- Zinnen: "The ship was the pride of the American side."
- Audience: "Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin."
- Tonight it's my great pleasure to get to introduce
to you Steve Ackerman.
He's director of the Operative Institute
for Meteorological Satellite Studies.
He's one of the two weather guys along with John Martin.
He's been here three or four times.
It's always packed. I appreciate that.
Tonight is a special occasion because we're commemorating
the 40th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald
on November 10th, 1975.
I think it's an important moment
in Wisconsin history.
I think it means a lot to a place such as
the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
which is one of the cradles
of invention of meteorological satellites
and a leader in weather forecasting,
to remember this event.
Tonight, Steve's going to talk about
the ship, the storm and the song.
He told me he's been waiting 20 years to be able
to give a talk with that title.
(audience laughs)
Please join me in welcoming Steve Ackerman back
to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you very much.
Thanks Tom and everybody here.
I really enjoy coming to these Wednesday Nite @ the Labs
as both a speaker and as a participant.
There's always lots of good conversation.
So I'm gonna go through this, hopefully not too fast
but I'm gonna be talking about this great legend,
the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald,
the ship, the storm and the song.
So we're gonna talk a little bit about everything,
all three of those things and how they integrate together.
It is a great historical activity
of the Great Lakes but also of Wisconsin.
I grew up in New York.
You'll be able to tell that when I say a couple of words
like water, so we'll get that out of the way now.
And I was actually just switching
and becoming a major in weather, meteorology,
at the time when this happened.
And so I kind of remember snippets of this and wondering,
holy mackerel, what kind of storm
can do that kind of sinking of a huge ship?
And then coming here and moving eventually to Wisconsin
and becoming an advocate of Wisconsin and a Wisconsinite,
there are two historical events that just amazed me.
This is one of them.
And the other is, anybody want to guess?
- Audience: Big fire.
The big fire, the Peshtigo fire, right?
You grow up in New York and you hear about the Chicago fire
but the Peshtigo fire is just so much more amazing.
And so I've also really gotten into
trying to understand that,
both from the weather and a cultural point of view.
So the Edmund Fitzgerald, again a great mystery.
There's still a lot of controversy.
Maybe controversy's the wrong word now.
I think it's more of a mystery of what went down
and every now and then, when pieces of information pop up
and you're going to be hearing me say this
throughout the evening, you know,
there's something that comes up and it's like,
"Oh, isn't that interesting and does it say this?"
Well no, not really. Does it say that?
No, not really.
There's nothing really that points to the fact
of what caused the ship to go down
other than what John Knox,
my co-author of our meteorology book,
and I like to say, it was the weather.
If it was a day like today,
the ship wouldn't have went down.
So it's all about the weather.
So that's why I like to talk about all three.
So you're gonna see a clippets come in from the song.
Apparently you know it,
'cause you wouldn't be able to quote it.
I may actually have you sing a phrase now and then.
As you were coming in, we were playing the song
so hopefully you got that ballad in your mind.
All right, a little bit about the details.
I'm gonna go over this.
I just wanted to tell you where a lot
of the information that I drew it from.
This is my primary sources of where it came from.
A lot of good books out there
and some not so good books I think.
But these are the good ones I think.
All right, so again this was memorialized a lot
by the song by Gordon Lightfoot,
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
And a lot of what he describes in that song is right.
In fact, 95% of it is right about what happened.
There's a couple of things that are, eh,
and I'll point those out cause after all,
I'm, you know, I'm a teacher. (chuckles)
We like to correct things.
But again, they're pretty minor.
And so do you want to sing the first phrase, no?
Everybody's shaking his head. You can read it right there.
"The legend lives on from the Chippewa down
"to the big lake they call Gitche Gumee."
Ojibwe name for Lake Superior is Gichigami
which means it be a great sea.
The story behind that, so you see, he's calling it
the Chippewa and it's changed its name to the Gitche Gumee.
When Longfellow wrote his poem about the story of Hiawatha,
that's what he called it.
So he translated it into that and now that just
keeps getting carried down.
Of course, he goes on to say that it
"never gives up her dead
"when the skies of November turn gloomy."
Kind of an interesting thing there that maybe
we'll talk about later on, that basically when body,
when people die and they get to the bottom
of a really cold water body, there's no gasses
and no biological activity, so the bodies never float.
They'll just stay down there
and so it never gives up 'cause its dead.
And of course it was carrying
26,000 tons more than the Edmund Fitzgerald.
So it was carrying a load of iron ore.
So this is about the ship but described in the song.
It was carrying 26,000 tons of these things
called pellets,
lake, taconite pellets.
Somebody gave me one of these a couple of years ago after a talk.
They're like iron marbles. All right?
This is going to be an interesting to talk about later on.
They're important to get into marble shape
because as you load the ship,
you put them on a slide and (blows raspberry),
they all roll down, cause these things roll nicely.
We'll come back to that.
26,000 tons
and it's off down to be, it's 1975.
Auto industry's going really good, right?
So they're gonna be making autos out of that.
Of course it sank on November 10th.
All 29 crew members died.
We'll look at the names of who those folks were later on.
And at the time, it was the worst shipping disaster
in the Great Lakes in 11 years.
There's a lot of ship wrecks on the Great Lakes.
And I had a slide that outlined them all,
but we're not going to talk about that
'cause we're talking about the Edmund Fitzgerald.
And many of those ships that went down,
they don't have a song after em, right?
So nobody remembers them, which is kind of sad,
but we do remember the people.
All right.
So again it was carrying 26,000 tons or more.
This was the route that the ship ended up taking.
So this is the ship.
It left from the Duluth-Superior harbor,
went up this way, and was heading towards
the Sault Ste. Marie to unload its load.
This is not the original plan
that it actually filed when it left.
It really, right, cause it's kind of,
oh that's kind of a long way.
So initially it was going to go this way, right?
'Cause that's shorter. You go shorter, you save fuel.
But this was the actual way it went.
This is where it went down.
You can see not very far from where the shoreline was.
It was, I think as Tom had you sing,
it was known as the pride of the American side.
