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Our American Stories

We're Holding Our Own: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Our American Stories

iHeartPodcasts

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.6817 Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode of Our American Stories, as big freighters go, she was bigger than most with a crew and captain well-seasoned...but on November 10th, 1975, she and her 29-man crew were sent to the bottom of Lake Superior. Ric Mixter of Lake Fury tells the story.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

This is an I-Heart podcast.

0:14.1

This is our American stories, and our next story comes to us courtesy of Rick Mixter,

0:20.8

a shipwreck researcher and diver who's explored over 130 shipwrecks,

0:27.1

one of which is the subject of this story on the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes.

0:32.5

Here's our own Monty Montgomery with a story.

0:40.1

When we think of the word lake, we often think of a calm, placid, and small body of water,

0:46.7

but the great lakes are anything but that.

0:49.8

People underestimate them, you know, literally they think they're ponds.

0:53.9

They think that they're,

0:54.8

you know, they're much smaller than the ocean. And the truth is that the Great Lakes span over

0:59.7

a thousand miles. You know, Lake Superior is immense. And unfortunately, it has these jagged shoals

1:05.9

that, unlike the ocean, it's confined. So these shoals bounce waves back and forth,

1:11.9

and these confused waves on the Great Lakes

1:14.9

tend to really mess with ships

1:17.2

and make it very difficult to navigate in a storm.

1:20.5

And the results of these confused seas

1:22.7

have often been deadly.

1:24.4

There's a huge argument on how many shipwrecks

1:26.9

are on the Great Lakes because it's

1:28.5

really hard to judge. Most of the time we would put it to, you know, insurance settlements. Let's

1:33.9

look at Lloyds of London or other places that paid out, but we don't know if they were recovered.

1:38.9

If you said on the bottom, most people would probably throw out a number between 6,000 and 10,000 shipwrecks that are still

...

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