To be a saturation diver is to be in one of the highest paid roles you can get, with the average pay being somewhere around $30,000 to $45,000 a month. However, with such a high paying role comes difficult tasks, claustrophobia, long stints out at sea, and many many deadly risks. But nothing exemplifies these risks more than the Byford Dolphin incident.
In 1983, in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, four saturation divers and one crew member were working on an oil rig known as the Byford Dolphin. These men would often spend long periods of time in a cramped, high pressure, chamber, living far below the surface of the water sometimes for multiple weeks on the go.
It was during this long stay under the waves that a piece of faulty equipment would lead to one of the worst accidents out at sea.
What happened to the Byford Dolphin divers?
On November 5th, William Crammond had been in the middle of a routine procedure which involved transferring two divers from the diving bell to one of the living quarters. The other two divers were already in the second living quarters. Crammond had done this many times before but this time, for some reason, the diving bell detached from the living quarters before the chambers doors were fully shut.
The air pressure in the chamber was much higher than it was outside. The small gap of the not fully shut door meant that the entire quarters rapidly decompressed going from 9 atmospheres to 1 atmosphere according to history.howstuffworks.com.
The rapid change in pressure would have killed the men instantly. Experienced commercial diver Phillip Newsum described it as “a death sentence.” Although the exact details of how these men died is far more gruesome.
The change in pressure boiled them from the inside
Such a rapid decompression would have given the man an extreme version of the bends. According to the autopsy report, three of the men, Edwin Arthur Coward, Roy P. Lucas and Bjørn Giæver Bergersen, were effectively boiled from the inside as the nitrogen in their blood turned into gas bubbles.
Crammond was killed when the diving bell was sent flying from the pressure. However, it was the fourth diver, Truls Hellevik, who suffered the most gruesome fate. Hellevik had been closed to the door when the bell detached, as a result, his whole body was sucked out through the narrow opening which was thought to be only several inches wide.
What caused the accident?
While Norwegian authorities initially chalked the incident up to human error on William Crammond’s part, it would later come out that faulty equipment had been the actual cause. It was discovered that there was no interlock on the locking mechanism, something which has since been amended in the wake of the incident.
However, the damage to Crammond’s name was already done with many still believing, even to this day, that his error was the sole reason the incident occurred in the first place.
