January 22, 2020 • 13 mins
In 1983, what may be the worst diving catastrophe in the history of deep sea oil exploration took place when a pressurized chamber was opened, instantly killing four divers inside.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's j j. Let's get started. It's one of the
most gruesome things that has ever happened in the history
of the world. Yeah, and probably the most grewesome thing
that's ever happened on this show. Yeah. I don't think
it's probably about it and we've talked about some gruesome stuff,
but we should probably give a little c o a here,
(00:24):
Like the stuff we're gonna talk about is kind of
graphic of people dying and being mutilated. So just heads
up on that one. I just looked at the pic.
Thank you, yes anytime. I can't believe you hadn't so far. Yeah,
I avoided it. So until you say the full color one?
Is that the one you looked at? Just now you're
talking about the tray of Yes? Okay, alright, so how
(00:46):
everyone knows what we're talking about? Uh? There was and
still is. It sounds like a drilling rig called the
Biford Dolphin. Uh. Now it looks like it's contracted out
by BP I think so. And in November on November
that was in the North Sea, a very horrific accident,
(01:08):
an explosive decompression accident that occurred on the Byfor Dolphin
or not on the Bifor Dolphin, but but very far
under the sea. No, no, it was on the Biford Dolphin.
But does that mean I thought this happened below deck?
Let me take this, Let me take this. You're ready?
All right? Good night. So the whole thing, the whole
thing centers around saturation diving. Yeah, I get it, Sure,
(01:29):
I get okay, Okay, So well let's explain to the
peeps at home at saturation diving is then, okay, it
means you can live down there basically in work. Yeah,
So like if you're working on the Biford Dolphin, you
could be drilling into, you know, thousands of feet um
of a bedrock under the sea to get to whatever
(01:49):
gas or oil you're after. And so you might be
working hundreds and hundreds of feet down every day, which
means that when you come back up, as if you
listen to our cave diving episode, you've got to decompress.
And if you're going to decompress, that takes time. So
that means that you know, it could take hours and
hours every day after your shift to decompress before you
(02:11):
can finally come up to the surface. So since that's
just so ridiculously inefficient, um, they've come up with this
thing called saturation diving, which kind of gets around decompressing
every day. Yeah. Plus you gotta keep him on the clock,
you know, while you're decompressing, you gotta pay for the decompressing. Yeah, alright,
So the way I understand it is they, like you said,
it's more efficient to stay down there and work, which
(02:32):
they do, but they don't live down there necessarily like
in the Abyss right right, they come back up to
the ship, but the whole journey from sea floor to
ship is pressurized at the same pressure, is that right?
It is? And then once they get to the ship,
they have to live and stay in these pressurized environments
(02:54):
so that they don't have to decompress every day. So
they're working down on the sea floor and then there
live being on the ship, and then they're traveling between
the two and a pressurized diving bell. But the point
is is everywhere they are for weeks on end, during
their shift or their their stint or hitch, that's what
they call it, their hitch of working the sea floor,
(03:14):
they're living in this pressurized environment whether it's on the ship,
in the diving bell or down on the sea floor,
it's all pressurized to the atmosphere, the atmospheric pressure of
the work site down on the sea floor. And this
makes a lot more sense now. Yeah, I was under
the impression it was like the Abyss and they all
just lived down there and played cards and made pithy remarks,
(03:37):
complained about the food. It was a good movie. Though.
It was a great movie, so this does make a
lot more sense. So basically, the hatches of the diving
bell and the ship chamber are all lined up and
clamped together by these divers that are on the outside
dive tenders, yeah, dive tenders. And that's where it becomes
a little bit like a movie. You move from one
(03:57):
to one and make sure everything is super tightly clamped
together obviously because it's all super pressurized. Yeah, and to
like hook the diving bell up to um the pressure
chambers where they like live and eat and play cards
and give pithy remarks to one another on the ship.
That's all pressurizes if it's you know, at nine atmospheres
(04:17):
down on the sea floor. Even though outside of those
chambers on the ship it's at one atmosphere, it's at
sea level pressure. You can't just pop out and have
a smoke, No, you cannot. You have to stay in
what's what is that gerbil habitat called you know what
I'm talking about. You can put like a bunch of
tubing and stuff together and let your gerbil run around.
