The Lifeboats Meant to Stop Another Titanic Tipped the Eastland. 844 Died at the Dock.

On July 24, 1915, a picnic steamer rolled over in the Chicago River while still tied to the dock, trapping Western Electric workers and their families in 20 feet of water. The lifeboats added after the Titanic disaster made an already top-heavy ship worse, and a shipping executive had warned Congress it would happen.

The morning of Saturday, July 24, 1915, was cool and damp on the south bank of the Chicago River, but spirits were high. Employees of the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Cicero had a rare Saturday off for the annual company excursion. Five steamers were chartered to carry more than 7,000 workers and their families across Lake Michigan to a picnic at Michigan City, Indiana. The first to board, around 6:30 a.m., crowded onto the Eastland, a three-deck excursion steamer billed as the "Speed Queen of the Lakes."

By 7:10 the Eastland held her licensed capacity of about 2,500 passengers, many of them immigrants from Bohemia, Poland, and Norway. The ship rocked gently as families settled in. Below deck, the crew knew the listing was no joke.

At 7:28 the tilt sharpened to 45 degrees. Dishes slid off pantry shelves; the piano on the promenade deck rolled across the floor and nearly crushed two women. Water poured through open portholes. Two minutes later the Eastland rolled quietly onto her port side and settled into the mud, in 20 feet of water, still tied to the wharf. The Chicago Tribune wrote that she "lay like a toy boat of tin wrecked in a gutter."

844 people died, 22 entire families among them. Seventy percent were under 25. More passengers perished on the Eastland than on the Titanic or the Lusitania. They drowned a few steps from shore in a river of raw sewage, dragged down by heavy wool suits and long dresses.

The cruelest detail is the lifeboats. The Eastland had always been unstable: built in 1902 with no keel, top-heavy, reliant on a balky ballast system, she nearly capsized in 1904 with 3,000 aboard and again in 1906. Crews called her a "hoodoo boat." After the Titanic sank in 1912, Congress passed the La Follette Seaman's Act, signed on March 4, 1915, requiring lifeboats for 75 percent of a vessel's passengers. The owners could cut capacity, or add lifeboats and rafts to qualify for a larger license. They chose the larger license. A ship designed for six lifeboats now carried 11 lifeboats, 37 life rafts, and life jackets for all 2,570 souls, almost all of it stacked on the upper decks. Nobody ran a stability test.

A shipping executive had told Congress exactly this would happen. A. A. Schantz of the Detroit and Cleveland Navigation Company warned that the new law would make shallow-draft Great Lakes steamers turn "turtle". Too few legislators listened.

Blame fell on the chief engineer, Joseph Erickson, for mismanaging the ballast tanks. Clarence Darrow took his case, and Erickson died before the proceedings ended, a convenient fall guy. The captain, Harry Pedersen, strolled dry-shod across the exposed hull to safety and complained that welders cutting rescue holes were ruining his ship.

The disaster hardened maritime regulation: stability calculations, inclining tests, and a board of naval architects to approve every alteration, work the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Center still does. Engineers named the pattern the "Eastland phenomenon," a fix that creates a new hazard. The ship even got a second life: raised in August 1915, rebuilt as the gunboat USS Wilmette, she trained Navy sailors until 1946 and then went to the scrapyard.

It is mostly forgotten now. As Ted Wachholz of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society put it, "there wasn't anyone rich or famous onboard. It was all hardworking, salt-of-the-earth immigrant families."

Also on this day

1567: Mary, Queen of Scots, was forced to abdicate at Loch Leven Castle, threatened with death on the spot. Her one-year-old son became James VI, the king who would one day inherit England too.
1701: Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit, the fur-trade outpost that grew into Detroit, on the narrowest point of the river.
1911: Yale lecturer Hiram Bingham got his first look at Machu Picchu, led up the ridge by a local farmer for one sol. Families were already living among the ruins.
1923: The Treaty of Lausanne was signed, fixing the borders of modern Turkey and replacing the carve-up the Allies had imposed at Sèvres.
1974: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon that the president had to surrender the Oval Office tapes. Sixteen days later, Nixon resigned.