Stuff You Should Know - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (not the song)

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Ahoy 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 of the year edition. That was great. Was that the sweetest chef singing Gordon Lightfoot? I think it kind of nailed it.

You totally nailed it. Hey, before we get going, I want to make a quick announcement. Very sadly, Emily's grandmother, Mary, as we referred to her, is the 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 102. So don't feel bad about life shortchanged.

She got every bit of it and about 100 and maybe a half of those years were pretty darn good. That's amazing. I'm not going to get in my soapbox about 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 we finally lost Mary and it's always sad, even though you kind of pre-greed 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. Stickled her pink. So there's an in-memoriam post up by the time this will come out, I'm going to get it up there on the Stuff You Should Know army page via Aaron Cooper or somebody. So it'd be great if people, as a final gesture, said a couple of words about it. Yeah. Well, RIP Mary, Stuff 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 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, was that Motley Crue? Yeah, I think that's what they were talking about. No, that wasn't Motley Crue.

Who's saying that? My mom would go, oh, that was Ozzy. Yeah, but Motley Crue had one about going home to, yeah, home sweet home. No, no, no. We saw them play that. I think you were thinking of smoking in the boys' room. It was. Wasn't that thin, Lizzie?

No. No, originally, I think so. Well, there you go. I'm an OG. Speaking of OGs, Chuck, I feel like we should talk about one of the OG 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 segues will be much better than that.

Well, I hit everyone with an obituary right out of the gate. Right, it's true. I think you did a pretty good job. Notice 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 don't like folk stuff? I love folk music. I'm not a big fan of sea shanties. I see. And this is a classic, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot is a classic sea shanty.

For sure. 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 because I hate it so

much. So I, I'm so dumb. I always thought the Edmund Fitzgerald was like the Titanic or some classic old ocean liner from like the 19th century or something. No, sir. I did not know that it was a, a, you know, fairly modern day, 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 1910 or something. Yeah. No, it sunk in 1975 and it wasn't even a twinkle in a shipmaker's eye in 1910. And it wasn't created until I think 1958 was when it was finally launched. So it was fairly recent, I would say.

Yeah. And to my defense, I'm going to defend myself here because you're not stepping up. When you raised in Atlanta, you don't like the, 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 learn when you grow up in Toledo or Detroit or Cleveland or something like that.

You probably did, right? Yeah. I was raised knowing about the Edmund Fitzgerald. Yeah. I didn't know anything about it. And I didn't have a seagoing member in my entire family and my whole family knew about the Edmund Fitzgerald. Okay.

For some reason, because if you sit down and look at it on paper, you, you will wonder why it actually, you know, it was a very famous shipwreck and there were some, some things to it. There was a huge ship. It was a very beloved ship before it sank. 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.

Yeah. 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 hate it up there though too. A lot of people are mad at me is all I'm saying.

Yeah. Gordon Lightfoot, the guy who sang the song, he was known as like the, the pride of Canada. Yeah. 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. Thanks 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. And he sang a Sunday, be be dee dee dee, do dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee. Yes. I don't know if that was him. I know the song you're talking about.

I think it was Gordon Lightfoot. So then that's, that's a great song. I agree. Okay. 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 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. 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 1800s 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, this iron ore, we're going to ship it in the form of taco night 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 a ship. You don't even have to be in that business and you can make tons of money. And that's what happened with the Eddy Fitz. Yeah, because the Edmund Fitzgerald was owned by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company.

So weird. And there's no like, well, wait a minute, what's the catch here? There is none. Northwestern Mutual commissioned shipbuilders on Lake Erie to build a design and build a ship for them for the purpose of transporting ore across the great lakes. Just as an investment. Yeah, and one of the reasons why it became such a attractive investment for anybody including an insurance company was that the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened, I believe in 1959.

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 it wasn't a bad idea and there was really nothing wrong with their ownership from top to bottom from what I could tell. No, 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 who Edmund 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. They 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, he was probably just sort of demurring and being like, hey, I'm going

to step out, but make sure this happens. Oh, I heard when he came back, he went and bonkers and broke some chairs and a water pitcher. Really? No. He seems like a pretty mild-bandered guy from what I could tell. Sure, to have a ship named after you. Sure.

