The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Danger of November
Near Duluth, Minnesota
November on Lake Superior has a reputation, and the reputation is earned. The great storms of November arrive when cold Arctic air from the northwest collides with water still warm from summer. The pressure gradients steepen.
The waves on Superior can build to heights that would be remarkable in the open ocean, and unlike an ocean, Superior offers almost no room to run. A ship caught in a November gale in the western lake has limited options and nowhere to hide. On November tenth, nineteen seventy-five, the Edmund Fitzgerald, at seven hundred twenty-nine feet one of the largest ore carriers ever built for the Great Lakes, was running from Superior, Wisconsin, to a steel mill in Detroit, loaded with twenty-six thousand tons of taconite pellets from the Mesabi Range.
She was accompanied, at some distance, by another freighter named the Arthur M. Anderson. The two captains had been in radio contact as the storm worsened through the afternoon.
At seven ten in the evening, the Anderson's captain called the Fitzgerald on the radio. The Fitzgerald did not respond. She had gone down in water about five hundred thirty feet deep, in the northern part of the lake, close to the Canadian shore.
All twenty-nine crew members were lost. No one aboard survived to explain what happened in those final minutes. The wreck was located days later, by a Navy aircraft.
Investigators and divers studied it for years. The specific cause of the sinking remains, in the strict technical sense, undetermined, though hull failure in extreme wave conditions is the most commonly cited explanation. The National Transportation Safety Board and subsequent investigators have differed in their analyses.
Gordon Lightfoot wrote and recorded his song about the sinking in nineteen seventy-six. The song was playing on Canadian radio within months of the disaster and has become the most widely known commemoration of a Great Lakes shipwreck. The Fitzgerald is carried on the books of the Lake Carriers' Association as still in service, a tradition on the lakes for ships lost with all hands.
Every November tenth, the Edmund Fitzgerald's bell is rung twenty-nine times at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, Michigan, once for each of the men who did not come home.
