by Jennifer Donovan
Was it the gales of November that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald? Was it faulty hatch covers, as the US Coast Guard claimed? Or ballast tank damage caused by bottoming on Six Fathom Shoal, as the Lake Carriers Association believed?
Contention continues, as it has since the 26,000-ton freighter took its crew of twenty-nine to a watery grave at the bottom of Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. But soon, in a fifty-foot wave tank that will be affiliated with the new Upper Great Lakes Laboratory (UGLL), scientists may finally be able to determine what actually caused the fabled shipwreck.
The wave tank allows for waves to be generated, modified, tested, and studied. With what they learn there, Civil and Environmental Engineering Associate
Professor Brian Barkdoll and colleagues may be able to definitively determine the cause of the sinking of the Fitzgerald. Perhaps the culprit will turn out to be a rogue wave—like the “Three Sisters Phenomenon”—a series of three waves following in quick succession, the first disabling the ship and the next two striking fatal blows before she has recovered from the first. Or perhaps something stranger, a mystery not yet imagined.