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 Eddy Fitz, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was 729 feet long, 75 feet wide, 39 feet tall from top of the keel to the bottom of the deck and had three, and some of this stuff you'll want to put a pin in, had three cargo holds that were separated by bulkheads, or they're called screen bulkheads. In other words, they're not watertight, so if water comes in one of these cargo holds

and fills up enough, or tilts a certain way, it can go into the other cargo holds, and there's three of them, and 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. And on the Great Lakes, yeah, they get some pretty bad weather from time to time, specifically in November, apparently. It's nothing like an Atlantic storm, or even a Pacific storm, I'm sure.

So yeah, it's not very weird that it was built like that. It was also designed to hold up to 30,000 tons, 30,000 tons of Tachanite pellets. Usually it would handle something around 26,000, 27,000, but it kept getting rated. The company kept going to the Coast Guard and saying, it can hold more. It can hold more. And the Coast Guard kept signing off on increasing the load limits to up to, I think, about 30,000 tons at one point. And again, this is not unheard of.

It's not super weird, but the Edmund Fitzgerald was 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 the Great Lakes. That's right. And I mentioned that it was welded. Most ships at the time, and I think still most ships are riveted because welding is great, but welding doesn't hold up like rivets hold up. But again, this was a ship for the Great Lakes.

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... The welder was like, wait, wait. We forgot to put in the plug, which I've forgotten actually on a boat before. Oh, yeah? Yeah. It's no good.

Water comes in. Is that where the rope trauma came from? No. But it didn't fall of a boat. All right. You're getting closer. Awesome. Okay.

We're getting there. That's a big hint. These...this was sort of unusual for a ship like this for an ore shipping ship. 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 entrance 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. Oh, wait. I have something about that, Chuck, the ship that overtook it the next year was one foot longer. Oh, come on. Wouldn't that just drive you bananas? Yeah. That's clearly on purpose.

For sure. Yeah, definitely. Although, I'm looking now, the Edmund Fitzgerald was 729 feet long. Maybe they should have just rounded that off. I don't...yeah, I don't know why they did that. Maybe they were like, well, that's how much iron we have to build the ship from. You're kind of asking for that extra foot though, you know? I guess so.

But they could have made it two feet bigger, any 10 feet bigger, who knows, but one foot. That is a thumb in the eye, I think. 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 liked to go out on it and ride 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 what they usually did, but again, it wasn't like some big red flag.

No, it was like an accepted way to build a ship from what I could tell. Those executives would go out on these voyages because the Edmund Fitzgerald was so fast. One of its 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 exec, you could just basically go for a couple-day voyage and you would be eating lobster and steak from what I understand. They were styled out for sure. So it was a really fast ship.

It could hold a lot of ore. There were frequently insurance executives partying on it. It was, again, a well-regarded ship on the Great Lakes. I can't stress that enough. It was very well-regarded. Long go for the song. So one thing we do mention that you should also put a pin in is hatch clamps. They had those three cargo holes.

In order to load the iron ore into the cargo holes, they had 21 hatch openings, I guess seven apiece. They were very, very large hatch openings, 11 feet by 48 feet. The doors were made of a single steel slab and they had a rubber gasket to keep it water tight, but there were 68 clamps per hatch and you had to manually crank these things down. So every time you're loading, unloading these things, that's almost 1,500 clamps that have to be engaged by human power. And we say that because apparently when the day of the fateful voyage, it was reported

that they don't think all those hatches were completely down. And if the weather was really good, it sounds like they did that kind of thing where you're like building Ikea furniture, I don't need all eight screws. I can probably just get by with the three. I've seen both. So this is a really big point of contention because it either places the blame on the crew for their fate or unfairly places the blame on the crew for their fate. It does seem like it was totally within the realm of possibility that under fair weather,

a captain of an iron carrier or carrier would have set sail without all the clamps done, but they wouldn't have been like, just forget it, let's go watch some MTV. They would still be putting the clamps on while they were setting sail and 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 9th, Sunday, November 9th, 1975 without all of their clamps hatched or all of their hatches clamped, but that doesn't mean that they weren't clamped within the next couple hours. Right.

