Theories range from the Fitzgerald striking a shoal and suffering bottom damage to flooding through the freighter's hatch covers, which filled the ship with water and sank it, to rogue waves, to structural flaws in the ship that the 1975 storm made deadly.
—
Doyle Rice,
USA Today,
3 Nov. 2025
The debris appears as a large cloud of dirty water seen beyond the shoals off Montego Bay.
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