It was the biggest ship on the Great Lakes at the time
when it was first launched.
So it was bigger than most when it went down,
but it was the biggest when it actually was launched.
Again, here's some phrases of him concluding some terms
with a couple of steel firms when they left
fully loaded for Cleveland, 'cause they really weren't going
to Cleveland, but that's okay.
And then later that night, again, this is from
the Lightfoot song.
"The ship's bell rang,"
and it could be "the north wind they'd been feeling."
And so what he's hinting here is that in his ballad here,
he's giving you what's going to happen in the future.
They're going to take off, they're going to hit a lot of weather
and it's going to be because of something's changed.
Could it be the north wind?
And as it turns out, that was part of the problem.
Of course their destination was Detroit.
That's where they were heading.
That's where they wanted to put the pellets.
Again, a little bit more about the Fitzgerald itself.
It weighed 13,000 tons.
It was 729 feet long,
7,000 horsepower steam turbine
which allowed it to go 16 miles per hour.
Again, you might not think that that's very fast,
but that's a lot of mass to be moving.
So that's a lot of energy.
Hard to stop something that's moving that fast.
It was launched in 1958 and at the launch
there were 10,000 people that went to that launching.
That's how cool that ship was.
Again, it was labeled the Pride of the American Side
and in 1964 it became the first ship on the Great Lakes
to carry more than a million tons of ore to the Soo Locks.
It's named after the president
of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company.
They had a big history
of Great Lake captains in the family.
And actually there's a nice exhibit
if you go to the Milwaukee Public Museum,
they have some really nice stuff about the family
and about the ship there as well.
So, if you're in Milwaukee and got the time,
I'd recommend going to see that as well.
It's kind of a nice exhibit.
These are all the hatchways I should point out,
right down in here.
This is where they loaded up.
We'll be talking about the hatchways in a little bit.
And there are, I didn't take these down off of the web,
but actually if you search on the web,
they'll show you some animations of what it looks like
to load these hatchways with these pellets.
Well, they just kind of come sliding down slides.
It's really kind of cool and amazing.
Fun to watch. You can see I'm kind of hooked on this. (chuckles)
So you know a little bit about the ship,
a little bit about the song.
Now, about the storm.
Let's talk about the storm 'cause after all,
it's the storm that sank it, all right?
Again, if we go back to when it left,
if I go back quickly to this,
you can see that their departure was at 2pm
on the afternoon of November 9th, 1975.
So what was the weather on that particular day?
It was great.
It was like today, right?
So you should be scared
(all laugh)
for next week, (chuckles) right?
'Cause it turns out--
There's a lot of things going back and forth on--
On the Internet system that we're all on.
You know, like what, we've had three 70-degree days
in a row in November.
That's pretty rare, what's the record?
Well, it turns out 1975 is the record for the number of days
in which the temperature was above 60.
Did I get that right, Tim? - Sure.
- Yeah. (all laugh)
So, beautiful, absolute weather.
This is what the map looked like at 7am Eastern time,
6am our time, Central time,
on November 8th, 1975.
So, the morning of when they're going to take off.
You can see if you read weather maps,
basically, this stuff up here where you see it highlighted
like that, that means there's precipitation there.
Where there are open dots that means that it's not cloudy.
And if you could read the temperatures really well,
you can see it's in the 40s and 50s.
And in Chicago it's like almost 60 degrees
at six in the morning.
So it's actually a beautiful day.
You know you look to the east, to the west, right?
'Cause systems move from the west.
Red sky at night, sailor's delight.
Red sky morning, sailor's take warning.
That's telling us that systems move
from the west to the east.
Then you see this thing and it doesn't look threatening.
These purple lines, by the way,
are stationary fronts, generally not moving.
Blue lines with the triangles are cold fronts
and red, we don't have any on there,
but we'll see, shortly.
Red lines with half-moons
are indications of warm fronts.
But if you look at this weather map, you think,
"Ah, not much going on here." Beautiful day.
Unless you know a lot about weather.
Then you look at this little lull right in here
and you go ooh, I wonder what's going to happen to that?
Because it's these things that, as we'll see,
can often develop into storms
that head right to the Great Lakes,
particularly in November.
But otherwise, it's a beautiful day in November,
just like today.
This is why, again, in his phrase he talks about
"when the skies of November turn gloomy,"
this is, if you look at weather systems,
mid-latitude cyclones, we call them,
or systems that have cold fronts and warm fronts
attached to them, and you look climatologically
how they travel across North America,
this is a region of genesis.
They begin here in the panhandle of Oklahoma
and just east of the Rockies.
Then they do a little hook,
sometimes they're called a panhandle hook
or the panhandle hooker. (chuckles)
But it's not, but it's a weather term,
not a, not another term.
And then this is the path they will often take.
They head right towards the Great Lakes.
And basically the weather,
beautiful November weather's gonna turn rather gloomy
as these storms come and head our way.
There are other paths, this is another one
where it forms in Alberta
and that's called an Alberta clipper.
They generally move really fast
and don't give us a lot of snowfall.
These guys can give us a lot of snowfall, the hookers.
Day two with the Fitz. So that's day one.
Okay, they're taking off, beautiful days.
They got ore pellets.
They're sliding down the huge chutes as I mentioned,
like marbles, they roll really nicely.
I drop these every now and then and then they roll away
and I'm chasing because I don't want to lose them.
There are 21 hatches in the middle of the boat.
We'll come back to that in a while.
It's interesting that the anchors each weigh
about seven ton, I'm sorry, no.
Not the anchors.
The anchors that weigh down the hatch covers are seven tons.
A car is what, a ton, two tons?
So very, very heavy types of activities.
They leave shortly before 2pm
on the open waters of Lake Superior.
This is how many automobiles
the ore that they carry is gonna make.
7,500 automobiles.
A lot of cars.
A colleague of mine who's really into trains,
when he saw how much it was and calculated in his head,
if you put that much ore in a freight train and carried it,
that freight train would be like six miles long.
So that's a lot of iron ore that they're carrying.
'Cause they gotta, they're gonna make a lot of automobiles.
