's they were are alive now and are are you know, get really upset at the idea that, you know, the suggestion that this was their fault, so much so that apparently Gordon Lightfoot in the original version of the song, he talks about the hatches being unlatched, and um, he found out how upset that that was making the families, uh, and that it was possible that wasn't true, and he went back and revised the lyrics. That is why he's the Pride of Canada. I think he a couple of different times revised the lyrics too, sort of more accurately reflect what may have happened, which, yeah, I mean that's something that you don't see a lot. Okay, So if the iches were open, Chuck, that would fully explain how the ship sunk, because, like you said, these were screen dividers that that kept them that didn't really separate the um the holds from one another from water, right right, So water going in one of these giant by eleven foot hatch openings would probably be enough to to sink the ship. That's one. That's one UM idea. There's another idea that has nothing to do with hatches to right, Yeah, I mean there are a couple. Uh. The Lake Carriers Association, Uh, they had a report that suggested that it struck a shoal, the six fathom shoal at Cariboo Island, UM. And this is based on some different things. Partially that UM Captain Cooper of the Anderson noted that that Edmund Fitzgerald was closer to Cariboo than made him comfortable. He was like, they're a little too close. So it may have hit the shoal, but I think they haven't really found shoal damage at the wreckage site. Uh. And then the other big one is possibly a series of three rogue waves that just took this thing down in quick succession. Yeah. The captain of the Anderson, Bernie Cooper, apparently said later on that there were two waves that passed him that were just huge, and he was behind the um the Eman Fitzgerald, which meant those waves were heading towards the Van Fitzgerald. And he said it was right at the time, around between seven ten seven twenty. That would have fully accounted for pushing the Evan Fitzgerald down. And all it had to do again was get that bow down underwater and get the stern up out of the water a little bit, and all of those tac knite pellets would have slid forward and it would have just been the end from that point on, and it would have happened really really fast too. Uh. If that's exactly what happened. So it's possible if they did get swamped by a couple of waves. It was over in seconds basically, Yeah, I mean they went down in ten minutes. That's that also helps explain why you know, there was no time to get into lifeboats or anything like that. Uh, it's also why they didn't, you know, the only bodies they found I think we're still in the ship basically. Um, you know we mentioned earlier than not quite sister ship, the Homer as far as comparing, like, hey, this thing was welded and not riveted, and it always did fine. It didn't go through a storm like this, so it's you can't make like a direct comparison. Uh. There's also other theories that like those hatch covers were maybe damaged by equipment flying around or like a tree, uh you know there. You know it was along the shoreline, so there could have been like trees out there being washed aboard. Well. Plus also they were carrying a spare propeller blade, massive propeller blade on deck, so it's possible that that got loose and started sliding around. That would have caused some pretty big damage too. But you just don't know, like as not far back in time as this was in seventy five, Like we have a really accurate records of it going out and what it was carrying, and how many people were on board and what time everything happened. But it's what happened in that that lost ten minutes that no one will ever really know. I don't think, yeah, no, And and it's almost certain we won't know because there were three major expeditions on the wreck, eight nine and ninety five, and after the ninety five expedition, the families said, okay, um, we've we've gotten all the evidence we can get. Um, we don't want anyone diving on the wreck anymore. And on the people on the expedition promised they wouldn't dive on the Edmund Fitzgerald anymore. And I think since two thousand four or five, like you said, it's been protected by the government of Ontario, so you could get to it, but you could probably get in trouble. And also you would be diving on a grave, a grave site basically, and you're not really supposed to do that, especially when the family is alive and asking you not to do that. And there's actually a piece of the Edmund Fitzgerald that you can go see at the Great Lakes Ship of Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point. And it's the bell, the bell of the Yeah, it was raised on that expedition. Um. There was a huge team of people from all over the world who came together. Um. The family was there on eighty five ft yacht that was donated by the guy who invented the bunt pan and got very wealthy from that, and I guess Um took an interest in helping those people out. I can't remember what his name is. I feel like a jerk for not remembering him. But no, it wasn't bunt It's a variation of boond Um. Yeah. They added the T I think to make it less nazi Ish. But Um they raised the bell, and there was a lot of controversy about that too, Chuck, because that's part of the ship. According to some people, that's the heart and soul of the ship, as the bell, and the enough of the families wanted it that the government of Ontario, along humanitarian ground said okay, you guys can go retreat that and it's now Um you can see it at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, and they replaced it with a replica of the bell that has the inscription of all twenty nine men who went down with the ship their names on that. Yeah, classy move. And when they brought it up, they had a big ceremony where they rang the bell thirty times, twenty nine for the lost souls, and then one to commemorate all the other souls lost at sea on the Great Lakes. So, uh, I don't have any family that was on that ship, but it seemed like a I think, like a pretty respectful way to memorialize it. Was. It was, like I said, it was kind of controversial, but in the end it seemed like, yes, it was. It was a good way to do it. And I saw footage from that expedition where as that bell breaks the water, it started ringing just from the wave action, and it was like haunting, you know, just to hear that and it just it happening on its own like that. It was really something. So that's it. Now. Do you understand why kids along the Great Lakes are raised on their story? You understand now? I hope everybody else understands two and sheds a tear for the twenty nine souls that went down with the Edmund Fitzgerald agreed, also, Chuck, we need to hat tip our good friend ed Grabanowski the Grabster, for helping us out with us when he did a fantastic job. Great great article. Ed. Uh, since I just thanked ed, and since I also previously just spoke like a sea captain, of course it's time for listener mail. Uh. This guy just sounds awesome, and so I'm gonna read his email. Hey guys, I was, as per usual, I greatly enjoyed your podcast on typewriters. I particularly liked the section on the IBM S Electric. We got a lot of electric enthusiasts boomers that wrote in that were just like, oh man, what a great machine. As one of the earliest personal computer geeks, I desperately wanted a printer. The cheapest dot Matrix printers were pouring quality and way out of my price range. So in I bought a US Electric took it apart. It was a marvel of mechanical engineering inside, truly wondrous. I found that I could attach tin solaroids to the various levers and parts of the whiffle tree inside to make it fully computer controlled with an altar computer, and I ended up printing my thesis on it. Glavin super Glavin two minor additions to your description of this electric. The typewriter had only one motor uh to power all functions, and it ran continuously clever clutches and linkage is made. Everything from keystrokes and tabs to carriage returns run from that single motor. The second thing to add was the greatest feature of this electric The golf ball print head would be swapped very quickly to give you a whole new font so you could type with the talics Greek letters, which is useful for scientific papers, even special computer symbols as for the A p L computer language. Uh. And that is from Ken Wells, my new favorite listener. Yes, Ken, hats off like I would be telling everybody that story too, So I'm glad We've got to spread the news that you are an awesome engineering type. So way to go. If you want to be like Ken and get in touch with us, you can via email. You can make your own computer if you want to start, but either way, address it to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,