(04:37):
So this is basically what these divers lived in. And
it was all pressurized. And so when you're traveling from
you know, the sea floor up to the chambers on
the ship and this diving bell and you clamp the
diving bell onto the pressurized chamber, you need to make
sure that the tunnel that connects the two is pressurized
and then you can open up the hatch and then
move into the chamber, shut the hatch, de pressure eyes
(05:00):
that that um that little tunnel, and then remove the
diving bell and you're fine. It's just a lot of
extra work and thoughtfulness to live like this for weeks
on end for saturation diving, but it means that you'll
only have to decompress once at the end of the
several week hitch before you go out into sea level atmosphere. Right,
(05:22):
and given what's going on, you would think that there
is a robust system of fail safes and check marks
and hand signals to make sure that everything is hooked
up and sealed tight in order to maintain that pressure.
And today you'd be right, but in three not necessarily,
that's right. So we're gonna take a break and tell
you what happened on November of that year, right after this. Alright,
(06:04):
So here's what happened on number November five. There was
a team of four divers down there working in the
frig gas field in the North Sea. Uh, there were
two divers in a bell and that's we talked about.
We I think we did a whole podcast on a
diving bell, didn't me. Yeah, yeah we did. We totally did,
which is kind of weird to think of. But yeah,
(06:25):
I remember because remember that one cook on that ship
from Nigeria that went down, he managed to like live
in like a little air pocket for a couple of days. Yeah.
So the diving bell is is the chamber that takes
people back and forth. It's the taxi basically transporting them
from the work site back up to these pressurized chambers
on the ship. Um it had just been cranked up
(06:46):
to the surface and they were crawling through this passageway
it's called a trunk to this attached sealed decompression chamber,
which is where they lived and worked and or lived
in eight and made exactly don't forget the cards, and
you got to complain about the cooking. And then there
was a chamber another chamber pretty similar nearby that had
two more of the diving team. And then each of
(07:11):
these chambers, this trunk, the bell, and the chamber were
all completely pressurized. And again the system was in place,
and it had worked pretty well up into this point. Yeah,
but for some reason, on this particular day, one of
the two dive tenders, one of the divers who were
outside in the normal pressure atmosphere outside of this pressurized chamber.
(07:34):
They their job was to assist in making sure the
diving bell was clamped up to the trunk correctly and
opening and closing valves and stuff like that. One of
them unclamped the diving bell from the trunk. Before them,
the hatch had been shut, closing off the divers in
(07:56):
their their quarters. They're deep, they're pressurized quarters. This was catastrophic.
It's what it did, was it introduced the normal one
atmosphere of atmospheric pressure into the pressurized dive chambers, which
were pressurized to nine atmospheres, and in a fraction of
(08:17):
a second, the pressure inside of these things went from
an extremely compressed nine atmospheres to an extremely decompressed one
atmosphere again in less than a second. And it was
it was again catastrophic, is the only way to put it. Yeah,
this is something that they would take nine, eleven, twelve
(08:38):
hours to decompress usually, and it happened in under a second.
It caused an explosion. A decompression explosion killed all four
of these divers, uh, and the dive tender immediately. Uh.
They did a follow up study, of course, they found
that the three of the divers were were literally killed instantly.
(09:01):
And I guess we need to say this right. Yeah,
so the diver, uh, their bodies ruptured. Basically, the diver
closest to the door, his organs, spine, and limbs, it said,
were ejected, and his remains exploded through a narrow gap
in that chamber door. Yeah. Before this happened so fast
(09:22):
and he was pulled apart so violently that before that
chamber door that he hadn't gotten shut yet could slam shut.
About half of them shot out in a burst of
like blood and gore through that that narrow opening. As
this the hatch door was slamming shut from the pressure. Yeah,
they said that they found his liver on the deck
(09:43):
of the boat, quote complete, as if dissected out of
the body. Right, And so they think what happened. So
the other three they all died instantly, But the other
three their bodies were intact. But what had happened is
the their their organs and their blood vessels at all
rupture because the gases that were dissolved in their blood
(10:04):
at that moment suddenly just expanded and just burst everything
inside of them. But the guy who was pulled apart
exploded so violently because he was the closest to that
pressure gradient in between one atmosphere and nine atmosphere, and
he was he was pulled apart by that pressure gradient,
(10:26):
like part of him was a little further away from
the door than the rest of him, and that difference
was enough to just be pulled apart by the by
this explosion. Yeah. The only thing that I can say
that is good about this was that it was so
fast there was not even a moment of panic. Of
what just happened. There was no fear, even much less pain.
