Why Men Kept Dying on America's Largest Lake

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store On November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald — the largest ship on the Great Lakes — sank in Lake Superior with 26,116 tons of taconite pellets and all 29 crew members aboard. No distress signal. No survivors. No bodies ever recovered. She went down seventeen miles from Whitefish Point, Michigan, the stretch of water known as the Graveyard of the Great Lakes, where more than 240 ships have been lost since 1816. The cause has never been settled. The Coast Guard blamed the hatch covers. The Lake Carriers’ Association argued she struck Six Fathom Shoal. What no one disputes is that her freeboard had been cut by over three feet through load-line regulation changes in 1969, 1971, and 1973 — letting her ride deeper in the water than her designers ever intended. But the Fitzgerald is only half the story. The iron ore pellets in her hold came from the same taconite industry that was pumping 67,000 tons of waste rock into Lake Superior every day. Reserve Mining’s processing plant at Silver Bay, Minnesota had been dumping since 1955. In 1973, asbestos-like fibers were found in Duluth’s drinking water. A federal judge ordered the plant shut down. He was removed from the case. The dumping continued until 1980. This is the story of the largest lake in America, the iron ore trade that built the twentieth century, and what happened to the men and families caught between an industry that couldn’t stop pushing and a lake that never forgave. Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 song made the Fitzgerald famous. The part most people never heard is why it kept happening. Sources: U.S. Coast Guard, Marine Casualty Report: SS Edmund Fitzgerald; Sinking in Lake Superior on 10 November 1975 with Loss of Life (Report No. USCG 16732/64216, 1977) Reserve Mining Co. v. United States, 498 F.2d 1073 (8th Cir. 1974) Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society / Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, Whitefish Point, Michigan — shipwreckmuseum.com Edward W. Davis, Pioneering With Taconite (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1964) Minnesota Historical Society, MNopedia: “Mesabi Iron Range” and “Commercialization of Taconite” National Archives, Records of the Environmental Protection Agency, Record Group 412: Reserve Mining Company’s Dump Site on Lake Superior (1973)