On this day in 1975, a cargo ship suddenly sank in Lake Superior. The ship’s name is the SS Edmund Fitzgerald and this was the worst accident in Lake Superior’s history, killing all 29 crew members on board.

The Cargo ship weighed more than 13,000 tons and was about 730 feet long. It also became the first ship to carry more than a million tons of iron ore through a set of parallel locks, called the Soo Locks.  In 1958, the ship was recorded as the biggest carrier in the Great Lakes.

On November 9th, the Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin to go to Detroit, Michigan. The following afternoon, Ernest McSorely, the captain of the ship, contacted the Avafor, another cargo ship travelling on Lake Superior. He reported that his ship had experienced “one of the worst seas he had ever been in.” The Fitzgerald had lost it’s radar equipment and the ship was unbalanced.

A few hours later, after the losing radar, another cargo ship on the lake made contact with the Fitzgerald, saying that it was holding it’s own. However, the ship soon disappeared from the radar screens a few minutes after. An investigation uncovered that the sinking of the ship happened very suddenly and there was no way for the ship members to exit the ship quickly enough due to the duration of it’s sinking.

The Fitzgerald was eventually found 530 feet below the surface of the lake, 17 miles from Whitefish Bay, at the northeastern tip of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The ship had broken into two parts that were found approximately 150 feet apart. As there were no survivors among the 29 crew members, there will likely never be a definitive explanation of the Fitzgerald‘s sinking.

The sinking of the Fitzgerald was the worst wreck in the Great Lakes since November 29, 1966, when 28 people died in the sinking of the Daniel J. Morrell, another cargo ship in Lake Huron.