Short Stuff: Byford Dolphin Incident

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 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, 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, 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

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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H M