- The SS Edmund Fitzgerald freighter sank in Lake Superior during a storm in 1975, killing all 29 crew members.
- Only a handful of people have ever visited the wreck, either by submersible or, in one case, a dangerous scuba dive.
- Explorations of the wreck, including the discovery of a crew member's body, have caused controversy among the victims' families.
- Divers and explorers who visited the site describe it as a sacred grave site and a privilege to witness.
Terrence Tysall was carrying everything he needed to stay alive on his back one September day in 1995 as he jumped into Lake Superior and started his death-defying descent, traveling more than 500 feet through dark, 34-degree water to the bottom.
When Tysall and his diving partner, Mike Zlatopolsky, made it to the clay floor of Lake Superior, their high-powered, cave-diving lights illuminated the port side — the left side of the ship facing the front — of the wreckage that was once the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.
The Edmund Fitzgerald — a 729-foot-long freighter, once the largest on the Great Lakes — sank about 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan during a violent storm on Nov. 10, 1975. All 29 crew members on board died. Their bodies were never recovered.
Once he reached the wreckage, Tysall swam around the ship and suddenly did something that, to this day, he told the Free Press he is not sure why he did it.
"I just reached out with both of my gloved hands and I gripped the rim," he said. "I’m a touching-learning kind of guy, so with me grabbing that rail, it made it so real to me that, 'Oh my gosh, I’m the first living hand to touch this rail since she sank.' It was a very special moment. That’s when it stopped being a logistical endeavor. This is a grave, and this is a privilege to be here.”
Privilege, indeed, for Tysall and Zlatopolsky, because they are the only two people to ever scuba dive to the wreck. Before them, only a handful of people had gone down to the Edmund Fitzgerald, and they did it in submersibles — underwater vehicles, manned or unmanned, that require a support ship as opposed to self-sufficient submarines.
Ric Mixter — who has produced three documentary films and wrote a book, all on the SS Edmund Fitzgerald — is one of those few people to go to the Fitzgerald wreckage in a submersible in July 1994.
"I could read the giant letters, 'Edmund Fitzgerald' as we went by and it was captivating," Mixter told the Detroit Free Press of his journey to the bottom of Lake Superior. "Then you start seeing very human things: Screw drivers on the bottom, I saw a coffee cup, and you start to realize this is where men worked. This is where 29 guys were trapped, and it takes you from that happiness, down to the lowest of low, realizing this is a grave site, too.”
The reality of the sacred ground washed over Mixter just 20 minutes after he surfaced. The diver and pilot of the submersible to follow Mixter got lost near the bow, or front of the ship. In doing so, they inadvertantly became the first people to discover the body of a crew member resting on the lake's bottom.
The fallout from Mixter's team's finding and Tysall's touching the ship resulted in a firestorm of controversy from unhappy family members of the deceased sailors. Others, too, viewed the dives as macabre. It's why so few have explored the wreck since. Mixter estimates only about a couple dozen people have gone down there.
But both Mixter and Tysall defend what they did and why they did it. Here are their stories and how they ended up nearly 535 feet below the surface of Lake Superior with one of the most famous shipwrecks of all time.
An explosion lights the drive to explore
Mixter, 61, first became enthralled with shipwrecks when he was a young television reporter in Saginaw. It was September 1990 and the Jupiter, an oil tanker, exploded while offloading gasoline at a refinery in Bay City, killing a man. Mixter went to cover the story.
"Immediately, I got captivated walking about the deck of the ship," Mixter said. "I just wanted to learn more about shipwrecks."
Mixter, who now lives in Wixom, was certified to scuba dive in 1991 and started doing TV documentaries on shipwrecks. One was on the storm of Nov. 7, 1913, that he said is "undisputably the worst disaster to hit the Great Lakes." A dozen freighters went down in one weekend, taking the lives of some 250 sailors.
But the most well-known Great Lakes shipwreck is that of the Edmund Fitzgerald, partly because of the unlikely 1976 hit song by Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." One of the lyrics reads: "The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy."
“The song was about the legend: 'The lake never gives up her dead.' That was the whole reason that Fitzgerald ever became famous," Mixter said. "Other shipwrecks had faded from memory because they either had survivors or they found the bodies, and it wasn’t the big mystery like they had in 1975.”