I wonder if anybody ever bought
one of those automobiles.
All right, later on, I mean, so there's been a lot
of interviewing right after the tragedy.
The National Transportation Safety Board, of course,
interviewed a lot of people and even as time went on,
more and more people would get interviewed,
and Bernie Cooper, who was the captain of the Anderson,
would recall that that Sunday, and we quote,
"was one of the special days on Lake Superior,
"just ripples on the water, sunny and warm for November.
"As we departed we could see the Edmund Fitzgerald."
So, two of them were leaving, Edmund Fitzgerald's out ahead.
At some point, they're gonna decide, let's go together.
Okay, so eventually they're gonna sail and you're gonna see,
there's gonna be communications throughout the next two days
between the Anderson and the Fitzgerald.
What did the weather look like?
This is the surface weather map for November 9th,
7am in the morning
and, again, what do we see?
There's the cold front.
I mean, there's the warm front, now we're seeing the warm front.
Here's the cold front. Here's where it's precipitating.
If you know your weather symbols,
you start to see that there's thunderstorms around here,
and you'll notice that that low that used to be
right in here and you could hardly see it
has now developed nicely and you could see a nice,
well-developed cold front dipping down into Texas,
and this nice warm front that's heading up
towards the Great Lakes.
Then that low I think is 900,
it's less than a thousand millibars, 999 millibars.
We like to think in millibars not in inches of mercury,
which is another way that pressure is reported.
But we can see by looking at this,
by our history we know
that this thing is probably gonna develop, right?
This is the classic type of situation
that's gonna head up towards the Great Lakes.
This is what it looks like on a satellite image.
This is one of the few satellite images currently.
And I say currently.
This is from the defense meteorological satellite.
This is when the storm was over Kansas.
You can see the warm front developing nicely.
You get this nice, dry slot.
There's no clouds in here.
That indicates, again, that this is gonna be a strong storm.
This is a developing storm.
We call this the comma head
'cause when we first got satellite imagery,
we could start looking at the storms from up above,
and these storms, as they developed, look like commas.
If you just look at the white, it looks like a comma.
So, being as creative wordsmiths as we are,
we call this the comma head. (laughs)
There it is, this is the comma tail that hangs down in here.
But this dry slot, again, is telling you
that the system is going to be developing.
It turns out we just got a bunch of data from NASA.
So we think we actually have the geostationary data
that goes with this which will allows us to run animations
at really high resolution.
The problem is that the crates of data
that we got from NASA, they're not labeled.
So we kind of just have to say, "Maybe it's this one!"
It's like, "Oh, maybe it's this one!"
(chuckles) No.
Someday we're actually gonna see it
and we'll show it in animation.
Maybe when we do the 45th case.
Hopefully not longer than that.
Here's another thing that our weather people like to do.
So again, this is what the weather was looking like
on November 9th, 1975.
Here's the cold front. Here's the warm front.
And then each one of these stations in here,
you know, like Tulsa, are stations
that are making weather observations.
And so what we like to do is what we call a cross section.
So we take these observations from each one of these cities
and we put them on this map down in here.
If it's a solid circle, I don't know how many
of you know these meteorological terms,
but if it's a solid circle,
that means it's totally overcast.
These barbs are telling you the wind direction.
Where I'm pointing here, that's a southwest wind
at 15 knots.
This tells you this is Tulsa
so it allows you to go look up here.
So this is due south going north up to Duluth.
If it's raining, there's some other marks in here.
These first number up here is the temperature.
So it's 45 degrees and down here is the dew point
to tell you it's dry.
This up here is where we just kind of drew in clouds.
This is from mine and John's book on this,
the chapter on this storm.
Cold air mass back in here.
This is where the cold front is. This is where the warm front is.
Again, not too spectacular, right?
Just kind of, interesting kind of day.
This is the classic type of cloud systems that we get.
When you see a warm front coming towards you,
you get these nice cirrus way out ahead of it
and then eventually you get these low level clouds
and as the front develops, eventually it'll turn into
stratiform, steady precipitation-type activity.
That's the weather.
This is what the weather looks like
later on in the afternoon, 4pm.
So not too much longer. Same day.
Notice now when we look at that system...
boy that's really developed.
That's a classic case now where it's not quite
at its most intense form, but there's the warm front,
there's the low pressure system,
and here's the cold front that trails all the way down.
When we do the cross section again through these states,
I mean, yeah, through these observing systems,
this is what it looks like again.
You can see the cold front now is really pushing north.
We're getting some precipitation
out ahead of the warm front.
This is the warm front right in here replacing cold air,
and this is the cold air replacing the warm air.
A lot of times in front of the cold front as it's moving in,
it's generating thunderstorms and clearly enough,
that's what we're beginning to observe.
So basically, if you look at the classic situation
of how these storms develop,
this is the classic type of situation.
The main difference is it's intense.
It's a lot more intense that your average
weather system that's moving along.
I want to remind you, 1975.
It's a long time ago, right?
We had these satellite imageries but you would never
find a satellite image on your TV television news.
They couldn't get it to them.
Radar images.
You look at radars now, they're really high resolution.
You get all these different colors.
Radar images in 1975, if you had access to them,
were just a blob of white where it was raining.
That was it.
The computers back then were less,
so as I said I was a undergrad at the time.
I was running a numerical weather prediction model
the next year.
The computer that I ran it on
is less than the power I have on my smart phone.
So, a lot of difference.
And we'll talk about that at the end
in terms of the forecasting of that storm.
But the National Weather Service knows it's happening.
They see that it's developing
and they have some predictions, but a lot of it is still
by looking at models and by experience.
So, by November 9th
7pm, the National Weather Service issued a gale warning
for Lake Superior.
So the storm hasn't even hit it yet,
but they know it's going towards the Lake Superior.
So a gale warning means that the winds are gonna be
like 34 to 40 knots.
- If you declare a course
and it says east to northeastern,
is that where it's coming from or where it's headed?
- So, when we say a north wind,
that means it's coming out of the north.
- Audience: Heading south. - Heading south, right.
- Northeasterly is--?
- A northeasterly comes from the northeast.
