New documentary follows divers down to wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
While the mystery of what caused the Edmund Fitzgerald to sink in Lake Superior lives on in many Minnesotans’ memories, just a few souls have seen her watery grave firsthand — and it’s likely no one else will ever again.
Ahead of the fateful 50-year anniversary on Monday, FOX 9 spoke with submarine divers and drew on archival footage to revisit the wreckage, debate over its demise and lasting legacy of the Fitzgerald.
Their documentary “Gales of November: Diving the Edmund Fitzgerald” premiered Wednesday night. Executive producer Joe Augustine joined MPR News host Cathy Wurzer on Morning Edition Thursday to talk about making the short film and the divers’ theories behind the Fitzgerald’s fate.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Listen to the conversation by clicking the player button.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
Most theories behind the Fitzgerald’s sinking rely on radio transmissions for the captain and weather reports. How have the divers’ discoveries added to the competing theories?
Well, I think what they were trying to do when they went on these expeditions, most recently in the mid-’90s, was really try to study the wreckage, the remaining pieces of steel, to see if there are any clues in there that can tell us, essentially, when the ship broke apart. That’s one of the biggest competing theories, because that’s what the U.S. Coast Guard didn’t determine in the late 1970s was: When did the ship actually fracture and break apart?
There are two theories on it. One is that it broke apart on the surface, and one is that it actually nosedived, hit the floor of Lake Superior and then broke apart. So that’s what they went down to try to understand better. And there are also competing theories on whether we should go back down and still try to figure out, and finally solve this mystery. One of the divers we spoke to thinks those clues are still down there. Others think we should just, at this point, 50 years later, leave it be.
Is there new footage in the documentary that might surprise viewers?
Luckily, when we spoke to divers, we were able to get all of the raw footage from dives in 1994 and 1995, so hours and hours of footage showing them in the submarine navigating around the wreck site. This footage gives fresh insight into how complex this dive truly is. I mean, we're talking 535 feet down in Lake Superior.
As one of the divers told me, at 300 feet, his camera, if he had dropped it into the lake, would have imploded. Also, because it’s so far down, this is largely undisturbed. This is fresh water. There’s no sea life down there. It’s too deep to be disturbed by ice. It provides a fresh perspective of what they were looking at through their submarines 30 years ago.
Pretty eerie stuff, isn’t it? When you see that footage?
Yeah, one of the stories that really struck me was them describing how you actually go on these expeditions. You don’t come just straight down, right over the wreck site. You land off of the wreck site and then use your sonar to approach it. But that sonar technology has come a long way in the last 30 years. Back then, they didn't really have any way of triangulating where they were, and two divers on two different expeditions described actually getting lost and ending up inside the ship in some way, shape or form. Think about the eeriness of that, not realizing until you’re already on the ship, and then realizing, oh my God, we’re actually in one of the cargo holds, or we’re actually over the deck of the ship. That happened to two different divers on two different expeditions.
And it’s considered a graveyard, because all 29 men went down with the ship.
When I first covered this shipwreck, I was a general assignment reporter here in the Twin Cities. I’d gone up to Duluth to cover the 40th anniversary, and I just scratched the surface of it. That was one of the first times I heard about the controversy over the grave site part of this. We've had six dives down there, but we haven’t had one in 30 years. Part of that is because on the independently financed expedition and dive of 1994, divers recorded video of what they believe was a member of the crew.
That, understandably, made a lot of the family members of the lost crew upset. Those families then pressured the Canadian government, and the Canadian government has not granted a permit since 1995. They did grant one more dive expedition with a family’s approval in 1995 to recover the ship’s bell. But after that, there has not been another expedition granted or approved because it has been determined to be a grave site, and the divers I talked to don’t think there will be another expedition in our lifetimes.
There are tributes Monday, including a sold-out commemoration at Split Rock Lighthouse. Why do you think the story lives on so prominently in Minnesotans’ memories?
That’s a really good question, and that’s something I tried to ask a version of to everybody I talked to during the reporting on this, and I think there’s two main answers. One is the Gordon Lightfoot song; you just can’t underestimate the impact that it had. As one person said in our reporting, it made the wreck a hit, and so it just kind of generated this worldwide interest in the shipwreck.
But the second is the mystery of it, the fact that we are still debating: How did the ship break apart; how did the ship truly go down? What did those last communications between the two ships tell us about what the Fitzgerald was experiencing out on Lake Superior that night? I think that mystery — the fact that we didn’t get those clear answers as to what happened, as to why there was no mayday — all of that leads into why this still generates such interest half a century later.
