The Tragic Sinking of the SS Daniel J. Morrell

by John Agbo, age 15

The SS Daniel J. Morrell, a 603-foot, 12,000-ton Great Lakes freighter, sank on Nov. 6, 1966. It split in half during near-hurricane-strength winds in a storm on Lake Huron.

The Morrell was built in 1906 by the West Bay City Ship Building Company to carry bulk cargo. It had multiple upgrades over its 60 years of service under the ownership of the Columbia Steamship Company. When the ship was in service, it was known as the “Queen of the Lake” because it was the longest ship in operation at the time.

An estimated 6,000 ships have sunk in the Great Lakes, including 1,500 in Michigan waters. In November 1966, the Morrell became one of those casualties. The ship sank 20 miles from Harbor Beach, a town near the tip of Michigan's thumb.

The ship did not have time to send a distress call, and the Coast Guard was notified a day after the ship sank. A 100-person search party scoured the snowy shores of Lake Huron looking for survivors, but the weather was bad that rescue helicopters were delayed from searching the water. In the end, the storm claimed the lives of 28 of the 29 crew members.

Dennis Hale was the only survivor. He was pulled from the a life raft by helicopter over a day after the sinking. The other three men in the raft with him didn't make it.

“I’m a fighter,” Hale said in a 2014 interview, “but the uncertainty of not knowing if anybody knows you're missing and to hear your friends cry out in pain like that is just… it makes life seem so useless, really. So I prayed.”

[Sources: Detroit Free Press; Michigan Tech University; Associated Press; Great Lake Shipwreak Museum]