And a northwesterly means it's coming out of the northwest.
And you're gonna see a map of Lake Superior
and we'll talk about why that's so important, okay?
Why the forecast actually was a little off
in forecasting the track and the timing
of how fast this storm was moving.
All right, so they predicted
east to northeasterly winds, right?
During the night.
So coming this way and then shifting to northwest to north
by the afternoon of November 10th.
Now since I'm a weather guy,
I gotta show you the upper air maps. (chuckles)
You may not be familiar with it,
but it's a lot easier to predict the upper air
than it is what's going on at the surface
because there's no friction up there, so it's easier.
But basically this is again a classic type of situation
where we get these troughs.
This is the jet stream where it's going
and low systems at the surface always tend to be
to the east of where these troughs are.
The great thing is that it's easier
to forecast a movement of these troughs
than it is to forecast the movement
of low pressure systems.
So, around 2am on November 10th,
the National Weather Service upgrades the gale warning
to storm warnings, right?
Which means winds are gonna be sustained at 48 to 55 knots
with the prediction of northeast winds 35 to 50 knots
becoming northwesterly 28 to 38 knots on Monday.
Waves, eight to 15 feet.
Okay?
You know, I think of a 15 foot wave,
I mean, I've been in five foot waves on a fishing boat
and you know, tried not to throw up
in my brother's boat (chuckles)
'cause he'd never invite me back.
15-foot waves. That's a big wave.
And as we'll see, some of the estimates are even
that they actually even got up to 30 feet or so.
But 15-foot waves to these seasoned sailors?
Probably nothing, you know?
They're probably like, "Ah, darn it."
But that's the way it goes.
So around 2am, so again, we have the logs
of the talking of the, from the Anderson anyway,
talking to the Fitzgerald.
The two captains talk about the weather that's coming
and how it's gonna be nasty on there.
And they decide to change their route, okay?
And they're also deciding now, hey, let's go together.
Misery in company, something like that.
That's how it goes.
So this is, again, this is the route
that they ended up taking.
They initially were planning to come this route.
Shorter, save fuel, get there faster, right?
But they decided to take this route to go the northern route
because the winds were predicted to come this way.
So they would be shielded by the land.
If they stayed with their other route
where they would be down in here,
then they would be pummeled by these winds
coming over the open lake.
And as we'll see, winds over the open lake
generate big waves and there's no friction
to slow them down.
Winds over here, and you can see it in our lakes as well.
Coming off the lake, they're slowed down by the land itself.
So they're shielded by it.
That's why they decide to take that route
based on the National Weather Service update
of its forecast, 'cause they're expecting north,
northeast-type winds.
Smart thing to do.
All right, November 10th, 7am in the morning.
By the way, we make these maps every 12 hours generally.
That's why it's always at 7am.
And these are the only ones I could get
and get our book people to redraw.
So these are, again, now you can see the system.
It is very well developed.
When you get a system where you have this nice,
long cold front, the warm front attached to it
and then this occluded front that hangs out
and touches low, you know that you're at your peak storm.
So, the steam, the storm is at its peak
and guess where it is?
Right over Lake Superior
where it's reading its maximum peak.
The other thing I forgot to mention
is that these lines right in here,
those are the isobars, lines of constant pressure.
And when these things are packed together,
the wind is really, really strong, okay?
Out here you can see this in Oklahoma.
They're not there at all so the wind,
there's basically no winds.
They're very very light.
So strong packing means lots of winds
and you can see this whole area shaded in as well,
indicating that it's all precipitating over there.
We don't know necessarily if its rain or snow,
but actually we'll get some reports later on
of snow and rain, all right?
So the storm's full blast now,
Nine in the morning, November 10th.
Seven in the morning, sorry.
November 10th.
Six in the morning Central time.
Seven in the morning Eastern Time.
That's right.
And here's again a quote now back to the song.
"And late that night when the ship bell rang,
"could it be the north wind they'd been feeling."
Okay, so now the problem is they've changed,
they've gotten up there but oh my goodness,
maybe the wind isn't from the north and the northwest,
maybe it looks like it's gonna back
and come out of the northwest.
And if that's the case, that's not good.
And we'll see what that is
if you can't picture that in your mind.
So again, his song is reflecting a lot
of what's going on with the weather.
I had to throw this satellite image in.
I'm going to go over it just to let you know that,
to remind you and remind me to tell you
that, yeah, we're great with regard to satellite imagery,
but it's really hard to pick the storm out.
This is what the storm was looking like
so it's a little bit difficult to pick it out
on November 10th, which this is for.
All right, so again, the storm is still evolving
on November 10th, so at 3am the winds are reported
coming from the northeast at 42 knots.
They're going together, the Fitzgerald and the Anderson,
with the Fitzgerald ahead of the Anderson.
And they're in radio contact.
And they could actually have radars on the ship
so they could actually identify where each other is as well.
They're not just talking,
but they have radar so they can pick it up.
7am, the storm passes over Marquette, Michigan
and starts across Lake Superior.
More poetically, that's the meteorological explanation,
more poetically Lightfoot says it as,
"The wind in the wires make a tattle tale sound
"and a wave broke over the railing."
He's saying it's getting nasty.
Winds get really bad and you gotta wire up.
(imitates vibrating) It vibrates and makes noise.
So things aren't looking good.
And they're gonna get worse.
And the reason why is there's gonna be a wind shift.
Okay, so on the afternoon of November 10th,
a wind shift is evident.
By 2:45pm the winds have backed,
which means they have moved counterclockwise,
That's what meteorological term back means,
to the northwest and they're steady at 42 knots, 43 knots.
Waves are observed to be 12 to 16 feet high.
And that's reported by the Anderson.
At around this time, the Fitzgerald, again,
is talking with the Anderson and they tell him
and this is a quote
out of the National Transportation Safety Board,
"A fence rail down, two vents lost
"or damaged, and a list."
A list means (imitates knife slash)
that it had gone like this, okay?
So they know they're taking damage.
They know that something's wrong.
And at this time, the storm's gotten so bad
that it actually closed the locks.
