Edmund Fitzgerald: A Chaotic 1958 Launch, a Blind Radar, and 29 Lost

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On June 7, 1958, about 15,000 people watched the largest ship yet built for North America's Great Lakes slide into the water. It took the sponsor three swings to break the champagne bottle, a spectator died of a heart attack, and the SS Edmund Fitzgerald dropped in sideways, drenching the crowd and slamming into a concrete pier. Financed with $7 million by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance and built by the Great Lakes Engineering Works to the maximum size allowed by the new St. Lawrence Seaway, she was 729 feet long and hauled taconite iron ore pellets from Minnesota to mills in Detroit and Toledo, while her interior, outfitted by Detroit's J.L. Hudson Company, offered deep pile carpet, air conditioned crew quarters, and VIP staterooms. On November 9, 1975, Captain Ernest M. McSorley left Superior, Wisconsin with 29 men and over 26,000 long tons of taconite, trusting a forecast that the storm would pass south of Lake Superior.

By the afternoon of November 10 she was in 70 mph winds and waves up to 35 feet. McSorley reported lost vent covers, a starboard list, and pumps running nonstop, then lost his radar and found the Whitefish Point beacon dead. At about 7:10 p.m. he told the Arthur M. Anderson, "We are holding our own." Ten minutes later the Fitzgerald vanished from radar with no mayday. She was found in two pieces under 530 feet of water, and investigators still split between rogue waves known as the Three Sisters, failed hatch clamps, grounding on Six Fathom Shoal, and structural failure of her long, rigid, all welded hull. Gordon Lightfoot wrote his 1976 ballad after spotting a misspelling of her name in Newsweek.

• Captain Dudley Paquette of the Wilfred Sykes read the same weather data, judged the forecast wrong, and took a sheltered route along the North Shore.
• A former crewman testified that McSorley "beat the hell out of the Fitzgerald" and seldom stopped for weather.
• The Coast Guard let her load line be changed three times, cutting her freeboard by more than three feet.
• The Lake Carriers Association pushed the shoaling theory, but later surveys found no grounding damage on her hull.
• In 1995 divers recovered her bell at the families' request and left a replica engraved with the 29 crew names.