SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an American Great Lakes freighter that sank in 535 feet of water in a Lake Superior storm on November 10, 1975, with the loss of the entire crew of 29. When launched on June 7, 1958, she was the largest ship on North America's Great Lakes, and she remains the largest to have sunk there.
The disaster is one of the best-known in the history of Great Lakes shipping. Singer Gordon Lightfoot made it the subject of his 1976 hit song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" after reading an article, "The Cruelest Month", in the November 24, 1975, issue of Newsweek. The sinking led to changes in Great Lakes shipping regulations and practices that included mandatory survival suits, depth finders, positioning systems, increased freeboard, and more frequent inspection of vessels.
Here's a link to the Fitzgerald Timeline (http://www.ssedmundfitzgerald.org/fitz-timeline/)
The Last Voyage of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald. This image was captured by me, while working for NOAA (1972-1980), as the Fitzgerald sailed up the Detroit River, Michigan on it's way to Duluth, Minnesota located at the western end of Lake Superior to get a load of taconite ore. You can see one of the 29 crew members who lost his life on 10 November 1975 when she sank off Whitefish Point, Lake Superior in one of the worst storms in 3 decades. The image is quite grainy (Tri-X film) as it's from a scan of a paper print I made in 1975 (I don't have the original negative).
Thanks for viewing.
