The Byford Dolphin Incident has gone down in history as one of the most horrific workplace accidents of all time. So, this might get a bit gory. In 1983, a team of saturation divers off the coast of Finland experienced an explosive decompression event that ended the lives of five people, one of whom in the most destructive way imaginable. So today we’re talking about saturation diving, what makes it so dangerous, and what went wrong on that fateful day.
TRANSCRIPT:
Imagine you’re a deep sea welder.
It’s 4am, you’re sleeping peacefully on your bunk when you’re suddenly woken up by a ringing telephone. You answer it in a daze and it’s your boss, screaming at you to come to the deck immediately. And bring a blowtorch.
Some kind of problem with the decompression chamber.
So you rush out of the room, grab your acetylene torch and head to the deck where you find crew members rushing around, panicked.
You look off to one side and see a crew member named Billy laid out on the deck, motionless, flanked by two personnel doing CPR. In the other direction, you see another crewmember named Martin, writhing on the ground in agony as a medic tightens a tourniquet on his leg.
But before you can figure out what happened to them, you hear the sound of your boss, screaming at you from the side of the decompression chamber. A hatch needs to be cut open immediately.
So you run over, your heart pounding in your chest, and you realize as you get closer that there’s a giant smudge around the hatch. In fact, it’s blood. Lots of blood.
Your foot slips as you’re running and you look back to see something that looks like a slab of bacon. In fact you have to slow down because your feet are sliding everywhere, the whole surface seems to be covered in some kind of grease. And some other… stuff.
Finally you reach the stuck hatch and light the torch to cut it open, but as you turn to the hatch, you see that it’s stuck, just slightly open with a 5-inch crack in the door. You glance inside the crack as you start to cut, and lay your eyes on one of the most horrific workplace accidents of all time.
An event so disturbing people will still be talking about it 40 years later.
That oil rig was the Byford Dolphin.
The Deep Sea
They say when you go in the ocean, you re-enter the food chain. It’s a foreign environment, one we’re not adapted to or designed for. And that’s more true the further down you go, as the weight of the water above puts crushing pressure on the body.
But sometimes, we gotta go down there.
Our modern world has a surprisingly extensive undersea infrastructure. From offshore gas drilling to windmills to oil pipelines and undersea cables, there’s a lot of stuff at the bottom of the sea that we all rely on. And all need to be maintained.
In fact it’s especially vulnerable considering it’s in the ocean.
But that maintenance has to be done by people. People who take on a special risk by going down there.
Think about how hard this job is, you’re doing construction work. Welding, bolting, cutting, the kind of stuff that would be a tough job on land, but you’re doing it in the water, in basically a space suit, at depths too low for the sun to reach so you’re in total darkness. You’re dragging massive cables along behind you the entire time, and the sea floor is constantly swirling dirt and mud around you, so visibility is less than zero.
But the craziest part of the job is that you have to live in a tiny chamber for 28 days while you’re doing all that. It’s a process known as saturation diving.
Saturation Diving
So you’ve all heard of the bends, right? It’s that condition that divers can get if they ascend too quickly? Well imagine if instead of diving 10 or 20 feet, you’re going down 600 feet, even 2,000 feet. How long would that take to decompress?
Actually you don’t have to guess, I can tell you, it’s a day for every 100 feet of depth. So yeah, at 600 feet, you’d need 6 days to compress and decompress.
So like think of a bottle of soda. CO2 is added at high pressure and that causes it to saturate into the water. Just like being underwater at high pressure causes gasses to saturate into your blood. But if you just release the pressure (on video) then all those gasses would come out of your blood. Bubbles would just form in your blood vessels, it wouldn’t be good.
The trick is to turn the cap slowly, slowly enough that the bubbles don’t form.
So if you’re working at the bottom of the ocean, under those pressures, and you have to go through a long decompression every time you come to the surface, that’s a lot of wasted time. Unless… you just stay pressurized.
That’s why saturation divers have to live in a tiny decompression chamber for weeks at a time, often up to 28 days.
The way it’s usually done is there’s a pressure chamber on the surface vessel that the crew lives in for up to 28 days. They take turns working 8-hour shifts down at the sea floor, which they ride down to in a diving bell. Kind-of like an underwater elevator.
