casualties were passengers, most of them from Cleveland or Detroit and their environs. The vessel was later raised and taken to Hamilton, Ontario for scrapping. The Noronic, built at Port Arthur, Ontario in 1913, spent her entire career as a cruise ship. She was 362 feet long, with a 52-foot beam, of 6,905 gross tons and carried 550 passengers, Her destruction and the retirement of the Huronic from service removed the entire fleet of the former Northern Navigation Company from commercial service. SEPTEMBER, 1949 An auto alarm device, designed to send and receive ship distress signals, was under- going tests on the lakes aboard the steamer Horace Johnson. The master of a ship in distress would need only to press a button which would cause the instrument to send a continuous signal alerting other vessels similarly equipped. Ocroper, 1949 Simultaneous steel and coal strikes brought lake shipping almost to a standstill toward the close of a season in which the curtailed operations of coal mines and cutbacks in iron ore commitments by some steel companies had already taken a serious shipping toll. winter storage grain was loaded in midseason in many cases and many vessels were laid up early. Ocroser, 1949 The S. M. Dean, a new Diesel tug owned by the Pringle Barge Line, arrived in the lakes to go into service towing coal barges between Toledo and Detroit, The ship, built at the Alexander Shipyard, Inc., New Orleans, was brought to the lakes by way of the Atlantic and the St. Lawrence River. Ocroser, 1949 The Great Lakes Towing Company announced it would put two Diesel tugs in service in Cleveland harbor the following spring, the first Diesels to be operated by the company in Cleveland. The e tugs Utah and Louisiana were being converted from steam and rebuilt from the hull up. Ocroper, 1949 Preliminary steps were being taken by the United States Corps of Engineers to remove the wreck of the oil barge Cleveco, which sank off Cleveland in December, 1942. The 262-foot steel craft was considered a menace to navigation Ocroper, 1949 A step toward making Huron, Ohio a more important grain-unloading port was under way with the installation of a marine tower at the elevator of the Eastern States Cooperative Milling Corporation. Plans also were announced to double the elevator’s capacity of 1,300,000 bushels. NOVEMBER, 1949 The federal government agreed to pay the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Company $2,000,000 for its wartime use of the passenger steamer Greater Buffalo, which was taken over by the navy in 1942 and converted into a flattop for the training of airplane carrier pilots. The ship was sold for scrap in 1948 DECEMBER, 1949 The number of freighters operating directly between the Great Lakes and foreign ports set an all-time high in 1949. Twenty-five ships rang up a total of 71 sailings from the lakes 118