Before land-based lighthouses were built, lightships guided navigation along Great Lakes shipping lanes. Lightship LV82 was built in July 1912 with a steel hull and whaleback forecastle deck, measuring 95 feet long and 21 feet wide, with a displacement of 187 tons. It was powered by a high-pressure steam engine that turned a five-foot-diameter propeller, and its beacon light stood atop a 30-foot mast. LV82 entered service on August 3, 1912, stationed in the eastern basin of Lake Erie 13 miles from the entrance to Buffalo Harbor, then one of the busiest ports in the world. Its crew of six men was Hugh M. Williams, Cornelius Leahy, William Jensen, Peter Mackey, Andrew Leahy, and Charles W. Butler. On November 10, 1913, the Great Storm of 1913 swept through Lake Erie after beginning on Lake Superior on November 7, bringing winds up to 80 miles per hour, 35-foot waves, and heavy snow. More than a dozen Great Lakes ships were lost and nearly 250 sailors perished, including all six men assigned to LV82. The morning after the storm, pieces of the vessel washed ashore in Buffalo Harbor, confirming its loss. In the following May, LV82 was found on the bottom of Lake Erie in 62 feet of water, two miles from its assigned station, and divers marked the site with a buoy. A major salvage operation eventually raised the battered ship in September 1915, and it was towed to Detroit for rebuilding so it could serve again as a lightship. After Canada's construction of the Point Abino lighthouse in 1917 made lightships unnecessary in the Buffalo Harbor area, LV82 served instead as a relief lightship in other parts of the Great Lakes from 1916 to 1935, until a lighthouse at Eleven Foot Shoal in Lake Michigan replaced that need in 1936.