The first explorations
The Coast Guard was the first to use a robot to dive to the SS Edmund Fitzgerald wreckage in 1976, Mixter said. In 1980, a team working with the famed French oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau went down in a submersible but, "they only got a half hour then a big storm came in. They only saw the bow. Then they came up," Mixter said.
Another robot was sent down in 1989, and other explorers in submersibles dove it in the early 1990s. It wasn't until 1994 when opportunity knocked on Mixter's door. Frederick Shannon of Mount Morris had rented a submersible called the Delta and he was looking for a crew to go down there.
The Delta was used earlier that year to explore the Lusitania, an ocean liner that sank in 1915 in the Celtic Sea after a German Navy U-boat torpedoed it during World War I, so Mixter felt the Delta was a safe vessel. So he offered to be Shannon's media coordinator and shoot all his video if he could get a ride down to the bottom of Lake Superior. Mixter and the team wanted to study the wreckage to determine what ultimately caused the Fitzgerald to go under.
Hitting the bottom in a 'moonscape' of clay
On July 26, 1994, Mixter was the third to dive in the Delta that day. Shannon, who died at age 76 in 2022, dove first, spending two hours with the wreck, Mixter said.
The little yellow Delta was a two-person submersible. The pilot "literally sits above you," Mixter said, in a tiny bike-like seat looking out of a tower that offered a 360-degree view. Mixter was below the pilot, lying on his belly on a mat the size of a couch cushion, he said. There are portholes, about 5 inches in diameter, all the way around to offer great views, he said.
An experienced diver, Mixter had great respect for Lake Superior's cold water, but inside the Delta, he could wear a sweatshirt and, "Once you seal the submarine shut, there’s no atmospheric pressure, it never changes. I’m not limited by time on the bottom except for the battery power of the submarine. It was unbelievable. I wasn’t going to get wet, I went down and it stayed warm.”
At about 300 feet, the sunlight could no longer penetrate the clear waters of Lake Superior. It went black, then something happened that made Mixter extremely uneasy: There appeared to be a leak in the submersible.
“I slyly asked the pilot: ‘There’s a little water in the sub?’ He started laughing and said, ‘Well, it’s 37 degrees outside the sub and your breath is condensation on the side,' " Mixter said. " 'You’re breathing pretty heavy. If there was a hole in the submarine, you’d be cut in half by this pressure.’ At least I knew there wasn’t a leak. You never want to have water inside of a submarine.”
The pilot left the vehicle's lights off to save electricity, relying on sonar to get to the bottom.
"It was pitch black," Mixter said. "The hills on the bottom, which had been undisturbed literally for thousands of years, got kicked up with this big cloud when we hit the bottom. When the lights came on, it looked like a giant moonscape of clay and underwater rolling hills.”
Finding a key clue
Fish darted away from the Delta as the pilot used a compass to steer the vessel toward the presumed location of the Edmund Fitzgerald's remains.
"It took a little while before we realized we actually had been on the deck of the Fitzgerald that was buried into the side of a hill on the port side of the ship," Mixter said.
The first thing he saw was a massive crack going down from the spar deck to the weather deck where the hatches are, Mixter said. His mission was to get video and find clues to help solve what happened that fateful night. But Mixter admits that he was unprepared. There was basically one "halfway decent book" about the Edmund Fitzgerald at that time and no real answers, Mixter said.
"I didn’t know much ... so I had a hundred million questions," he said.
But Mixter did find some answers once the submersible got situated near the wreck and he saw the debris around her.
"We saw two twisted hatch covers and the numbers painted on them were 2 and 3. So we radioed to the surface," Mixter said. "They said, ‘You’re still at the bow because that’s where Hatch 2 and 3 were.' But it turns out those hatches were right next to the upside-down stern. So that was the clue that really broke the tradition that the Fitzgerald went down in one piece.”
A mystery around the ship's missing parts
Mixter and the pilot found other clues that challenged some preconceived notions. He said the stern, or end of the ship, was inverted, and there was "not a single scratch on the 260-foot section that’s there.”
That was in direct contrast to what many sailors and experts believed, he said. Some had thought the Edmund Fitzgerald might have struck a shoal, or shallow area of the lake, as it navigated the storm. But Mixter saw no evidence of that happening.
