what if we cut a deck, fix the ballast system, put another seacock and do all the things walter steele was talking about. the navy does it and it operates fine. they used to to train soldiers and they were preparing to send it to world war ii. world war ii ended before it made it out there. but, importantly, they made the changes to the ballast system and they made the ship safe. it sailed without incident again. this is a great detail that, as a writer, you love. i look over the naval inspection report at the national archives in washington, d.c. it is a naval inspector report and they are concerned that this is the ship that killed 800. are the sailors ok with this? very dry engineer speak. he says that there was concern that shifting of water from tank tank was a problem, but the navy asked the problem. still, the sailors who sailed the eastland, now called the willamette. they renamed it. no one wants to be a cursed ship. the sailors always keep the ballast tanks full. they were over-cautious. they keep them full the whole time. detail i remember is that they had been full so long,

it is called a seacock. it is a little wheel that opens and in comes the rushing water from the lake. it probably needed two. one did not allow water to come in quickly. they also needed to pump the water out more quickly. they built a system that let them let water in and did not allow them to move it around very well. and, so, what i think about, to describe it to you, is, imagine having a lasagna tray full of water and you start walking with it. all of a sudden, it starts getting to one side and you tip if the other way to compensate. this is essentially what is happening inside of the east and. it makes it impossible to have full control of the ship. luckily, we have a hero in the story. this is joseph erickson. he is 32 years old in 1915. he is a norwegian immigrant. he is the hero of the story. and, why that was interesting for me is, because all of coverage and previous writings of the book, he was a scapegoat. he was the bad guy. it was not true. it was not true. i will explain why. he was newly-hire

what if we added another seacock? i told you that was a problem. he said, what if we changed the way water shifted? if we made the changes, what would that entail? erickson tells them, we could do that. it is costly and it will take time. we will not be able to sail the ship during the time. walter steele starts scratching his head and says, we are going into sailing season and i do not want to lose all that. he decides to do it after the sailing season. yeah. he decides to postpone a work that would have made the eastland stable. he asked erickson about what can be done. erickson says, yes. they decide to wait. for me, that was the death sentence for the victims. there was no way. here he is. i like this photo. this is about one month after the capsizing. all the victims are out. there is one corpse inside. see the big pinky ring, the big nugget. very well to do. . he -- he -- his father was a food company executive. most of the money that walter used to buy the eastland came from his dad, a wealthy food executive in chicago. he was key in decidin