![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP23265543256247.jpg.jpg\")
His list included the Daniel J. Morrel, a freighter that sank during a storm on Lake Huron in 1966, killing all but one of the 29 crew members, and the Cedarville, a freighter that sank in the Straits of Mackinac in 1965, killing eight crew members. He also listed the Carl D. Bradley, another freighter that went down during a storm in northern Lake Michigan in 1958, killing 33 sailors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plane Lusardi is trying to recover is a Bell P-39 that went down in Lake Huron during a training exercise in 1944, killing Frank H. Moody, a Tuskegee airman. The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of Black military pilots who received training at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Brendon Baillod, a Great Lakes historian based in Madison, has spent the last five years searching for the Trinidad, a grain schooner that went down in Lake Michigan in 1881. He and fellow historian Bob Jaeck finally found the wreck in July off Algoma, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first photos of the site, taken by a robot vehicle, showed the ship was in unusually good shape, with intact rigging and dishes still in cabins. But the site was \u201cfully carpeted\u201d with quagga mussels, Baillod said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt has been completely colonized,\u201d he said. \u201cTwenty years ago, even 15 years ago, that site would have been clean. Now you can\u2019t even recognize the bell. You can\u2019t see the nameboard. If you brush those mussels off, it tears the wood off with it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Quagga management options could include treating them with toxic chemicals; covering them with tarps that restrict water flow and starve them of oxygen and food; introducing predator species; or suffocating them by adding carbon dioxide to the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So far nothing looks promising on a large scale, UW-Milwaukee\u2019s Bootsma said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe only way they will disappear from a lake as large as Lake Michigan is through some disease, or possibly an introduced predator,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That leaves archaeologists and historians like Baillod scrambling to locate as many wrecks as possible to map and document before they disintegrate under the quaggas\u2019 assaults.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At stake are the physical remnants of a maritime industry that helped settle the Great Lakes region and establish port cities such as Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago and Toledo, Ohio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen we lose those tangible, preserved time capsules of our history, we lose our tangible connection to the past,\u201d Baillod said. \u201cOnce they\u2019re gone, it\u2019s all just a memory. It\u2019s all just stuff in books.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Seemingly unstoppable invasive quagga mussels from Russia and Ukraine threaten U.S. maritime history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":107667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":91,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[101,23,91,12,25,19,69],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3002],"class_list":["post-69329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-home","category-military-history","category-news","category-newsletters","category-veterans","category-your-marine-corps"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"SIEOMIFQDNACFDRVQVFLRVRZ5A","arc_canonical_url":"\/veterans\/military-history\/2023\/09\/25\/race-to-find-great-lakes-shipwrecks-before-mussels-destroy-them\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n