"We know there was a monster wave that built from as far away as Thunder Bay, Ontario, and had crossed, with the northwest winds, to 17 miles off of Whitefish Point and nailed the Fitzgerald," Mixter said. "It passed Captain Cooper of the (Arthur B. Anderson) freighter, which was about a dozen miles behind the Fitzgerald, and hit the Fitzgerald."
Since 1975, it was known that the ship rested in two major pieces on the bottom. But there was a mystery. The bow was about 160 feet long and the stern was about 260 feet long on the bottom, meaning there is a big chunk of the middle section of the 729-foot Fitzgerald that is missing.
“It crumbled," Mixter said. "At some point it either accordioned on the surface or it dove down straight, hit the bottom with its nose and accordioned and lost all that middle part."
Most experts believe it was the giant wave that put the Fitzgerald down, but he said, nobody can agree on how she sank and where the middle of the ship went.
'No way it nosedived'
Here is what Mixter concluded from what he saw while down there:
“The bow is right on course for Whitefish Point, so it never veered. But the stern inverted, flipped upside down and went almost perpendicular," Mixter said. "So it went way off course by almost 30 degrees. When we went diving the stern section, I found most of the cargo behind the Edmund Fitzgerald’s stern, meaning there’s no way it nosedived. You can’t lose all of your taconite pellets behind the shipwreck if you nosedive. It would all rush forward.”
The Edmund Fitzgerald was loaded with 20,000 tons of taconite, the round iron-ore pellets used to make steel. Mixter believes that, had she nosedived, those pellets would have been everywhere around the bow, "yet I didn’t see a single one."
In the years since his dive, Mixter said he has interviewed many people connected with the Edmund Fitzgerald, including the cook who retired before it sank. He learned the ship had many problems, including structural damage to its keel (the spine of the ship that runs along the bottom). Then, there was Capt. Ernest McSorley's disdain at paying overtime to secure all the hatches. He also had a reputation for aggressiveness in storms.
"You’ve got a broken back of a ship, you’ve got a boat that flexes really strangely in storms, then McSorley in 1975 goes through five more storms and the cook is telling him there’s still problems on board," Mixter said. "He hits more storms than any other captain on the Great Lakes and ends up going into the big wave that puts him under.”
'We see a body. It's wearing coveralls'
At the bottom of Lake Superior, near the remains of the Edmund Fitzgerald, rests the body of a man wearing coveralls and a life jacket. His eternal sleep has never been disturbed, except for on July 26, 1994.
About 20 minutes after Mixter had resurfaced and was on his way to get a sandwich onboard the tugboat, a call came through the radio from the Delta team at the bottom.
"They said, ‘We found the missing crew member,’ “ Mixter said. "We didn’t believe them at first. There’s been five groups down there before us, there’s no way. They said, ‘No. We see a body. It’s wearing coveralls.’ We brought the video up and sure enough, the person actually had a life jacket on too.”
Mixter said he has a good idea of the person's identity, but out of consideration for the family, he has never publicly disclosed it. The remaining bodies are believed to be trapped deep within the wreck. The Canadian government, which oversees permits allowing for dives to the site, restricts the use of any lights or cameras to be pushed through any opening in the ship for that reason, Mixter said.
"We find this crewman, who obviously knew that there was a problem, and he put a life jacket on and he was close to the shipwreck," Mixter said. "So that became a conundrum in itself. We knew if we called the Canadian government and reported our findings, they would throw us off the wreck and we still had a second day of dives scheduled. So we made sure that the phone call was made, but we might have found someone who wasn’t going to be in the office that day.”
The other decision the team faced was to publicly talk about the finding or not, knowing it could ignite bad feelings.
"As a journalist, I said yes. You don’t hide stuff because it’s going to hurt somebody’s feelings," Mixter said. "You tell the story. But you try to do it ethically, and you try to do it in a way that won’t hurt."
His documentary on the dive included a song called, "It's Quiet Where They Sleep," and he used one shot of the body that is mostly hidden in a halo of dust kicked up from the submersible circling the bottom. No one on his team ever revealed the details of the body and they have rejected offers from others to buy the video.
Still, Mixter and the team were labeled "ghouls and pirates," and "the state of Michigan actually passed a law against recording bodies on shipwrecks that are less than 50 years old," he said.
"It was a slap in our face for the efforts that we did make to try to tell a story that we felt, the only reason it was really significant was because of the song. 'The lake is said to never give up its dead,' " Mixter said. "Well, it gave up its dead. That’s why every newspaper in the country ran a story on it.”