Exactly. One other thing we'll mention before we go to break is that, and this kind of is somewhat noteworthy, a lot of times you'll have a, if you're building a ship, you build a couple of them because you're already building them, you might as well build another one, and that's called a sister ship, and it means it's a ship of basically the same design of materials that you're just knocking out in tandem. And even though Eddie Fitz did not have 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 if you look at the sinking of a ship, you might look at the sister ship and say, well, were there design flaws? Like why didn't this one sink? If this one didn't sink, and the Homer never had any problems. It fared well until 1986 when it was scrapped and out of service, but it will come up a couple of times here and there. Okay.

Nice setup, man. I think it is break time. All right. Let's do it. I'm Mangesha Tickler, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends, and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop, but just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good.

There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Pulsar.

And he was well-known for going through these locks. This ship was designed to just barely squeeze through the locks. So it was an enormous thing to see coming like, you could reach out and touch it, basically, as it was going through the locks. And then to make it even more impressive, Captain Pulsar would alternately play music from speakers to basically give everybody a show while the Edmund Fitzgerald was going through the locks. Or he would use a bullhorn to shout facts about how amazing the ship was.

I like this guy. Yeah, he was pretty cool. He was not the captain when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. Instead, 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 go through a storm if at all possible. It didn't seem like he was reckless or anything like that or would relish in putting his crew

in danger. But there were times where certain boats would pull back and say, hey, maybe we should wait this one out. And other boats would push through. And he seemed to be the kind of captain that would generally try and push through. So if there was a fateful day in the history of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it was Sunday, November 9th, 1975. Because that was when the Fitts, the Toledo Express, set sail from Superior, Wisconsin,

carrying 26,116 tons of tachyne pellets. And I did some math. Oh, boy. Pretty sure it's right. Here we go. 58 and a half million pounds of musket-sized pellets of iron ore, ore for our friends outside of the imperial system world, 26.5 million kilograms. That's a lot.

And add on to that, 50,000 gallons of fuel oil that's a lot of weight itself. But it wasn't technically overloaded. It was well loaded. Yes. And it set sail at 2.15 in the afternoon for Zug Island in Lake Michigan. And I was like, Zug Island, Zug Island, it's 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 hum?

People can just, some people hear a hum and it drives them crazy. Yeah. Well, there's a Windsor hum. And I remember they associated it with Zug Island. And I looked it up and it turns out that during the pandemic, a US steel company who had a steel plant on Zug Island basically shuttered their operations just for due to lack of availability of raw materials and the hum vanished. That's right.

So they figured it out. It was US Steel, one of their components of their whole setup. Yeah, I like that. I do too. I thought it was definitely worth mentioning. All right. So they're headed toward that island, which is in Lake Michigan. Like you said, it was 215, about two hours and 15 minutes later at 430, the SS 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. But the sort of, again, along in the short of this is that there was another boat, another ship nearby, kind of for this whole route and nearby meaning under 20 miles and sometimes even as close as like 12 to 15 miles away, which is not tailgating someone, but it's pretty close as far as ship travel goes. Yeah.

I mean, they could keep their lights in sight the whole time basically. And the Anderson would end up basically being like the hero of the story. So just keep that in mind. So a couple of things about the Great Lakes themselves. Like I said, ships designed to travel the Great Lakes are probably not quite 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. And when storms start blowing across the Great Lakes in November, the sailors up there call

it 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 like 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 unobstructed across the lake and really pick up some steam. Yeah.

You know, 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 going to 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, I mean, it wasn't the most well-traveled area. And it seems like at least at the time, Lake Superior itself, despite being 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 was more action on the other Great Lakes, maybe. Yeah. I think only about 350 shipwrecks in Lake Superior out of the... And we saw different numbers. I think 6,000 is what most people around 6,000 shipwrecks on all the Great Lakes. I saw it as high as 10, 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. But still, that's a pretty low ratio. And it's because it's just not quite as traveled. In addition to being huge and wide, it's also really deep.

I saw somewhere that it's about 1,200 feet deep at its deepest point. It's also extremely cold, where on the lake bottom, a few hundred feet down, there's basically no aerobic life down there. It's just devoid of. It's like basically a freezer. It hovers at about 32, 33 degrees just above freezing, or wait, zero degrees is just above freezing. But still, it's really, really cold, 32 degrees is.

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. It's always cold, basically year-round, so 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 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's coming. We're going to take what they, you know, people that sail that area jokingly called the scenic route, which was basically 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 had

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 chock full of fateful decisions. But that scenic route, and they purposely took the scenic route because the weather was supposed to be bad. And I think they left at 2.30 p.m. and by 7.00 p.m., there was a gale warning for the entire lake.