But they're on their way.
Back to the weather.
These are the sea level pressure
as a function of time going from November 9th on the left
all the way over to November 11th on the right.
And you can see, you know, 12 midnight, 6pm, etc.
And then the different colors represent the different cities
in Wisconsin and in Michigan.
And so when you see the storm approaching,
when the storm starts getting to you,
you can see that the pressure rapidly drops.
And then as the storm passes,
the pressure generally goes up.
If you're a meteorologist, you know that when you're doing
this rapid dropping, that means that the packing
of the isobars is tight, which means the winds
are really, really strong.
If you're a folklorist, you know the saying,
fast rise after low foretells a stronger blow.
What's that saying is that
if the pressures rapidly rises after the low pressure
that means your nasty weather is yet to come, all right?
So it's not over yet, even though the pressure's going up.
And again, these are on the land surfaces.
This is when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank,
at around this time.
So again, remember this is the west,
so this is what's heading their way.
Really, really strong winds.
The other information we have that we plotted up
was to look the Marquette wind speeds
and as well as the Sault Ste. Marie wind speeds as well.
That's on this axis
and that's the black line that's going up.
And again the dotted line represents the time of the wreck.
And then this represents the pressure
which is on the right-hand side of the scale.
And so again, you can see that relationship between,
as the pressure rapidly drives the wind,
even though the pressure's going up,
the wind is actually increasing and getting really bad.
These are the maximum wind gusts
being measured either at these stations in Marquette
or these stations up here in Sault Ste. Marie.
Biggest gust measured here is 62 knots.
So basically, we're talking about 100 miles per hour.
(chuckles) Not a fun wind to be in.
This is the, again, a quote from the song,
"When the gales of November come slashing,"
When they come, man, it's nasty, right?
"When afternoon came it was freezing rain
"in the face of a hurricane west wind."
All right, so they are like hurricane-type winds.
Hurricane category one, which is the weakest hurricane,
has to have sustained winds of 64 to 82 knots.
There's only been a wind gust so it's really
not quite a hurricane.
It's more like, in the face of a tropical storm west wind
but it doesn't really flow.
That's okay, we give artists license.
Basically, the point is, it's getting nasty out there,
really strong.
The other thing is
there's no real observations of freezing rain.
It's raining or it's snowing.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't
freezing rain happening, so it could have been
freezing rain out on the lake.
Temperatures were below freezing,
so it wouldn't be surprising.
It's just that, as far as I know,
there was no real observations of freezing rain.
Again, that's not to criticize the song.
It's just to, you know, be the weather geek.
- Audience: You weren't on the ship.
- Yeah. (laughs) And I wasn't on the ship.
Could've have been freezing rain.
Well, neither was Gordon.
All right, so again, back to some more weather,
looking at what was going on in Madison during this time.
Again, starting on the 9th on the left
going to the 11th, here's the weather systems that tell you.
The green is telling you how much it's raining
or precipitating and then again, we're looking
at the temperature drops in red.
So, this is the Madison temperature and the dew point.
The green is the dew point. The red is the temperature.
You can see that boom, we got hit by a thunderstorm.
You probably felt that when a severe thunderstorm comes in,
a lot of times temperature drops as you get hit
by that gust front and it brings it down
and then the temperature kept dropping
after the cold front went by.
Rapidly drops down.
Once the cold front goes by, the pressure begins
to rise steadily.
And daylight comes.
That's another song, right * Daylight comes and
(laughs) And things begin to warm up again.
But again, you can see that the temperatures
are getting around freezing around Madison.
Certainly a big temperature drop from up in the 60s,
down into the low 30s,
so that's a 30-degree temperature drop.
You'd feel that if you were outside, right?
And you probably would be complaining to me
rather than thanking what's going on.
All right, so back, again, to the weather
with regard to this wind shift that we brought up already.
The shift of the winds from the northwest
is very important to what goes on with the weather
and its impact on the ship.
As this increased the fetch
that's allowing large waves to build up.
Okay, so remember, they took this way
because they thought the winds would be out of the north
or the northeast.
By the time they're heading this way,
the winds, again, National Weather Service
had the timing off.
The winds are coming this way, okay?
So they're coming all along this open area, open water area.
That's not good if you've been on a lake.
And the reason why it's not good is because
when wind blows over the ocean, it's gonna generate waves,
so big bodies of water.
And how big those waves get is a function of three things.
One is the wind speed.
The wind speed is at constant 45 knots or so.
That's a strong wind, that's gonna build up big waves.
The second thing is the duration of the winds, all right?
That storm lasts for several hours.
Those winds are not dying. They're constant.
And the third thing is the fetch,
or the length of the open water.
So as we go back here, now that the winds are over here,
they're strong, they're steady, that they're continual,
and they have a big fetch.
So, they're gonna generate big waves.
And the type of waves that they generate are these guys.
So what we did here is this blue line is a theoretical line
of how winds, how big waves could get theoretically.
If the wind speed was in knots here,
this is the maximum wave height
if you had an infinite fetch.
So this would be, in some ways
if you were over the Pacific Ocean.
So if you have a 50-knot wind, you could generate waves
that are about 50 feet high.
Pretty big.
These Xs right in here were observations made by ships
of the wave heights that we were able to get.
And so you can see a lot of them are 20 feet high.
All right, so again remember the prediction was 12 to 18.
Some observations were even getting up to 30 feet.
So these are, you know, think of this building.
You know, this is only maybe 15 feet from where we are.
And imagine it moving.
That's a lot of mass.
And again here's the quote,
"When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck,
"saying fella it's too rough to feed ya."
So, you can imagine rocking in these big waves, right?
We don't know if he actually said that,
but again, it tells you what they're probably thinking.
"At 7pm," so again, this is from Lightfoot's song.
"At 7pm a main hatchway caved in,
"He said, 'fellas it's been good to know ya.'
"The captain wired in, he had water coming in
"and the good ship and crew was in peril.
"And later that night when the lights went out of sight
"Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."
Sounds very romantic. And it is, right?
But it's a little bit misleading in the following ways:
There's probably, well,
they knew they were having trouble, right?
