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Any book store or gift shop in the area of the Great Lakes is liable to have a section on ships. It is almost guaranteed that the preponderance of the books on the shelf will deal with ship wrecks. It's to be expected - we are fascinated with catastrophic events, and what is more horrendous to contemplate than a ship going down, with great loss of life...in a terrible storm, . The Titanic comes immediately to mind, but the Great Lakes has it's own example, immortalized by Gorden Lightfoot, in the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. It is to be hoped sincerely that there is not great disappointment abroad in the land that nothing like the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald has happened on the lakes in nearly thirty years - and that it becomes less likely to be repeated all the time.

The last ship to be lost on the lakes was in 1979, when the Frontenaca, 603-foot Cleveland-Cliffs ore boat ran aground in Silver Bay, MN where she was to load taconite pellets. A sudden snow squall obscured both human and radar vision. Things might still have been OK if a buoy light had not burned out, causing the grounding. Nobody died, but the ship, after being pounded on the rocks by the storm, never sailed again and was broken up for scrap after being towed to Superior, WI.

The worst disaster on the Great Lakes resulted in over 835 deaths, but it had nothing to do with the lake's infamous storms. In 1915 the passenger steamer Eastland had boarded about 2,500 employees of Western Electric in Chicago for an afternoon excursion on Lake Michigan. While the passengers where loading, they congregated on the pier side, where a band was playing, causing a list towards the pier. The Ship's officers corrected this by emptying the ballast tanks on the pier side and the ship resumed level. Shortly after that, a fireboat passed on the outboard side (starboard) and the crowd rushed across the deck to the outboard side (still ballasted), to watch the fireboat., The ship rolled over onto it's ballasted side (apparently the lines to the pier failed??) and drowned 835 people- ( from Ships of the Great Lakes, James Barry").

There is no question that, contrary to intuition (after all, they are just lakes), spring and fall storms on the Great Lakes can be deadly. The Great Lakes lie in the path of climatic battles between tropical and polar airstreams which can collide, producing violent storms. The "Perfect Storm" Sebastion Ungers' description of the loss of the Andrea Gail, a Glouchester, MA fishing boat in the North Atlantic originally formed over the Great Lakes. When these storms form, the water in the lakes can pile into huge waves in a relatively short time. Compared to the Atlantic, the smaller size of the lakes produces waves which are typically shorter in height, but build faster and closer together. They are big enough though - as Mark Thompson has written: "While it is extremely difficult to accurately gauge the height of waves from a ship, reports of 20 to 25 foot waves are common and estimates have ranged as high as 35 feet in some particularly severe storms."

Soooo.....why are disasters less likely when the weather seems to be getting less predictable? Well, most of the historic incidents that resulted in damage to ships or injury to personnel weren't caused by storms breaking them up, as may have happened with the Fitzgerald. They were caused by ships running into things, shoals, rocks, land or each other. In other words, navigation problems. This is not too surprising considering the numerous narrow, shallow channels that ships have to navigate on the lakes. Technology has been improving things steadily and continues to do so. It would be hard to argue that the professional skills of the people who drive these ships around have not improved, and that the ships themselves aren't stronger and better built than 100 years ago (for one thing, the steel used to construct ships up until the 30's was different. As was found with the case of the Titanic, the "steel" was more like "iron" and became brittle in cold temperatures, and the annual mean temperature of Lake Superior is about 39 degrees F. No real disasters have occurred with the 1000-footers, or the other ships built in the seventies except for some generally bizarre incidents:

Apparently "navigation aides" can be significant hazards themselves. Two rather extreme examples illustrate the all-too-human propensity to not pay attention to what is going on - maybe just look out of the porthole from time to time.

(1) In the early (3:30 am) hours of September 9, 1993, the American Steamship's thousand-footer MV Indiana Harbor had completed some apparently routine repairs at the shipyard in Sturgeon Bay, WI and was bound for the straits of Mackinaw. All systems appeared to be working and the weather was clear when she ran into the Lansing Shoals light (approximatly 10.6 miles due north of Beaver Island, and 18 miles south-east of Seul Choix Point on Michigan's upper pennisula). "Apparently the third mate, who was on watch did not change course to pass through the Straits". . The Indiana Harbor struck the light house, opening a 50 -square-foot hole in the bow. The ship turned around and headed back to the shipyard for a $1.9 million fix-up. The Coast Guard's report delicately suggested that the mate "was perhaps in the wrong profession" (from "Ships of the Great Lakes", James Barry). The light house sustained $112 thousand dollars in damage, but continued to blink away..

(2) In 1997 another state-of -the art American Steamship vessel, the MV Buffalo (634 ft, launched in 1978) encountered a problem. On the mid-morning of December 12 the Buffalo was steaming downbound (beatifically, one must assume) ,in clear skies and calm water, on the lower Detroit River when she was ambushed by the Detroit River Lighthouse (which had been in the same place since the late 1880's, when it was built as a navigation aid). In spite of sophisticated radar and GPS navigation, the experienced officers and crew managed to ram the base of the light, which resulted in a "..stove in bow, like a pop can that had been jammed upon a brick" (from Lighthouse Adventures, Wes Oleszewski). There were no casualties and the Buffalo managed her way to Toledo where she was laid up for $1.2 million in repairs. The Detroit River Light survived without damage. The crew members on duty were fired, but presumably given letters of recommendation for work in the fast food retail industry.

When things go wrong and damage results or individuals get hurt, the folks of Harbor House write about it in their "Great Lakes Seaway Log" (www.harborhouse.com). Here is a summary for the years 2000 and 2001:

10/23/00 - An integrated tug/barge,Undaunted/Pere Marquette 41, carrying 5,000 tons of pig iron from Calumet Harbor in Chicago to Marinette, WI ran into 30 mph wind gust and eight-foot seas. The tug disconnected from the barge (standard procedure in case of a problem). The storm opened a 300 foot tear in the barge's side and the cargo was lost. No one was injured.

08/11/01- The Canadian ship Windoc (730 ft, 1959), owned by W.N. Paterson & Sons of Thunder Bay, ON had her bridge sheared off when a Welland Canal bridge closed too soon. There were no deaths or serious injuries to the crew members. The cause of the accident was not immediatly known.

10/23/01 - One of the most cherished traditions on the Lakes is that of the "Detroit Mail Boat", the 45 foot J.W.Wescott II which delivers mail (the post office designates a unique zipcode for the service - 48222) and other services to ships passing through the Detroit river. Although the Wescott comes alongside thousands of ships each year she apparently swamped when she encountered rough water while delivering a pilot to a Norwegion-flagged ocean-going tanker off Zug Island. The Captain and one deckhand were killed in the incident, which remains unsolved. The Wescott was subsequently raised and is back in business delivering the mail.