Yeah. 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. 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 could like pull behind an island or sneak into a bay or something like that and ride it out for a little while.

Right. So they traveled along that north shore and then made about a 70 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. And then that would like kind of send you on to what's called the Sue 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 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, and I look this up too, so I hope I get it right, Mitsupikotin 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. There was another small island called Caribou Island. And if you look at it on the map, you're like, I don't think that would have helped very much. So Mitsupikotin Island is probably the last chance that they had. And again, McSorley said, no, we can make it. But when they made that right hand turn and started heading along parallel to basically

the eastern shore, the weather that hit the far western shore of Lake Superior could have been a straight line right to them, unobstructed. So they were turning 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. That's what they did when they took that right turn. Right. So McSorley radios at 330, the other ship, the 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 vents, and

have a list. So the fence rail is what you think it is, and it's held up by cable, you know, going along the perimeter of the deck. And we don't know exactly what happened. There are a few theories that could have just snapped because 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, a rivet is supposed to hold. That's why they make, you know, big ships and jumbo jets out of them. Right. And it's to 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 here. I think that's correct. 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 McSorley mentioned

it. And again, this is a seasoned veteran Great Lakes pilot. And anything he mentions or doesn't mention is significant in retrospect. So he mentions that he mentioned the vents being gone 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. And that also was to keep the ship intact.

An event being gone means that there was now a hole in the deck where water could slosh in. But it wasn't enough that it was going to sink the ship. But again, that was worth mentioning by McSorley. Right. And then the last thing you mentioned is that I have a list. And in shipping, that doesn't mean go by 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 in maybe one of those cargo holds, and it's not evenly distributed. So your boat is caddywampus. Right. That's a great way to put it. So that was, what'd you say, 3.30 p.m., right? That's when he radioed, yeah. Okay.

So, and this was on November 10th. I'm not sure if we said, they set sail on November 9th. This is now about 24 hours later after they'd gone underway. So this is 3.30 on November 10th. And they're still making their way. McSorley told Anderson that 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. Yeah.

That's significant. 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 mentioned that his pumps were running. He apparently said both pumps, which is quizzical because they had six pumps on board. They had two 2,000 gallon per minute auxiliary pumps. Just stop and think about that for a second. Then they had four 7,000 gallon per minute pumps.

So if you put them all together, that ship could pump out 32,000 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. All right. So, less than one hour from that point, Fitzgerald radios again to the Anderson and said, 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're going to 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, Aquias stayed within 15 miles of the Fitzgerald. And as they were headed toward Whitefish Point, 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, it was a Swedish ship called the Avafore. And Fitz called them, said, hey, I hear there's no radio beacon at the point at Whitefish Point, but 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 McSorley, a very key told the Avafore 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.

Yeah. It had a bad list. It was getting battered by waves that I think the Anderson later reported were up to 25 and it was taking on water to some degree or another. We just don't know. 7.10 p.m. So this is, this is the first time he radioed the Anderson saying we've got some problems was 2.30.

They've, you know, made it made their way all the way along to 7.10 p.m. And the Anderson this time got in touch with the Edmund 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 7.10 p.m.

A squall whipped up and temporarily not only blinded the visuals from the Anderson of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it swamped their radar too. So they couldn't catch anything on radar for about 10 minutes. And 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 Edmund Fitzgerald. So in that 10 minutes, the Edmund Fitzgerald went from being on top of the Great Lakes to sinking, which is astoundingly fast for a 730, sorry, 29 foot ship. Yeah. Super fast. I think that's a great place for a second break, and we'll talk about some of the theories on what happened right after this. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the

moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop.

But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find the Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right. So the Anderson has looked out their front window 10 minutes after they hear that the Eddie Fitz is holding its own, or her own, I guess. And though I did see one of the people refer to the Edmund Fitzgerald as a he, but then everywhere else I looked said, gee. Yeah. Maybe they were talking about the actual president of the insurance company. Maybe so.

So they get the word 10 minutes later, the Edmund Fitzgerald is no longer in sight. And the Anderson captain, Captain Cooper, started to try and get in touch with the Coast Guard and said, hey, we think 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. He had to get all the way to Whitefish Point and pull in there. And there was clearly no Edmund Fitzgerald there at that point before they finally got on the emergency response.