I mean, they were listing, they lost a railing,
they lost, as we'll see later on,
they lost their radar as well,
so they know that they're in trouble, right?
But I doubt, given how seasoned those folks were,
that they probably thought that they were gonna sink.
Okay now, there's evidence that came up later on
that may point to the fact that, again,
they really knew something was really bad.
But at this point, there's no indication.
They know they're having a tough time,
but there's no indication that they're worried
about sinking at all.
So, it's very unlikely that anybody said,
"Hey, been good to know you."
(chuckles) Like, you know, say goodbye.
The other thing about this is that he,
the phrase there, "a main hatchway caved in."
So we went and saw Gordon Lightfoot come here
and sing about a month ago or a year ago or so.
How many people went there? You could raise your hand.
Oh, not so many. Okay, a few people went there.
It was fun to watch people sing.
People sang along with this song and many of his other songs.
When he came this phrase, I just looked around
at what people were doing and they were like,
* At 7pm the main hatch...
So, what, uh, hm, huh, oh?
* The captain wired in he...
You know, it's like, oh I forgot the words.
And it's not that he forgot the words,
it's that Gordon Lightfoot changed the words, all right?
Because there's no real,
while this is the main, we'll come to the theories
of what sank the ship and one of the arguments
is that the hatchways, water was getting into the hatchways.
There's no real evidence that that's actually what happened.
So he said, "Well, you know what,
"I'm not going to put that in there anymore."
So he took it out and he put this in:
"At 7pm it grew dark."
It was then he said,
"Fellas it's been good to know ya."
This is now the official words.
If you go to a live concert, this is what he'll sing.
So memorize it if you want to sing along.
Cause otherwise you're going to go huh, what happened?
And you'll sound really intelligent,
"Oh yeah, I knew he changed the words."
We have this in our book
and we were required to put in the new words.
We weren't allowed to use the old words.
And he has good reasons for it, like again,
there's no real evidence that it was the hatchways
and in addition, many of the families of the people who died
didn't like them saying it was the hatchways, right?
Because in some ways that put the blame then on the sailors
which isn't a good thing to do
because we don't know what sank the Fitzgerald.
All right, so in the middle of this howling snowstorm
that's going on, things spraying, you could hardly see,
you probably don't wanna be on deck.
Well, you definitely don't wanna be on deck.
In fact, that's another curious thing that came up.
We'll get to it maybe in a minute.
But around 3:20, the captain on the Fitzgerald
calls the Anderson captain on radio and says,
"Anderson, this is Fitzgerald.
"I have sustained some topside damage.
"I have a fence rail down,
"two vents lost and damaged, and a list.
"I'm checking," which means he's slowing down.
"Will you stay by me 'til we get to Whitefish Bay?
And of course, they say, "You bet.
"Do you have your pumps going?"
And he says "Yes, we got both our pumps going."
Okay, so the Fitzgerald knows
they're probably taking on water.
That's why they're listing.
So they turn on the pumps to try and get things out
but it doesn't seem to be helping very much.
What we do know at this time is that
something has damaged the Fitzgerald.
Don't know what it is,
but we know that something has damaged it.
(sighs) And that dumb weather storm,
it continues to intensify!
By 4:10pm, the wind, the gusts are blowing
and it takes off the radar antenna of the Fitzgerald.
The winds (blows air) blow it off.
That's how bad they're getting.
Power's knocked out at the remote navigation station
at Whitefish Bay.
At 5pm, the lighthouse north of Marquette,
which is closet observing station to the Fitzgerald
at that moment, records a gust of 66 knots,
77 miles per hour.
That's wind that's moving.
Cooper, whose captain on the Anderson,
estimated that the wind gusts are more
than 100 miles per hour.
So again, in a nasty storm.
Before 6pm, the captain of the Fitzgerald, McSorley,
tells another skip captain via radio the following:
"I have a bad list, lost both radars.
"And I'm taking on heavy seas over the deck.
"One of the worst seas I've ever been in."
Let's remember that phrase.
Very seasoned captain.
He's saying these are the biggest seas I've ever been in.
Other captains haven't said that.
So we're gonna use that again as our,
well, maybe what happened.
Anderson's, at this point, just 10 miles behind her.
Still can pick her up on a radar,
so they know that they're there.
Also, around this time, which is also kind of interesting,
there comes in again another little piece of information
that goes huh, interesting.
Around this time, when he's talking to this other ship,
he leaves the communication on, the radio on,
and says, "Nobody goes topside."
(chuckles) You know, it's like, oh yeah, of course, right?
But the analogy is to a weather person,
if there's a tornado coming to me and we're in this room,
I'm never gonna have to tell you,
"Don't go towards the tornado." Right?
You know, don't do that.
So one of the arguments is that he saying this
but he's just curious because all the seasoned sailors
are gonna know you don't go on deck, all right?
Unless there's something really damaged
and you think you can fix it
or you need to go out and investigate it.
Okay, so again, there's no evidence for that
but again, it's another one of these mysteries that
why would he say that?
People know that you shouldn't do that
unless he thinks that maybe somebody's gonna try
and do something, given that he's lost a couple
of things on his deck already.
This is the mystery part that just keeps,
every piece of information that comes up
just gets mysterious.
7:10pm, the Anderson gives the navigations instruction
to the radarless, right?
Doesn't have its radar anymore, doesn't know where it's going,
doesn't know what it's gonna run into.
So the Anderson is using it's radar
to track it and tell them where you're going.
You're getting off track. You need go to the east
or to the west or whatever.
Anderson first mate asks, "Oh, and by the way,
"how are you making out with your problems?"
Like the list and the moving things.
And the Fitzgerald replies, "We are holding our own."
Immediately after that conversation,
another severe snow squall enshrouds the boats.
If you've ever been in a heavy snow storm,
and all the sudden snow comes in and you cannot see anything.
Again, 1975, radars aren't that advanced.
Blocks the radars out as well,
so they cannot see the Fitzgerald at all.
Can't see it visually, can't pick it up on the radar
because of the snowstorm.