Bell comes up, divers go down, families go mad
The body remains down there, in no condition to be brought up. But the Canadian government did retrieve the bell that was on the ship in 1995. At this point, the family members of the deceased sailors were asking the Canadian government to stop allowing dives to the ship.
"But the Canadian Ministry said, ‘We can’t do that. You can’t seal it off. It’s not a war grave and there’s no precedence to seal it off,' " Mixter said, but added that anyone who does dive down to the ship must get a permit.
Which leads us back to Tysall and Zlatopolsky, two men Mixter has hard feelings about.
“After the bell came (out), these two divers go flying out there on their boat, they jump in the water, they go down to the bottom for four minutes. It takes them four hours to come back up because of the pressure," Mixter said. "It was just a stunt and they start telling everybody, ‘I went to the Fitzgerald.’ Well now the families are like, ‘Anybody can go down there.’ That really put a heat on the (Canadian) Ministry.”
Mixter said the dive Tysall and Zlatopolsky did wasn’t about uncovering new facts around the Edmund Fitzgerald.
"They only did it as a Mount Everest kind of a thing, and it really hurt the expeditions before them," Mixter said.
Lake Superior and 'a spooky air'
Tysall disagrees, admitting it was initially a logistical challenge to see whether he and Zlatopolsky could use the right balance of mixed gases to survive such a dive. But it was also a spiritual experience for him.
Tysall, 59, grew up just north of Bradenton, Florida. Today, he is a U.S. Army captain who served in Iraq and now serves stateside as the Commanding Officer of the U.S. Army’s 627th Heavy Dive Team, according to NAUI Worldwide, the National Association of Underwater Instructors.
Tysall learned to dive at age 8 from his Uncle Ledd, who was a Navy SAR (Search And Rescue) swimmer. The first shipwreck Tysall dived, he said, was the SS Benwood off the Florida Keys at age 8. He has since dived to shipwrecks all over the world, including the Andrea Doria at least two dozen times, the USS Monitor and the USS Wilkes-Barre. He's also an expert in long-duration cave diving, which he calls "the most ultra hazardous activity on the planet."
Still, he admits Lake Superior was a different beast from everything else he'd done, and he was going to a depth, in dark, cold water that spooked him.
“Most wrecks are pretty torn up," Tysall said. "Most of them met some kind of violent end to their lives. I’ve always been a history geek. I’ve always been really attracted to war ships. So I don’t find them really spooky. Now, if you get into cold, dark, deep water, they can have a spooky air to them, for sure.”
Tysall met Zlatopolsky in the early 1990s in Florida, where he trained Zlatopolsky on technical and deep diving.
Tysall, who has fallen out of touch with Zlatopolsky in recent years, recalled that Zlatopolsky and another diver talked about wanting to dive to the Edmund Fitzgerald at that time. Tysall was intrigued.
"Being born in Peoria, Illinois, and then growing up, listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s song on the radio, we’d lived in Florida since I was 6 years old, but that song had such air play," Tysall said. "In the late 1970s, I was living in Florida when she sank, and it was a big deal."
He'd run into Zlatopolsky at various dive events and trade shows over the next couple of years and would ask him whether he had done a dive to the Edmund Fitzgerald yet. Zlatopolsky would say no.
"After a few years of seeing him and asking him, I said, 'When are you going to do it? What’s the deal?' " Tysall said. "He was frustrated and he just said, 'Why don’t you help me do it? Why don’t you come and do it with me?' I said, 'When?' ”
'If we executed right, we knew we could do it'
They settled on September the following year and begin training for it.
The two men had different motivations for this dive. Zlatopolsky was "truly, truly fascinated" by the wreck and had researched it for years, Tysall said. Tysall was also intrigued with the wreck, but he was mostly driven by the logistical challenge of doing such a deep and dangerous dive. It was a chance to prove what was considered emerging technology at the time: Civilian divers using mixed gases, mostly used at the time by commercial or military divers.
"It was a manner of planning and proper execution," Tysall said. "If we executed right, we knew we could do it.”
The gas mix to use is known as a tri-mix. It requires mixing helium, nitrogen and oxygen in the right balance to allow a diver to go to great depths and remain alive and functional.
The two men trained for the dive like one would train to run a marathon, he said, because even though Tysall had dived other Great Lakes, he had never been in Lake Superior, or gone that deep before.
