Construction on Edmund Fitzgerald began on August 9, 1957 at the Detroit Great Lake Engineering shipyard on the Rouge River. It was launched on June 7, 1958 by Elizabeth Fitzgerald in the third attempt to break the champagne bottle on the bow of the ship. It was the largest ship of the time at 729 feet and could carry 25,000 tons of cargo that would sail the Great Lakes on the Canadian border with the United States. On November 10, 1975 it sank.
On November 14, a military plane, Orion, was searching 100 square miles of Lake Superior for the Fitz and detected a sunken vessel 17 miles from Whitefish Bay with its magnetic anomaly sonar.
The SS Woodrush with its side-gazing sonar scanned the seafloor at about 500 feet for the surface and took pictures of the Fitz, split in two. On Monday, November 18, a board of inquiry met in Cleveland, with four seated specialist sailors.
The board heard eyewitness accounts from all the boat captains who were on the lake that night. The board heard from the previous crew and the captain of the Fitz on how the ship was handled, the board also heard from the captain’s previous crew to see how they handled their ships. They called in the Navy’s inspection board that inspects all shipments on the lakes, annually, and the shipyard that carried out the Fitz’s repairs.
The theories that emerged from this plate were that the hatch cover bolts may not have been tightened. If not, did this allow water to enter the cargo hold during the storm? Did a hatch cover fail allowing rapid flooding of the cargo hold? Did the Fitz land during the storm, piercing the hull and allowing it to flood? Did the hull fracture due to the height of the waves allowing the boat to leave the water? Were repairs carried out on the ship in the past done correctly?
With the sudden loss of the Fitz and its entire crew and no emergency call, the board could only guess what had happened to the Fitz. The discussion still continues, and without concrete facts we will never know what happened to the Fitz on the night of November 10, 1975.