Technical diving is one of the most dangerous jobs out there, and this incident saw five divers die in a horrific manner
An incident on a technical diving rig saw five people die a horrific and gruesome manner.
If human history has taught us anything, it’s that there are many unpleasant ways to die.
But an incident on November 5, 1983, saw five people working as ‘saturation divers’ near the Byford Dolphin Oil Rig meet an extremely unpleasant end.
To understand why the incident happened, we need to clarify what exactly ‘saturation diving’ is.
When you dive very deep underwater you have to use a special mixture of oxygen and nitrogen.
This is held under pressure to help the body cope with the pressure exerted on it deep underwater, around 1,000ft below the surface.
Technical divers work on oil rigs, conducting underwater maintenance and construction. (Abstract Aerial Art / Getty)
To make it easier when conducting frequent maintenance and construction jobs divers sometimes live in a pressurised container for days at a time.
This prevents them from having to repeatedly undergo the process of pressurisation and depressurisation.
But as the five occupants of this chamber found, this can be highly dangerous.
During their work the group had been living in the pressurised facility including living quarters and an area called ‘the diving bell’.
This was sealed off from the other units as it was where the divers could depressurise.
While the precise causes are not known, what we do know is that the diving bell was released before the doors were fully closed.
The result of this was that the area where the crew was living went from nine atmospheres to the surface pressure of one atmosphere in an instant.
Normally, divers require days to safely depressurise from the kind of depth they were working at, so you can imagine the horrific result.
William Crammond was working as a tender and was hit and killed by the diving bell.
The placement of the people in the capsule. (Wiki)
But divers Edwin Coward, Roy Lucas, Bjørn Bergersen, and Truls Hellevik met with a horrible end.
The rapid depressurisation made the nitrogen saturating their blood turn into bubbles, effectively bursting them from the inside.
But one diver met with a uniquely grisly fate.
This is because the pressure from the depressurisation forced his body through a 60cm hole, resulting in it being ‘fragmented’.
His chest cavity was expelled by the pressure, with his internal organs being strewn around the pod – some were even found ten metres away.
There was just one survivor of the horrific incident – another tender named Martin Saunders, who was left in a critical condition in the wake of the disaster.