But again, another like, and it may have been futile, sort of in retrospect, considering how fast this thing went down. 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. The Coast Guard didn't have a rescue vessel available unless it came from, I think, Minnesota, which was like 24 hours away. They had search aircraft, but they couldn't perform rescues. 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, 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 the Anderson, I think there was another one that went back, but a handful of them were like, no, we're not, it's just too risky. There probably no survivors, we're 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 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, a little bit of flotsam, and that was it. I don't even think they found an oil slick. There was nothing.

There were no survivors. There was no one, there were no corpses. There was just nothing there. 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 530 feet of water, about 17 miles off of Whitefish Point. Right when they got to Whitefish Point, they would have hit the harbor, they would have been totally safe and that boat could go almost 16 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 trip of the season and the first mate and the captain were both retiring. So this is their last sail, 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 17 miles or 100 miles, that water's so cold, you're in trouble really fast. Yeah, that's the movie trope.

If someone mentions retirement, if it's like a cop or somebody or anyone that drives a large thing, it's like, well, 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 it. Do you like the show? Well, we're almost done. We got one more. I don't want to give away that part, but we're talking about The Devil's Hour. It's an Amazon Prime 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 going to love the last episode because there's nothing that's left unbuttoned. It's the opposite of severance. Well, severance continues, but does this show continue or is this a one-off? No, this is it. It just made six episodes. I'm about to get Scooby-Dude tonight then, right?

Yeah, you're going to 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, 1976, there was one of those little unmanned robotic diving camera vehicles that did a big underwater search and survey of the record site. But they found, which explains a lot, but also doesn't explain really how it happened,

but they explain how fast it happened when they found two pieces. They found the Edmund Fitzgerald basically in two big chunks, the bow, which was upright, but it was listing at about 15 degrees, and it was buried in 30 feet of mud, which really indicates how fast it basically torpedoed to the bottom into 30 feet of mud, and then they had the aft section about 170 feet away, which was upside down. So, this boat essentially kind of broken half. It did. And when it hit that 30 feet of mud, apparently the reason it stopped at 30 feet was because

it hit bedrock. It would have kept going. It probably, but it hit bedrock, so it stopped immediately. And if you believe that that ship was in one piece as it was going down and hit the bottom, then that means all of that weight of the 26,000 tons of taconite pellets, all the water was carrying, all the fuel it still had came barreling toward the front that had stopped and that the whole thing just came apart. And apparently on the wreck site, there's about 200 feet of the ship missing, and it's

not missing. It's just torn into such ribbons that it appears to have just disintegrated. And that seems to support the idea that it did go down in one piece, which is there's a couple theories on that. Well, I guess we should talk about some of the theories. There have been plenty of dives over the years that went down there. I think the families were always worried that just recreational divers were 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. But there's a few theories about what happened officially. There were a couple of reports. One was from the NTSB, it was inconclusive, but basically said there were heavy seas, there were heavy waves. The ship basically became a wash in what they call green water, which are waves that are

so deep that 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 I saw a presentation by a guy, I can't remember if it's Rick or Bruce Mixter.

He's one of the people who's officially been a member of Dives and Expeditions to the Edmund Fitzgerald. And he showed pictures of those clamps that were still intact, and he made a really good point, I thought. If those clamps had been shut on a hatch that was torn off or popped off when the ship hit that bedrock, that clamp would be in pieces, it would be all twisted. But the fact that it's intact suggests that it was not attached or clamped at the time that the ship sunk. So there probably almost certainly were clamps that were not attached, that were not clamped

down, but whether that's what caused the problem or not, that's a big point of contention. Because again, it says these guys should have known better, they really should have clamped the stuff, maybe they would have survived had they clamped their hatches like they were supposed to, or this was a force of nature that was inevitable. That's kind of what it comes down to. And depending on who you are, especially if you're a family member, because there's plenty of family members still alive. This is so recent, the Arthur M. Anderson, it still works.

It's still out there on the Great Lakes today. And there's plenty of family members who aren't great-great-grandsons or anything like that. That's true to our dads. Yeah, there are people whose dads they were are alive now and get really upset at the idea that 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 he found out how upset that was making the families 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 a couple of different times revised the lyrics to sort of more accurately reflect what may have happened, which yeah, I mean, that's something that you don't see a lot. So if the hatches were open, Chuck, that would fully explain how the ship sunk. Because like you said, these were screen dividers that didn't really separate the holds from one another from water, right?