“I don’t like to experience anything new on a big dive," Tysall said. "I wanted to make sure the first time I encountered 530 feet, was not on this dive. I wanted to know how my body would behave at those depths."
Zlatopolsky did his "tuneups," or training dives, "Up North," while Tysall did his tuneups in Florida.
"I conducted dives as deep as 600 feet in preparation for this. I just wanted to make sure that (I was) OK and I’m not going to grow a strange colored mustache because of this depth," Tysall said. "I wanted to know what it feels like."
He hit that depth over a series of dives where he kept gradually going deeper. But he admits: "My biggest concern, being a Florida guy, was the (cold) temperature. Also, there’s always that unknown going into a new spot and Superior was the deepest of the Great Lakes and spooky."
To help overcome that fear, the two also did a series of tuneup dives at Whitefish Point days before the dive. Those dives also served to get them accustomed to a new boat captain and support divers “that didn’t even know where they were going until I got them in the truck" to drive to Michigan.
An experience he'll take to his grave
On Sept. 1, 1995, Tysall said the famous prayer astronaut Alan Shepard recited on his May 5, 1961, Mercury-Redstone 3 (Freedom 7) mission, dubbed the "Shepard's Prayer": “Dear Lord, please don't let me screw up.”
The plan was to do a week’s worth of diving to the wreck, he said, adding, "We weren’t there to look for bodies or solve the mystery of why she sank. We wanted to show that it can be done.”
He and Zlatopolsky were in the zone that morning as they hit the water, fully aware that the next time they were on the surface, they would have been successful or, if not, hopefully alive and unhurt.
Their first shock was the water temperature. They had selected that time of year because there was usually a "nice thermocline," meaning the relatively warmer waters on the surface go down to about 40 feet making some of the descent and surfacing more pleasant.
"But, of course, Lake Superior being who she is, lots of rain and stuff two or three weeks prior, it just blew that warm water somewhere else and we had 34 degrees from top to bottom," Tysall said. "That’s something I’ll take to my grave."
The minute the men entered the water, everything felt like pins and needles ... or just went numb.
Hitting the bottom ... and the unbelievable sight
To dive to most wrecks, divers send down a hook, anchored line or weighted line, to latch on to the wreck, then travel down the line to the wreck. In this case, Tysall said they could not "hook the wreck," given it was burial site and they did not want to be disrespectful.
"That’s something that Mike and I were extremely sensitive about," Tysall said.
On each of their backs, the divers had twin large steel tanks, then smaller tanks, with an additional smaller tank of the gas mixes they'd need. The rest of their decompression gas was supplied by the support divers, who would meet them as they resurfaced at a predetermined time that had been rehearsed.
The two continued the descent and, “it kept getting blacker and blacker and blacker, so until the wreck comes into view, I’m looking at Mike, he’s looking at me, we’re looking at this cable going down and you’re looking at your electronic depth gage and the numbers are just getting bigger and bigger: 100, 200, 300, 400 feet and so on."
The deep-cave diving lights they carried down with them finally showed the wreck in their sight.
"We probably had about 50 feet, and then came down on her port side, right next to the bridge … and whether it’s force of habit or whatever, we ended up going right to the bottom," Tysall said. "So we’re where her bow is driven right into the lake bed. And that was another huge impression of mine.
"It looked like she just plowed right into the bottom and the bottom is clay. So you have huge … almost boulder-sized, living room-size … chunks of this sharply sheered clay where her bow is slammed into them. I was like, 'Wow.' ”
One minute too long could mean death
There is a mantra that plays like a broken record through any experienced scuba diver's mind when in deep water: "Depth, time and PSI" - or pounds per square inch, meaning how much pressure is left in the gas tanks to keep you alive and get you to the surface.
"You’re carrying everything you need to live on your back. You gotta watch your depth. We had planned our depth to the bottom, so we wouldn’t be violating our depth," Tysall said. "But time and PSI are a big deal."
It was a big deal because the equipment they had at that time was such that any part of a minute that he and Zlatopolsky got delayed at the bottom would equate to 45 more minutes needed of decompression.
"So if you spaced it even two more minutes, that’s an hour and a half of decompression that you may not have the gas for," Tysall said. "That’s why it’s such a precision activity."
