By Phil Egan
It would come to be known as the White Hurricane, the Freshwater Fury, the Big Blow, or simply the Great Storm of 1913.
Canadians who listen to the music of Gordon Lightfoot are familiar with “the gales of November,” as described in Lightfoot’s ballad of the sinking of the massive iron ore carrier S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald. Each year, the ship’s recovered bell tolls 29 times for the crew members lost in the 1975 storm, and once for the 30,000 sailors lost on the Great Lakes in other storms and tragedies. But the 1975 storm pales in comparison to the combined blizzard and hurricane that blasted its way across the Great Lakes in early November of 1913. It was a storm of truly epic proportions, the worst weather cataclysm to ever strike the Great Lakes.
The storm began to form on November 7, and would reach its apex on November 8th.. It dropped as much as 50 cm. of snow on cities bordering the lakes. Visibility was reduced on the lakes to virtually zero. The storm managed to generate 135 km./hr. hurricane-force winds, and created steep waves on Lake Huron that have never been repeated – by some accounts, almost 35 feet high. The winds blew icy spray onto lake vessels, casing them in sheets of ice and threatening their seaworthiness.
It had begun as a mere Alberta clipper, but the clash of starkly contrasting weather systems created a cyclonic effect that left catastrophe in the storm’s wake. Weather forecasting was still in its infancy in 1913, and ships on the lakes were caught unawares. The relatively warm lake waters provided a deadly mix for the two potent and contrasting weather systems that collided over the Great Lakes Basin.
On Lake Huron, tragedy was unfolding as ships broke in two, rolled over, or simply slipped under the raging waters, taking their crews to the bottom with them. Over 230 men would perish on the Great Lakes during the storm. Twelve ships would be lost, and 25 others stranded or driven ashore.
The storm lashed Sarnia’s beaches, destroying boats and boathouses. A public walkway was weakened by having its foundations undermined, while a public bathhouse was lifted off its moorings. On the beach at Port Franks, 10 bodies washed ashore, several of them from the freighter Charles S. Price which had overturned in Lake Huron, eight miles off Sarnia’s shores.
As the storm finally subsided on November 11, Sarnians would breathe a sigh of relief. It had been a tough year; the hope was that 1914 would bring greater fortune. As time would tell, however, 1914 would bring one of Sarnia’s most massive fires, and an appallingly deadly war. Thirteen hundred Sarnia men were about to don uniforms in a town struggling to become a city.