After their shift is over, they go back up in the diving bell, dock the diving bell to the pressurized living quarters, and then do what they call a TUP, a transfer under pressure, into the living quarters. Once that’s sealed, the crew can detach the diving bell for servicing.
Although in some cases, they just stay on the bottom in a deep sea habitat.
Just to put this pressure in perspective, think about the way your ears pop when you’re ascending or descending on a plane.
They pressurize planes to the equivalent of about 8000 feet of elevation, that comes out to about .74 atmospheres, so that pressure difference you’re feeling is literally the difference of a quarter of an atmosphere of pressure.
Saturation divers go from one atmosphere to up to nineteen atmospheres, and even much higher.
The deepest saturation dive was done in 1992 when a company called COMEX was kinda testing the limits for research.
They sent a diver to 2300 feet (701m), and was under 71.1 atmospheres of pressure.
This is still the deepest saturation dive and the most pressure any human has ever experienced.
By the way, the air that they breathe in these tanks is a mix of oxygen, nitrogen, and helium, which they call trimix.
Helium because it’s an inert gas and it’s really low density so it’s easier to breathe under pressure.
But being that it’s helium, it does have the expected side effects of breathing helium.
That combined with that fact that sound behaves differently in high pressure means that the most badass people on the planet, people doing construction work on the bottom of the ocean, are talking back and forth to each other like this…
Anyway, I hope that gave you a smile because the rest of this video is horrifying.
Incident in Brief
The Byford Dolphin was drilling in a gas field in the North Sea on November 5, 1983. There were four divers total, including two British divers, Edwin Arthur Coward and Roy P. Lucas, and two Norwegian divers, Bjørn Bergersen and Truls Hellevik.
The depth that they were diving in required that they be pressurized to 9 atmospheres, and they worked in shifts, with the British crew going down together while the Norwegians rested and vice versa.
In the early morning hours of November 5th, Coward and Lucas were resting in their sleeping chamber, which in diagrams is Chamber two. Bergersen and Hellevik had just come back up to the decompression chamber after finishing their 8-hour shift, which ran a few hours over.
Once at the surface, they docked the diving bell to the decompression chamber with the help of two dive tenders, William Crammond and Martin Saunders.
The way it works is they dock to a trunk that sticks out from the pressure chamber, kind-of like an airlock in space terms. Once that connection is sealed, the trunk is pressurized to 9 atmospheres, then the crew can crawl across the trunk (Transfer under pressure), open the hatch to the pressure chamber, climb in, re-seal the hatch, and then the dive tenders depressurize the trunk and detach the diving bell.
This was something that they did all the time, day after day. But on this day, something went wrong.
What happened has never been fully understood. Though one of the crew did get the brunt of the blame, possibly unfairly, I’ll get to that in a minute.
Some say it may have been a communication issue because of stormy conditions that day but what happened was this.
Bergersen had entered the chamber first and stood on the opposite side of the chamber while Hellevik was in the process of closing the hatch.
But just before the hatch was fully closed, one of the dive tenders opened the clamp to free the tunnel from the diving bell.
Again, we don’t know if it was a communication issue or a mistake brought about by tiredness and fatigue, but when that clamp was loosened, the pressure shot out of the chamber.
In case you’re wondering how powerful 9 atmospheres of pressure can be, it sent the 80,000 pound diving bell flying across the platform.
It smashed into Crammond and Saunders with the force of a semi truck at full speed. Crammond held on long enough for a rescue helicopter to pick him up but he died on the way.
Saunders managed to survive but suffered extensive injuries, including a broken back and neck.
He was the only survivor of the Byford Dolphin incident. Because the four guys inside the chambers… Well this is where things get really grizzly.
I would offer to let you skip ahead but if you clicked on this video, I’m pretty sure this is what you’re here for. Freaks.
Coward, Lucas, and Bergersen just dropped dead. Actually Bergersen dropped dead because he was standing when it happened, Coward and Lucas were in their bunks, likely asleep so they just… died.
That’s what it looked like from the outside anyway, they just stopped breathing. And maybe got a little puffy.
Because instantaneously, nitrogen and other gasses surged out of their blood and tissues like a mentos in diet coke. Their blood literally boiled inside of them. In less than a second, there were bubbles filling every inch of their bodies.
