Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald 35 years ago today
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/a...ago-today?bn=1
WHITEFISH POINT, MICH.—Three and a half decades have passed since the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald and mystery still surrounds the shipping disaster that killed 29 people and inspired a famous song by a Canadian icon.
Friends and families of the sailors killed on Nov. 10, 1975, when the 222-metre ore freighter sank in Lake Superior, and members of the public will mark the 35th anniversary of the tragedy on Wednesday. The annual memorial ceremony in Whitefish Point, Mich., is organized by the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.
The ship's sinking, the most famous disaster in the history of Great Lakes shipping, spawned Gordon Lightfoot's ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
It's not clear why the ship sank, but a report by the U.S. Coast Guard at the time blamed the crew for the disaster, concluding they failed to fasten the hatches properly.
In his 1976 song, Lightfoot speculated that "they might have split up or they might have capsized. They may have broke deep and took water.''
But the maritime community has always struggled with the notion that a crew would be careless when they were well aware of the fierce weather conditions coming on Lake Superior that night.
In a documentary by a Toronto film company that debuted earlier this year on History Television, a father-and-son diving team suggests the ship was in fact sunk by a rogue wave _ a massive wall of water that can reach up to 10 storeys high but was previously dismissed as a sailors' myth.
In "Dive Detectives'' _ produced by Toronto-based Yap Films _ Mike and Warren Fletcher, who had access to recent high-quality footage that was not available to coast guard officials at the time, said clear images of the bottom of the ship debunked one popular theory that the Edmund Fitzgerald ran aground and was damaged.
Their findings prompted Lightfoot to revise some his song's lyrics in future live performances. The recorded version was not changed.
Photo Caption: This undated photo, provided by the Lake Superior Maritime Collection, University of Wisconsin-Superior, shows the Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore carrier which sank in Lake Superior Nov. 10, 1975 during a storm.