Mighty Fitz by Michael Schumacher

Author:Michael Schumacher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

Bernie Cooper's eagerly anticipated appearance before the board took place on Thursday, November 20, with a follow-up on December 10. Only ten days had passed between the loss of the Fitzgerald and Cooper's initial appearance, and his would be the first in-depth, public retelling of the events transpiring on Lake Superior during the storm of November 9-10. If anyone was able to provide the board with clues about how the Fitz had gone down, it would be this witness: not only had he had extensive contact with the Fitzgerald throughout the storm, right up until its disappearance from his radar, but also he was an experienced captain, capable of speaking authoritatively about Great Lakes vessels, storms, and how ships performed under stress.

Cooper's testimony managed to be both extremely detailed and agonizingly elusive. His riveting account of the Anderson's experiences, beginning with the ship's leaving Two Harbors and ending with the futile search for the Fitzgerald, lived up to the expectations of the Marine Board—and the attending news media. Still, like a military officer testifying at a formal hearing, Cooper was reluctant to stray outside the facts; he had to be prodded before he provided any kind of speculation.

This was especially apparent when the board grilled him about the Fitzgerald's movements around Michipicoten and Caribou Islands. The board had obtained a tape of Cooper's November 11 conference call to the U.S. Steel offices in Cleveland, during which he'd stated that he was certain that the Fitzgerald had passed too close to the treacherous shoals near the islands; in his testimony before the board, Cooper backed off from those statements.

"We were not plotting him," Cooper offered, somewhat defensively, with respect to the Fitzgerald's course near Caribou Island. "All we can do is give you up to this point what we hauled down as an impression. It was my impression definitely—my mate and I both looked at this, and in the respect that he was in closer than I wanted to be is the absolute truth. I didn't want to be in that close to the island—and again, now, when you are using a small-scale chart, it changes in perspective. It definitely changes in perspective of what I was testifying about."

Cooper held his ground, even after the tape of his phone call was played into the record.

"You are talking about describing a conversation that I had when I had been up 48 hours and [was] tired," Cooper protested, when asked to describe his conference call with U.S. Steel. "There might have been something taken out of context, I don't know."

Aptly enough, Cooper's testimony exemplied the confusion on both the Fitzgerald and the Anderson throughout the tense final hours of their journeys on Lake Superior. Nothing seemed certain or easy to describe. Cooper excelled when he spoke of the weather and displayed his expertise in understanding its highly volatile changes, drawing laughter from those attending the hearings when he suggested that "there are two or three real good meteorologists along the lakes, especially when they agree with me.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.