Blood circulation was impossible and their bodies just stopped functioning.
Like, if you want to try to imagine what that would be like, you might think it would be like suffocating because no blood can get to your brain, like you might have a brief moment of panic as you become conscious of what’s happening but here’s the thing – their brains were boiling too. So they weren’t aware of anything. It was just… over.
The autopsy report talked about how this degassing in their blood also solidified lipids and fats in their bodies… And they explain it like this:
“In the cardiac chambers and in the great vessels around the heart, both arteries and veins, large amounts of free fat were found. This fat was mixed with gas bubbles, and looked like sizzling butter on a frying pan.”
The Fourth Diver
As horrible as that sounds, it’s what happened to the fourth diver that made the Byford Dolphin incident so memorable.
As I was saying before, Hellevik was in the process of closing the hatch when the decompression happened. The hatch itself is 60 centimeters, or about two feet in diameter, but it was most of the way closed when it happened, leaving about a 5-inch gap.
A 5-inch gap that Hellevik was standing right in front of.
Remember how this explosion was so powerful that it threw an 80,000 pound steel diving bell like a rag doll? Well there was that amount of force, and then there was Hellevik, and then there was a 5-inch gap.
It literally shot him out of the decompression chamber like a cannon.
And he didn’t go through smoothly either, to get much more grotesque, his body was pushed against the gap in the door, which was right in front of his abdomen. The pressure then pushed through his body, sending his abdominal organs flying through the hole. The rest of his body then folded in half backwards and just got shredded through the hole.
Only all of that happened in the span of microseconds. From an outside perspective, there was just an explosion of body parts that covered the deck of the platform. One body part that they weren’t even able to identify was found 10 feet above the decompression chamber. It took 4 bodybags to collect all of his remains and the investigators didn’t believe that was all of him.
Now you might be noticing that I’m not using any pictures of the actual event in this video. And no, I’m not, for all the obvious reasons, but I did use the autopsy report as a source, it is linked below, and it’s just as brutal as you might think so not for the squeamish.
No, it literally flayed him apart, and because of the way his body folded, it kind-of defleshed him, so there were large chunks of his skin laying around, including his face, just ripped it off.
The dread is real
It’s easy to see why this incident has buried itself into our collective psyches. It’s gory and sensational. But for me… I don’t know man, it just hits that existential dread place for me, the idea that one second you’re there and a second later, you’re… everywhere.
We don’t think of our bodies as something that can just instantly disintegrate. Like did he even have time to know that something had gone wrong? Or was it just lights out?
I don’t know, some people might say that’s the best way to go, just immediate nothingness. But for me…
I don’t like thinking about this!
Somebody paid for this, right?
Well I mentioned earlier that one of the divers took most of the blame for it. That person was Billy Crammond.
The Aftermath
Crammond was one of the dive tenders that was helping to secure the diving bell to the chamber as the crew performed their TUP. And he was the one that pulled the clamp before the chamber hatch had fully closed. Which he paid for with his life.
So when the families and the governments sought answers for what happened, it was pretty easy for COMEX, the company that operated the Byford Dolphin, to say it was user error and put the blame on Crammond.
In fact there was so much hate directed toward Crammond that his widow, Ruth Crammond, had to move away from her home in Edinburgh.
But of course, it’s not that cut and dried. Obviously the company was eager to pass the buck to Crammond and not take responsibility because that would cost a lot of money.
But the reality is, the company did make decisions that contributed to the accident. And those decisions were also all about money.
The Victims
Because it turns out that this was 100% preventable by a simple interlocking mechanism that keeps the clamp from releasing until the hatch is closed.
And this wasn’t some fancy, newfangled technology, in fact, regulations had been passed in 1982 that made these mandatory on saturation dive rigs – but it only applied to new construction projects. The Byford Dolphin was grandfathered in.
So, they didn’t have to install it. But they could have. And they chose not to.
At the same time, they were pushing their divers to take on longer shifts. Industry standard was 8 hour shifts, but COMEX lobbied the Norwegian government to allow longer shifts.
This means the divers were working as long as 14-18 hours at a time. So of course they were exhausted and out of their minds at 4 in the morning in a roiling sea.
