The Great Lakes are the location of a number of big ship disasters.
There was the Great Lakes Storm of 1913 which downed 12 ships and stranded 19 and, of course, the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald many years later.
A much lesser known accident was the crash of two liquid cargo tankers in 1996 which were both chartered by Sherwin-Williams to carry a large quantity of paint, red, green, purple, and yellow, from the production facilities in New York to the distributors in Chicago.
The two ships were too close to each other when the lake became choppy and they crashed into each other, ripping open the holds containing the red and purple paints and spilling them into Lake Michigan.
The sailors had to jump into the water to avoid sinking with the ships and, of course, they were marooned