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The Morrell Survey
By Roland Schultz |
In 1966, the Witch of November arrived with a series of shock storms that seemed to keep the lakes in a constant state of turmoil. Each would deliver her punch, followed by a brief lull, only to allow a greater tempest to arrive in her wake.
With the impending break-up of the Nordmeer foreseen days earlier by the 9th CG District commander, my ship, the Bramble, was directed to proceed to the Nordmeer site for the purpose of setting a wreck buoy as close to the vessel as conditions would allow. This was accomplished on November 30, the morning after the rescue of her remaining crew by helicopter. Within an hour of having completed the commissioning of this marker, the Bramble was ordered to a location approximately 20 miles north-northeast of the Thumb of Michigan. A ship had gone missing!
The freighter Daniel J. Morrell departed Buffalo, New York for Taconite, Minnesota on November 26 at 2300 hours, EST. Built in 1906 and measuring 586 feet in length, she carried a crew of 29 and was running in ballast.
Aware of the adverse weather moving through the upper lakes, her captain, Arthur I. Crawley, had chosen to anchor in the Detroit River the next evening to await the weather's improvement. The Morrell passed the Huron Lightship in the late afternoon the following day and proceeded upbound, with winds initially out of the west at 10 to 28 mph. By midnight, they would intensify to gale-force from the north, with seas running 20 to 25 feet.
Sailing the same track upbound approximately two hours astern, the freighter Edward Y. Townsend, sister ship to the Morrell, had several radio-telephone communications with the Morrell while passing off Harbor Beach. As a result of deteriorating conditions, both skippers were having difficulty holding course and were at risk of breaching.
While the thought of coming about and running for the safety of Port Huron was tempting, the risk of being caught in a trough outweighed any such maneuver, and both made the decision to maintain course, with the option of possibly anchoring in the protected waters of Thunder Bay. The Morrell would never reach this safe haven, suffering a major structural failure sometime during the early hours of November 30. Her breakup occurred so rapidly, much like that of the Fitzgerald years later, that no mayday signal was ever sent.
The Bethlehem Steel Corporation, at 1215 EST, notified that the Daniel J. Morrell was overdue, but Coast Guard Rescue Coordination Center Cleveland had little accurate data to respond to. The Cutters Mackinaw, Bramble and Acacia were immediately ordered to rendezvous off Michigan's Thumb to commence an expanding search from an estimated datum position that was little better than a guess. Detroit and Traverse City Air Stations provided air support, with a coastal search from Port Huron, Harbor Beach and Saginaw River Lifeboat Stations.
At approximately 1600 hours, a pair of HH-52A helicopters from Traverse City Air Station, working the inshore grid of a search pattern in tandem north of Port Hope, sighted a raft grounded in the shallows. Aboard they found four ice-clad figures that had spent the past 38 hours upon the storm-tossed lake after the Morrell had broken in two. Each had succumbed to exposure and were frozen in grotesque shapes to the raft, with the exception of one 26-year-old deck watchman, found to be semi-conscious and delirious, clad in only a lifejacket, peacoat and shorts, who was immediately airlifted to the Harbor Beach Hospital.
The following morning, the Witch began to give up the debris, along with the majority of the victims of the Morrell, offering them to the cutters and helicopters. The loss was great, with Dennis Hale being the sole survivor of a crew of 29.
At 1905 hours on December 4, the search and rescue for the Daniel J. Morrell was suspended. There appeared to be no rhyme nor reason for the Witch choosing that vessel.
On November 30, the Edward Y. Townsend, which had been following approximately two hours astern of the Morrell off Harbor Beach, arrived at Lime Island on the St. Marys River to take on fuel. As a result of loose rivets in the deck plating observed by her crew and a crack from the starboard corner of hatch No. 10 running beneath the deck strap between hatches and sheer strake along the starboard side of the vessel, a Coast Guard inspector boarded the ship upon its arrival at the Soo on December 2nd. The preliminary inspection's findings resulted in the ship's Certificate of Inspection being withdrawn, directing the vessel to be drydocked for further survey and repair via unmanned tow. Less than two years later, while under tow in the North Atlantic en route to Europe for scrapping, the ship would break up and sink in the general vicinity of the Titanic.
With the Edward Y. Townsend narrowly escaping the same fate as the Daniel J. Morrell, concern regarding metal fatigue of older vessels in the Great Lakes fleet was not long in forthcoming. Yet there were other events that had occurred during this infamous gale of November that were worthy of recognition.
During the height of the "witch's fury," strain gauges mounted throughout the hull of the ore carrier Edward L. Ryerson had measured stresses of 23,000 pounds per square inch.
Aboard the CGC Bramble, a vessel built somewhat like a battleship to endure the punishing forces of icebreaking, the ship's hospital corpsmen had discovered that a door through a non-structural bulkhead in sickbay had sprung the thickness of the door jam prior to making port.
The commandant of the USCG at the time of the Morrell sinking was Adm. Willard J. Smith, who had come from a dynasty of Coast Guardsmen who served on the Great Lakes. Having been born on North Manitou Island, when his father was assigned there as station keeper in the National Lifeboat Service, he had virtually grown up on the lakes. He graduated from the Coast Guard Academy and held such assignments as commanding officer of Air Station Traverse City and the Cutter Mackinaw, as well as the 9th District commander, so he took a special interest in the loss of the Morrell. By his direction, Ocean Systems Inc. would be hired to conduct a survey of the Morrell wreck to assist the Board of Inquiry in determining her loss. Based in Alexandria, Virginia, Ocean Systems had received international acclaim a few years earlier by locating and recovering a nuclear device lost off the coast of Spain after the collision of a U.S. Air Force KC-135 tanker and B-52 Bomber during aerial refueling.
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