So water going in one of these giant 40, 48 by 11 foot hatch openings would probably be enough to sink the ship. That's one idea. There's another idea that has nothing to do with hatches too, right? Yeah. I mean, there are a couple. The Lake Carriers Association, they had a report that suggested that it struck a shoal, the Six Fathom Shoal at Caribou Island.

And this is based on some different things, partially that Captain Cooper of the Anderson noted that the Edmund Fitzgerald was closer to Caribou 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. 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 Edmund Fitzgerald, which meant those waves were heading toward the Edmund Fitzgerald. And he said it was right at the time, around between 7, 10, 7, 20, that would have fully accounted for pushing the Edmund Fitzgerald down. And all it had to do again was get that bow down under water and get the stern up out of the water a little bit.

And all of those Taconite 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 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 10 minutes. That also helps explain why, you know, there was no time to get into lifeboats or anything

like that. It's also why they didn't, you know, the only bodies they found I think were still in the ship, basically. You know, we mentioned earlier the 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 you can't make like a direct comparison. There's also other theories that like those hatch covers were maybe damaged by equipment

flying around or like a tree, 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 75, 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 10 minutes that no one will ever really know, I don't think. Yeah, no, and it's almost certain we won't know because there were three major expeditions on the wreck, 89, 94, and 95. And after the 95 expedition, the family said, okay, we've gotten all the evidence we can get. We don't want anyone diving on the wreck anymore and the people on the expedition promised

they wouldn't dive on the Edmund Fitzgerald anymore. And I think since 2004 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's 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 Shipwreck Museum, Whitefish Point. And it's the bell. Yeah. They got the bell. Yeah, it was raised in 1995 on that expedition. There was a huge team of people from all over the world who came together. The family was there on an 85-foot yacht that was donated by the guy who invented the Bunt Pan and got very wealthy from that.

And I guess took an interest in helping those people out. James Bunt? I can't remember what his name is. I feel like a jerk for not remembering, but no, it wasn't Bunt. It's a variation of Boond. Yeah, they added the tea, I think, to make it less Nazi-ish. But they raised the bell, and there was a lot of controversy about that too, Chuck, because that's part of the ship.

Yeah. According to some people, that's the heart and soul of the ship is the bell. And enough of the families wanted it, that the government of Ontario along humanitarian ground said, okay, you guys can go retrieve that. And it's now, 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 29 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 30 times, 29 for the lost souls, and then one to commemorate all the other souls lost at sea on the Great Lakes. So I don't have any family that was on that ship, but it seemed like a pretty respectful way to memorialize the incident. It was. Yeah, like I said, it was kind of controversial, but in the end, it seemed like, yes, it was a good way to do it.

And I saw footage from that 95 expedition where as that bell breaks the water, it started ringing just from the wave action. I saw that. And it was like haunting, you know, just to hear that and just it happening on its own like that. It was really something. Yeah. 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 too and shed the tear for the 29 souls that went down with the Edmund Fitzgerald. Agreed. Also, Chuck, we need to hat tip our good friend, Ed Grabenowski, the Grabster for helping us out with this one. He did a fantastic job.

Great, great article, Ed. Since I just thanked Ed and since I also previously just spoke like a sea captain, of course it's time for Listener Mail. This guy just sounds awesome. And so I'm going to 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 Selectric. We got a lot of Selectric 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, but the cheapest dot matrix printers were poor in quality and way out of my price range. So in 1975, I bought a used Selectric, took it apart. It was a marvel of mechanical engineering inside, truly wondrous. I found that I could attach 10 solenoids to the various levers and parts of the whiffle tree inside to make it fully computer controlled with an Altair 8800 computer. And I ended up printing my thesis on it.

Glavin. Super Glavin. Two minor additions to your description of this Selectric. The typewriter had only one motor to power all functions, and it ran continuously. Clever clutches and linkages 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 Selectric. The golf ball printhead could be swapped very quickly to give you a whole new font.

So you could type with italics, Greek letters, which is useful for scientific papers, even special computer symbols, as for the APL computer language. 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 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. And either way, address it to StuffPodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe.

You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me. And my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get

your podcasts.