And just as suddenly at 7:30pm,
you've probably been in this as well, the snow ends.
Boom. (imitates whooshing) The skies clear out.
Boom, gets beautiful clear outside.
Still cold, still windy, but the storm's passed.
Beautiful skies, beautiful visibility.
They can see from the Anderson lights
from ships going in other directions, like going north,
but they don't see the Fitzgerald anywhere.
Don't see its lights.
So they think well, maybe it's lost its power.
Right, I mean, it's lost its radar, why not lose its power?
But it's not on the Anderson radar as well.
So they begin to get worried, right?
What happened?
Hadn't been too long ago
that they were actually talking to them.
Now big, 727-foot ship is gone.
So Captain Cooper
searches for the Fitzgerald trying to find it.
You know, wondering how do you lose a 729-foot ore freighter
in the middle of a lake
when you were just talking to it 10 minutes ago.
That's the mystery.
He called the Coast Guard to warn them about it
and about his worst fears.
Again, this is a quote from the documentation.
"This is the Anderson.
"I am very concerned with the welfare
"of the steamer Edmund Fitzgerald.
"I can see no lights as before.
"I don't have them on radar.
"I just hope he didn't take a nosedive."
Basically, the Fitzgerald is gone, off the map.
Where did it go?
Whatever happened, happened fast.
You know, they tried to send some rescue ships out
to try and find it, but one boat went out.
Others didn't because the seas were too rough.
So they didn't wanna, you know,
they would have been risking their ships as well.
The conditions when they recovered the lifeboats
suggests that there were no attempts to leave the ship
by launching the lifeboats.
That probably would have been really tough anyway,
given the size of the seas.
But these images that they found indicate
that the lifeboats were basically just torn away
from their holdings and ripped away.
No distress signals were ever issued.
So, they knew they were in peril,
they knew that they were having problems,
but they never issued a warning.
They never said come and get us, SOS.
Indeed after, oh no, so,
they found, these are the damaged lifeboats.
This was the weather again, now on November 11th, 1975.
It, again, just continues its classic movement
up into Canada.
Now it's beginning to die.
Its winds are weakening, the low is filling in,
the fronts are all going away.
A little indication that it just,
that this maelstrom on the Great Lakes anymore
by the weather in just 24 hours ago.
On Monday, actually it did do some damage.
It actually drowned two people in Grand Haven, Michigan.
Wiped them off, big wave come in,
take people off piers back then.
The southwest winds blew across the entire lake
of Lake Erie to Buffalo,
generating waters nine feet above normal in Buffalo,
blowing a woman off her second story porch.
So again, strong.
This, again, gives you the,
can you imagine being blown off your porch?
I mean, that's kind of, the winds these people
were dealing with out on the middle of the lake.
Back to the storm, you can sing this.
"Does anyone know where the love of God goes."
You can sing it on your own, in your own mind,
not out loud.
"When the waves turn the minutes to hours."
I mean, you could imagine what it'd been in on that boat.
Probably seemed like forever going on.
They got close to Whitefish Bay.
If they, actually, if the forecast would have been spot on,
they probably never would have made north
and they would have made it to their destination.
"They might have split up or they might have capsized,"
"they may have broke deep and took water."
Actually, there's no evidence and the indications
are very much towards not capsizing.
There's no indication in the analysis of the boat that,
they found it, obviously, on the bottom,
that it actually capsized, so that probably didn't happen.
But back in 1976, it was written a year afterwards,
you know, there was still theories
including UFOs coming and just plucking it away.
'Cause nobody knew where it went.
That was, of course, was disproven. (laughs)
In case you didn't know. So, what happened?
There are a couple of theories, again, that come out
and I'm sure they'll be always ones that come out.
There was a report, as there are in any disasters,
from the National Transportation Safety Board
that investigated in it.
There's no survivors, there's no witnesses that's going on.
So again, it's all conjecture and mystery
and trying putting together pieces of the puzzle, right?
Which makes scientists, I mean,
this is what we love to do, right?
Take all these little pieces and put something together.
It's clear that all of the evidence
that we point to suggests that the Fitzgerald
was taking on water someway.
Water was getting in there.
A couple of ways to indicate that, one of which that,
the one that I like to think of the most is that
if you're taking on water onto a boat,
taking on lots of water,
what's gonna happen is as you take on the water,
the boat gets heavier, right?
And you just get lower and lower.
And now those waves that everybody thinks are big,
you begin to think that they're the hugest waves
you've ever been in, right?
Because now, instead of being 20 foot waves,
they're 25 foot waves.
Okay, and they're crashing over the boat
and they just look really, really large.
Here are the two, I would say, theories,
that still are, have
evidence, evidence is like the wrong word
because there's nothing, again, to say which is which.
There are evidence for each one,
although there are also questions about,
well, if that happened then why didn't this happen?
One of those is that there was a problem
with the hatch covers.
And this is what the National Transportation Safety Board
ended up concluding, that water somehow
was getting into the hatch covers
by themselves, taking on water.
Now you can take on a lot of water and not know it, right?
Because the hatch covers are filled with these things.
Imagine a pile of sand, pour water on it,
where's that water gonna go?
It's not gonna come out for the pumps to clear out.
It's gonna fill in the spaces of all of these marbles.
Okay, so if water's coming into the hatchway,
you can turn on your pumps
and you're not gonna get it out of there.
It's just gonna stay in with the iron marbles
and that's gonna bring your ship lower
and lower in the water.
There's a problem with that, though,
and that is that if the waters are coming in the hatchways,
well, it's coming into the middle of the boat
and that wouldn't cause a list.
So, somehow the water has to be in the ballast
off to, I think it was the starboard side.
I think that's the way they were listing.
You need to get into the side
and get it unevenly distributed so that the boat has a list.
That wouldn't happen with the hatchway theory.
The other is that it bottomed out.
As it was going by, if you go back and look at the maps,
there's some shoals in there.
The water's only 26 feet deep,
but there's a lot of waves there.
It's possible that the boat could have touched bottom.
All that weight, touch bottom, could develop a crack.