(10:49):
It was just you're going back into the chamber and
all of a sudden you wake up sitting on a cloud,
going what just happened? Where did I get this loot? Yeah?
Basically or herp it's a heart. At least it was
that fast that there certainly was no pain involved, but
also no fear or anything. It was just lights out right,
(11:11):
And so you might think like, well, wait a minute,
how did this guy even begin to get this clamp
open that that allowed the pressurized chamber to depressurized catastrophically. Well,
that's what a lot of people said afterwards, and so
the Norwegian Oil Directorate and the regulations body Norsk Veritas
basically said, this can never happen again. If you have
(11:34):
an old like um saturation diving system set up, you
have to retrofit it following these new specifications that make
it this impossible, Like you couldn't possibly open a clamp
um before the trunk has been like depressurized, before the
hatch has been shut, before all this stuff happens to
the its an actual fail safe. Yeah, And the thinking
(11:56):
all along was that it was a human error, that's
what the report said, fatigue or just you know, somebody
made a mistake. But it seems like years later some
of these relatives of the of the gentlemen that were
killed got their hands on a report that said it
was actually faulty equipment. So there you go. Yeah, and
(12:17):
where did this come from? Who do we have to
thank for this? We've got a lot of people to thank. Um,
everybody from History Channel too. There was a guy on
Reddit actually named spectrum Merrow who did a great job
of explaining saturation diving in this particular accident. So I
gotta got a handful of people to thank for this one.
Good stuff, Yeah, well, terrible stuff but interesting nonetheless. Yeah,
(12:41):
there you go. Check. I think he saved us at
the last minute. Uh. Well, thanks a lot for joining us.
We hope that you can carry on the rest of
the day without um shuddering good luck. Uh. In meantime,
short stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I Heart Rady Knows How Stuff Works. For
(13:01):
more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H M
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
there's j j. Let's get started. It's one of the
most gruesome things that has ever happened in the history
of the world. Yeah, and probably the most grewesome thing
that's ever happened on this show. Yeah. I don't think
it's probably about it and we've talked about some gruesome stuff,
but we should probably give a little c o a here,
(00:24):
Like the stuff we're gonna talk about is kind of
graphic of people dying and being mutilated. So just heads
up on that one. I just looked at the pic.
Thank you, yes anytime. I can't believe you hadn't so far. Yeah,
I avoided it. So until you say the full color one?
Is that the one you looked at? Just now you're
talking about the tray of Yes? Okay, alright, so how
(00:46):
everyone knows what we're talking about? Uh? There was and
still is. It sounds like a drilling rig called the
Biford Dolphin. Uh. Now it looks like it's contracted out
by BP I think so. And in November on November
that was in the North Sea, a very horrific accident,
(01:08):
an explosive decompression accident that occurred on the Byfor Dolphin
or not on the Bifor Dolphin, but but very far
under the sea. No, no, it was on the Biford Dolphin.
But does that mean I thought this happened below deck?
Let me take this, Let me take this. You're ready?
All right? Good night. So the whole thing, the whole
thing centers around saturation diving. Yeah, I get it, Sure,
(01:29):
I get okay, Okay, So well let's explain to the
peeps at home at saturation diving is then, okay, it
means you can live down there basically in work. Yeah,
So like if you're working on the Biford Dolphin, you
could be drilling into, you know, thousands of feet um
of a bedrock under the sea to get to whatever
(01:49):
gas or oil you're after. And so you might be
working hundreds and hundreds of feet down every day, which
means that when you come back up, as if you
listen to our cave diving episode, you've got to decompress.