It’s almost like working people way past when it’s safe is unsafe.
The Families
But perhaps the real victims on all this were the families of the six men involved.
The Norwegian government did pay some compensation to the families of Bergersen and Hellevik, because they were Norwegian citizens. Saunders was granted disability benefits in the UK though I’m sure it didn’t come close to replacing his income.
The Coward, Lucas, and Crammond families suffered the most. They were denied compensation from the company and the Norwegian government until 2009, when the North Sea Divers Alliance brought a lawsuit over the accident.
That means their widows raised their children alone for 25 years on just a fraction of what they expected to live on. They finally did settle in that 2009 lawsuit for an undisclosed amount.
The money won’t bring back what they lost, but at least the organizations involved finally took responsibility. And Ruth Crammond finally got to move back to Edinburgh with some measure of vindication.
A Safer North Sea
And thankfully, regulations are much tighter in the diving industry today, partly because of the Byford Dolphin Incident.
I guess if there’s an upside to horrifying accidents, it’s that they can lead to actual positive change because we’re all so disturbed by it.
The North Sea is now considered one of the safest places for divers, but no place is completely safe. Even with modern technology, deaths of commercial deep seas divers are still reported each year.
One of the most horrifying recent events happened in 2022, when five underwater welders were sucked into an oil pipe off the coast of Trinidad. The last man to enter the pipe was the only survivor. The deaths of the other men have been blamed on criminal negligence by the fuel company.
All of which might make you wonder why people would sign up to do such a dangerous job. And the answer is simple. Money.
Saturation divers are some of the highest paid construction jobs in the world. And rightfully so. The British divers on the Byford Dolphin were making 2000 pounds per month, that’s the equivalent of 14,000 today.
But you want to hear what’s really crazy? The number of commercial diving deaths is nowhere near the number of deaths from recreational diving.
2018 is the last year we have solid numbers for, and there were 55 recreational diving fatalities in the United States and Canada alone. 189 worldwide. The number of commercial diving fatalities in 2018? Six.
At least the commercial divers were getting paid well, the recreational divers died doing it for free. And most of them were in submerged caves…
I will never understand why people go diving in caves.
Although to be fair there’s a LOT more recreational divers than commercial saturation divers. Even if it pays a lot of money, it’s still one of the most dangerous jobs in the world.
According to the North Sea Divers Alliance, between 1965 and 1990, there were 350-400 working saturation divers in the world. Out of that count, 56 of them died. That’s a 1-in-7 ratio!
But that’s a risk that saturation divers are willing to take. Because the pay’s good, sure but it’s also important, challenging work. And some people love that kind of challenge. Gives them a purpose.
It takes a certain kind of person to do this, I mean these guys give big astronaut energy.
Ruth Crammond, when talking about her late husband, she said she used to complain to him about how dangerous his job was and he’d just shrug it off and say, “crossing the road is dangerous.”
For the record, he’s not wrong. Looking at those 2018 numbers, there were 189 diving deaths and 6000 people who died crossing the road.
It would be ironic if one of those was a saturation diver on his day off.
Underwater Robots?
And maybe someday we won’t have to put people’s lives on the line anymore, I did a video a while back about humanoid robots, well, there’s underwater robots as well.
We already have to tether people to the surface for air and communications, robots could do the same thing and be down there for as long as they need to be. No decompression necessary.
A couple of early steps in that direction are the uOne from uWare Robotics. It’s designed to not just swim through the water but hover in place, which is necessary if you’re going to actually do some work with it. Right now it’s mostly used for scanning the sea floor and not so much physical labor.
For that you might want to look at the Aquanaut from Nauticus Robotics, it actually has actuating arms and robotic claws that can be controlled remotely or be pre-programmed to do a number of tasks.
These have a very long way to go before they start taking any sat diving jobs, but they’re a step in that direction. For better or worse.
Until that happens, some of the bravest, maybe craziest roughnecks on the planet will continue to do live under pressure.
I have held off on that joke this whole video.
And those same men will be a little bit safer because of the Byford Dolphin incident. So I guess if you want to find some kind of silver lining in a story about 4 guys spontaneously exploding, there you go.
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