Five divers suffered gruesome deaths in oil rig accident

In an incident at a technical diving facility, five people lost their lives in a horrific and cruel manner.

If human history has taught us anything, it is that there are many unpleasant ways to die.

But in an incident on November 5, 1983, five people working as “saturation divers” near the Byford Dolphin oil rig met a very unpleasant end.

To understand why this incident occurred, we need to clarify what exactly “saturation diving” is.

If you dive very deep underwater, you must use a special mixture of oxygen and nitrogen.

This pressure is maintained to help the body cope with the pressure exerted on it deep underwater, about 300 meters below the surface.

Technical divers work on oil platforms, performing maintenance and construction work underwater. (Abstract Aerial Art / Getty)

To facilitate frequent maintenance and construction work, divers sometimes live in a pressure vessel for several days at a time.

This avoids having to go through the process of repeatedly building up and releasing pressure.

But this can be extremely dangerous, as the five inmates of this chamber discovered.

During their work, the group lived in a pressurized cabin, which included not only living quarters but also an area called the “diving bell.”

This was sealed off from the other units because the divers could release the pressure there.

The exact causes are not known, but it is certain that the diving bell was released before the doors were completely closed.

As a result, the surface pressure in the area where the crew lived dropped from nine atmospheres to one atmosphere in an instant.

It usually takes divers several days to safely depressurize from the depth they have been working at, so you can imagine the terrible consequences.

William Crammond was working as a tender and was hit and killed by the diving bell.

The accommodation of the people in the capsule. (Wiki)

But divers Edwin Coward, Roy Lucas, Bjørn Bergersen and Truls Hellevik suffered a terrible end.

The rapid release of pressure caused the nitrogen that saturated her blood to turn into bubbles that practically burst her from the inside.

But one diver suffered a particularly gruesome fate.

This was because the pressure of the decompression caused his body to be pushed through a 60 cm hole and thus “fragmented”.

His chest was pushed out by the pressure and his internal organs were scattered inside the capsule. Some were found even ten meters away.

There was only one survivor of this terrible incident – ​​another dinghy named Martin Saunders, who was left in a critical condition after the disaster.

Photo credit: YouTube/Storified

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