And if you're going to decompress, that takes time. So
that means that you know, it could take hours and
hours every day after your shift to decompress before you
(02:11):
can finally come up to the surface. So since that's
just so ridiculously inefficient, um, they've come up with this
thing called saturation diving, which kind of gets around decompressing
every day. Yeah. Plus you gotta keep him on the clock,
you know, while you're decompressing, you gotta pay for the decompressing. Yeah, alright,
So the way I understand it is they, like you said,
it's more efficient to stay down there and work, which
(02:32):
they do, but they don't live down there necessarily like
in the Abyss right right, they come back up to
the ship, but the whole journey from sea floor to
ship is pressurized at the same pressure, is that right?
It is? And then once they get to the ship,
they have to live and stay in these pressurized environments
(02:54):
so that they don't have to decompress every day. So
they're working down on the sea floor and then there
live being on the ship, and then they're traveling between
the two and a pressurized diving bell. But the point
is is everywhere they are for weeks on end, during
their shift or their their stint or hitch, that's what
they call it, their hitch of working the sea floor,
(03:14):
they're living in this pressurized environment whether it's on the ship,
in the diving bell or down on the sea floor,
it's all pressurized to the atmosphere, the atmospheric pressure of
the work site down on the sea floor. And this
makes a lot more sense now. Yeah, I was under
the impression it was like the Abyss and they all
just lived down there and played cards and made pithy remarks,
(03:37):
complained about the food. It was a good movie. Though.
It was a great movie, so this does make a
lot more sense. So basically, the hatches of the diving
bell and the ship chamber are all lined up and
clamped together by these divers that are on the outside
dive tenders, yeah, dive tenders. And that's where it becomes
a little bit like a movie. You move from one
(03:57):
to one and make sure everything is super tightly clamped
together obviously because it's all super pressurized. Yeah, and to
like hook the diving bell up to um the pressure
chambers where they like live and eat and play cards
and give pithy remarks to one another on the ship.
That's all pressurizes if it's you know, at nine atmospheres
(04:17):
down on the sea floor. Even though outside of those
chambers on the ship it's at one atmosphere, it's at
sea level pressure. You can't just pop out and have
a smoke, No, you cannot. You have to stay in
what's what is that gerbil habitat called you know what
I'm talking about. You can put like a bunch of
tubing and stuff together and let your gerbil run around.
(04:37):
So this is basically what these divers lived in. And
it was all pressurized. And so when you're traveling from
you know, the sea floor up to the chambers on
the ship and this diving bell and you clamp the
diving bell onto the pressurized chamber, you need to make
sure that the tunnel that connects the two is pressurized
and then you can open up the hatch and then
move into the chamber, shut the hatch, de pressure eyes
(05:00):
that that um that little tunnel, and then remove the
diving bell and you're fine. It's just a lot of
extra work and thoughtfulness to live like this for weeks
on end for saturation diving, but it means that you'll
only have to decompress once at the end of the
several week hitch before you go out into sea level atmosphere. Right,
(05:22):
and given what's going on, you would think that there
is a robust system of fail safes and check marks
and hand signals to make sure that everything is hooked
up and sealed tight in order to maintain that pressure.
And today you'd be right, but in three not necessarily,
that's right. So we're gonna take a break and tell
you what happened on November of that year, right after this. Alright,
(06:04):
So here's what happened on number November five. There was
a team of four divers down there working in the
frig gas field in the North Sea. Uh, there were
two divers in a bell and that's we talked about.
We I think we did a whole podcast on a
diving bell, didn't me. Yeah, yeah we did. We totally did,
which is kind of weird to think of. But yeah,
(06:25):
I remember because remember that one cook on that ship
from Nigeria that went down, he managed to like live
in like a little air pocket for a couple of days. Yeah.
So the diving bell is is the chamber that takes
people back and forth. It's the taxi basically transporting them
from the work site back up to these pressurized chambers
on the ship. Um it had just been cranked up
(06:46):
to the surface and they were crawling through this passageway
it's called a trunk to this attached sealed decompression chamber,
which is where they lived and worked and or lived
in eight and made exactly don't forget the cards, and
you got to complain about the cooking. And then there
was a chamber another chamber pretty similar nearby that had
two more of the diving team. And then each of
(07:11):
these chambers, this trunk, the bell, and the chamber were
all completely pressurized. And again the system was in place,
and it had worked pretty well up into this point. Yeah,
but for some reason, on this particular day, one of
the two dive tenders, one of the divers who were
outside in the normal pressure atmosphere outside of this pressurized chamber.