You got a crack, water now comes in,
it's gonna go into the ballast,
you're gonna list, you're gonna be able to pump it out.
Problem is, no evidence that there's any damage on the boat.
As we'll see in the image that's coming up,
the boat was, they found the boat and the problem is
is that in terms of validating this theory,
is that the stern is flipped over upside down,
so you can see the bottom.
And there's no evidence that that bottom hit the shoal
or hit the ground in any way.
The bow part, the front half of the boat
is sitting in the mud right-side up.
So you can't see the bottom,
so you don't know if it actually hit the bottom.
So that's why these two theories generally
have the most credence, I should say,
in terms of what caused it to go down
though there's no shooting gun.
There's no loaded bullet
that's gonna say this one or that one.
Except for what John and I say.
It was the weather!
That's what brought the boat down.
It was those big winds and those big waves
and somehow the water got into the boat and brought it down.
There's been a number of expeditions.
I like to look at this one
which was from the '76 Coast Guard expedition.
You can see them there, you can read them.
Ones that went down to see it.
There was actually one, I don't know if that's on here,
there was an expedition, humans actually went down there
to try to find some stuff,
but they could only stay down there for like four minutes
before they had to come up.
This is a pretty accurate image.
So, this is the stern side of the boat,
the back of the boat.
You can see, flipped upside down.
This is the bow side of the boat, right-side up.
So this is drawings that came from this expedition.
Other expeditions suggest
that this is actually more parallel,
so it actually should be sitting more like this,
more parallel to where the bow is.
So there may be a little misdrawing there,
but otherwise it's pretty good.
This is the other drawing that I like that's pretty good.
The things about this and then the other expeditions
as they went through and looked at it
is that there is indication when you look
at how it's sitting on the bottom,
it's deep in this mud,
which means it hit the bottom really hard.
There's also evidence,
if you look at these wonderful pellets,
they're not just around the boat.
They're scattered all over a debris field
and that suggests that when it hit bottom,
they were not one piece.
It had already broken apart and that when this
was on its way down, this was probably still up
at the surface, spilling out some of these marbles,
spreading it out over the site.
A lot of this damage that you see here as well
was associated with the impact when it got down
to the bottom and hit the ground,
not associated with damage that would have been done
by waves or water.
He ends his song in kind of nice way.
"In a musty hall in Detroit,
"they prayed in the maritime sailors' cathedral."
One of the voyages that went down
recovered the bell and that's now sitting in a museum
and on November 10th, they'll have a ceremony
and they'll go there and they'll ring the bell
for the 29 sailors that died.
There were 29 people on boat, on board,
that were killed during that sinking.
And this is a list of them.
I think it's always good to put this out
because there is always
gonna be another extratropical cyclone.
That's what we call this mid-latitude cyclones,
extratropical cyclones.
There's always gonna be these storms
and there's probably always gonna be shippers
on the Great Lakes so there's always gonna be accidents.
We haven't had a really big one recently.
In fact, I think since '75, maybe.
We've had boats go down with individuals
or couples on there, but not a big disaster
like the Edmund Fitzgerald was.
But people are unique and irreplaceable,
so it's always good to pause and remember the loss
of the 29 people that were on that boat
because that loss is forever.
To end more on a happy note, (chuckles) remember these?
I'm gonna play this video.
Oh, maybe, hopefully.
Oh no, it's not playing.
So you know what happens with this?
Yeah it wobbles, it wobbles, and then it collapses.
And it falls down. Galloping Gertie, right.
It's that one.
I'm not sure why it's not playing.
It did last night, it's fascinating.
You can see right in here, it's a little dark
but you could actually see it collapsing.
It's a standard thing.
Happened in?
- Audience: 1940. - 1940, right, because?
What happened here? (audience speaks off mic)
Armistice Day of 1940.
Right, this is the storm path
of the Armistice Day storm of 1940.
Pretty much took the same track,
once it got east of the Rockies,
as the storm that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald.
And look at the dates.
Oh my goodness, November 10th, November 11th.
Right around this time, same thing.
This ended up killing about 152 people,
I think about that many people in this area.
A lot of them were duck hunters
because it was a beautiful day just like today.
And they were out hunting.
Beautiful, 60 degrees.
You go outside, you take off your jacket,
you go hunting, you don't know its coming.
And then (claps) wham, boom, temperatures drop 30 degrees
and now you're stuck.
And there's some great books about this story
and stories about this storm as well.
But again, it points to the fact that yeah,
these storms happen and they will happen
and they cause a lot of damage.
This is what the weather map looked like for that day.
So you can see, the gradient here is huge.
So really, really strong winds
and really strong temperature drops.
If you weren't around in 1940,
I'm gonna guess you were around in 1998.
1998, we basically had the same storm
as the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Here's the path of the Edmund Fitzgerald,
this one right in here with the red.
Here's the path of the storm on, look at that.
11.
November 10th, November 11th.
11, 9th.
Basically took the same path, same type of thing.
If you were here for that day, you would remember the winds
'cause they were really, really intense.
So again, these storms happen.
They're not uncommon.
It's a matter of whether or not they actually hit us.
Here's the satellite image from that
that reminds us of what changed between 1940,
when more than 150 people died,
to 1998 when? to 1975, when over 30 people were killed,
to 1998 when?
(students speak off mic)
Nobody was killed.
Three things happened.
One is we have better radars, right?
So we can really monitor what's going on.
Second thing that happens is
we got really good satellites in '98
and those satellites feed
the numerical weather prediction models
to tell them where the storm is
and where it's probably moving to.
Third is our numerical weather prediction models
have gotten a heck of a lot better in 40 years.
So the predictions are much, much better right now.
Plus all the warning systems that go with it
and plus the access, right?
So this was 98, we're due.
We're approaching 20 years later.
We should be getting another one these storms
and if we do, I'm gonna bet that a lot of you
are gonna pull out this thing
and track it on your radar to see what's going on.
So that's why: We've gotten better at forecasting,
better at warning, therefore better at protecting lives.
So with that, thank you. I really appreciate coming here.
Thanks for all the TV folks and to Tom.
(audience applauds)