Bell tolls for Edmund Fitzgerald
DETROIT, Michigan (AP) -- The bell at Mariner's Church tolled eight times, not the usual 29.
Two days after the 31st anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the church broadened its scope Sunday to remember all of the more than 6,000 lives lost on the Great Lakes.
Each year since it happened, the church located near the Detroit riverfront had held a memorial service to mark the November 10, 1975 sinking of the 729-foot ore freighter in Lake Superior. The highlight of the ceremony was the ringing of a church bell 29 times, once for each victim of the fabled tragedy.
But several weeks after last year's ceremony, the church received word that the Canadian government had approved a regulation restricting divers from the sunken wreck, which lies in Canadian waters. For families, it was long-awaited protection for their entombed loved ones.
The news spurred the late Rev. Richard W. Ingalls -- the current rector's father, who passed away in April -- to suggest a return to memorializing other maritime tragedies.
"The only sensible way that I could think of to do that was to have one toll for each of the Great Lakes and the interconnected waterways," said his son, the Rev. Richard W. Ingalls Jr.
So following a scripture reading Sunday, the bell was tolled five times for the Great Lakes, a sixth time for the St. Clair and Detroit rivers, a seventh for the St. Lawrence Seaway and an eighth time for military personnel whose lives were lost.
"We had a packed house today, probably 350 people," Ingalls said. "And everybody wanted to talk and meet and so on. It was a good day."
In the Midwest, the Edmund Fitzgerald's sinking is the stuff of legend.
After picking up 26,116 tons of taconite iron ore at Superior, Wisconsin, the Detroit-bound freighter found itself caught in a gale. Meteorologists who studied it recently said the Fitzgerald was in the worst possible location, during the worst weather of the storm, with 69 mph winds, hurricane-force gusts and waves topping 25 feet.
The ship plunged 530 feet to the bottom. Diving expeditions later determined the freighter had broken into two large sections.
There are various theories for why the Fitzgerald sank, ranging from improperly fastened hatch covers that flooded the ship to the freighter breaking apart on the surface in between short sets of massive seas.
Ingalls, who took over as church rector earlier this year from his father, said he thinks the ship drifted too close to the Six Fathom Shoals and scraped bottom. He said there's talk of a group of divers going out next summer to check the shoals for evidence for the first time.
"It seems to make much more sense than some of the other speculations" such as hatch covers, Ingalls said. "If they didn't actually bottom, it was probably metal fatigue from the twisting and flexing of the boat under these huge waves."
Ruth Hudson, whose son, Bruce, died aboard the ship at age 22, attended Sunday's ceremony from Ohio along with several other family members. She said she agreed with the decision of the late Bishop Ingalls to change the ceremony.
"I respect his decision because he was the one who rang the bell 29 times the morning after the ship went down," she said.
Yuri
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- Borderstone