(07:34):
They their job was to assist in making sure the
diving bell was clamped up to the trunk correctly and
opening and closing valves and stuff like that. One of
them unclamped the diving bell from the trunk. Before them,
the hatch had been shut, closing off the divers in
(07:56):
their their quarters. They're deep, they're pressurized quarters. This was catastrophic.
It's what it did, was it introduced the normal one
atmosphere of atmospheric pressure into the pressurized dive chambers, which
were pressurized to nine atmospheres, and in a fraction of
(08:17):
a second, the pressure inside of these things went from
an extremely compressed nine atmospheres to an extremely decompressed one
atmosphere again in less than a second. And it was
it was again catastrophic, is the only way to put it. Yeah,
this is something that they would take nine, eleven, twelve
(08:38):
hours to decompress usually, and it happened in under a second.
It caused an explosion. A decompression explosion killed all four
of these divers, uh, and the dive tender immediately. Uh.
They did a follow up study, of course, they found
that the three of the divers were were literally killed instantly.
(09:01):
And I guess we need to say this right. Yeah,
so the diver, uh, their bodies ruptured. Basically, the diver
closest to the door, his organs, spine, and limbs, it said,
were ejected, and his remains exploded through a narrow gap
in that chamber door. Yeah. Before this happened so fast
(09:22):
and he was pulled apart so violently that before that
chamber door that he hadn't gotten shut yet could slam shut.
About half of them shot out in a burst of
like blood and gore through that that narrow opening. As
this the hatch door was slamming shut from the pressure. Yeah,
they said that they found his liver on the deck
(09:43):
of the boat, quote complete, as if dissected out of
the body. Right, And so they think what happened. So
the other three they all died instantly, But the other
three their bodies were intact. But what had happened is
the their their organs and their blood vessels at all
rupture because the gases that were dissolved in their blood
(10:04):
at that moment suddenly just expanded and just burst everything
inside of them. But the guy who was pulled apart
exploded so violently because he was the closest to that
pressure gradient in between one atmosphere and nine atmosphere, and
he was he was pulled apart by that pressure gradient,
(10:26):
like part of him was a little further away from
the door than the rest of him, and that difference
was enough to just be pulled apart by the by
this explosion. Yeah. The only thing that I can say
that is good about this was that it was so
fast there was not even a moment of panic. Of
what just happened. There was no fear, even much less pain.
(10:49):
It was just you're going back into the chamber and
all of a sudden you wake up sitting on a cloud,
going what just happened? Where did I get this loot? Yeah?
Basically or herp it's a heart. At least it was
that fast that there certainly was no pain involved, but
also no fear or anything. It was just lights out right,
(11:11):
And so you might think like, well, wait a minute,
how did this guy even begin to get this clamp
open that that allowed the pressurized chamber to depressurized catastrophically. Well,
that's what a lot of people said afterwards, and so
the Norwegian Oil Directorate and the regulations body Norsk Veritas
basically said, this can never happen again. If you have
(11:34):
an old like um saturation diving system set up, you
have to retrofit it following these new specifications that make
it this impossible, Like you couldn't possibly open a clamp
um before the trunk has been like depressurized, before the
hatch has been shut, before all this stuff happens to
the its an actual fail safe. Yeah, And the thinking
(11:56):
all along was that it was a human error, that's
what the report said, fatigue or just you know, somebody
made a mistake. But it seems like years later some
of these relatives of the of the gentlemen that were
killed got their hands on a report that said it
was actually faulty equipment. So there you go. Yeah, and
(12:17):
where did this come from? Who do we have to
thank for this? We've got a lot of people to thank. Um,
everybody from History Channel too. There was a guy on
Reddit actually named spectrum Merrow who did a great job
of explaining saturation diving in this particular accident. So I
gotta got a handful of people to thank for this one.
Good stuff, Yeah, well, terrible stuff but interesting nonetheless. Yeah,
(12:41):
there you go. Check. I think he saved us at
the last minute. Uh. Well, thanks a lot for joining us.
We hope that you can carry on the rest of
the day without um shuddering good luck. Uh. In meantime,
short stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a
production of I Heart Rady Knows How Stuff Works. For
(13:01):
more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H M
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