'I think we pulled this off'
Tysall and Zlatopolsky begin filming the port side and bow of the Edmund Fitzgerald and, as they got to the bridge, that's when Tysall reached out and gripped her rail.
"It was a very special moment. That’s when it stopped being a logistical endeavor and, 'Can we do this?’ I won’t (over grandiose) it and say I got super emotional, but this a grave and this is a privilege to be here," Tysall said. "Just like a mountain, we’re at the summit."
The 15-minute descent and exploration of the wreck was over. They had to start the four-hour journey back up. It was a brief visit, but satisfying, he said.
“We’d accomplished this, we’d seen the wreck, we’d visited the wreck, we’d filmed the wreck on this first time," Tysall said. "We give the thumbs up and stay on the same line and start heading up and at 400 feet we had our first decompression stop. We switched to a different helium mix. Took that up to where we could breath air, we switched to air at about 220 feet, if memory serves."
The support divers met them with some different nitrogen-oxygen mixes until they hit 20 feet from the surface and switched to pure oxygen from there to the top.
"Then, as a precaution, we breathed 30 minutes of oxygen just floating there on the surface, not exerting. Then when we came back on the boat, we did another 30 minute of pure oxygen on the boat," Tysall said. "That’s when we realized: I think we pulled this off. Nobody was hurt.”
Lake Superior shuts it down
The plan was to dive for a week and get more footage, but that's when Lake Superior shut it down.
"During the dive, it was like a mirror on the surface. It was so calm and it had been that calm all three days we had done the tuneups," Tysall said. "Then we got out of the water, turned that boat and I can’t tell you how fast conditions changed. It was unreal. By the time we got back into Whitefish Bay, I could see a 1,000-foot freighter on the other side of Whitefish Point taking 30 or 40 foot waves over her bow."
The team spent the next three days holed up in a hotel as a near-constant thunderstorm rolled across the lake with wild winds.
“At that point, it became real to me. This is not a joke," Tysall said. "We were given a gift by this lake today because if that had gotten there three hours earlier, it would have made our decompression a lot more difficult. It would have made getting back in the boat a lot more difficult. And, to see how quickly that lake changed character, is something I will never forget.”
Each person on the team bought a poster with the Edmund Fitzgerald on the lake's bottom and all signed each other's, which Tysall has hung on the wall of his living room.
Controversy and contrition
Soon, word got to the sailors' families that Tysall and his team scuba dived to the wreck. He said there was backlash. His act of touching the rail was especially controversial, he said, after a newspaper reported it, "like I reached out and touched the rail. No, that’s not what happened. Physically, yes, but it was reverence."
The family members who read it saw it differently.
"They were thinking, 'Oh my gosh, our memorial to our families is going to become some ghoulish tourist attraction,' " Tysall said. "I get it. But I remind people that people have dived in the Great Lakes since the advent of scuba, and there are wrecks where you can see bodies, and no one behaves inappropriately. It’s an honor to be able to do these. We never saw any bodies on the Fitz, and we were never looking for any bodies."
But to console the families, Tysall said he got in touch with a woman who represented the families at the time. He said he spoke to her at length. He did not walk away with her approval, but "I think she understood our motivations," Tysall said.
To prove his sincerity to the families, Tysall has turned down requests from various outlets who wanted the footage, and the team deleted it, he said.
Would he dive it again?
No one has scuba dived to the wreck since Tysall and Zlatopolsky did it three decades ago.
Tysall said he's often asked whether he would ever do it again. He said it’s not a picturesque site and it’s difficult to get to it. Still, "If we could do it without upsetting people … I’d love to go down and film that wreck. But no wreck is worth upsetting people. That’s their tangible reminder to their fathers, their brothers, their dads for heaven's sakes.”
Yet, like Mixter, it still bothers Tysall that some people believe they dove down there with some macabre motive to gawk at the dead.
"People said ‘Oh you were looking for bodies?' " Tysall said. "You know what we were trying to do? Not become death 30 and 31 on that wreck. Twenty-nine guys died. We didn’t want to be 30 and 31. I’m not burning to dive it again because it’s dangerous. But imagine if the family said, ‘Can we get some footage of the wreck?’ I’d be happy to go down and film it. I’d be honored."
Jamie L. LaReau is the senior autos writer who covers Ford Motor Co. for the Detroit Free Press. Contact Jamie at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. To sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.