WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT Five men tragically died in horrific ways because of the incident and a sixth man sustained life-threatening injuries after being crushed.
In a chilling tale, a fatal underwater error involving six men led to what has been labelled as some of the ‘most gruesome deaths’ in history, with five out of the six men tragically losing their lives in horrific ways.
The terrifying incident unfolded on a semi-submersible oil drilling rig where the divers were assigned to carry out a deep-sea diving mission.
Although the rig itself appeared unremarkable, it was sadly the scene of numerous accidents involving workers during its operational years.
One such dreadful accident took place on the rig in 1983.
The catastrophic 1983 disaster
Operating across the British, Norwegian, and Danish sectors in the North Sea, the Byford Dolphin was a semi-submersible oil drilling rig which drilled seasonally for various companies.
In November 1983, a team of two British and two Norwegian divers – Roy P Lucas, 38, Edwin Arthur Coward, 35, Truls Hellevik, 34, and Bjørn Giæver Bergersen, 29 – along with dive tenders William Crammond, 32, and Martin Saunders, 30, were stationed on the rig to undertake a deep-sea diving mission.
At the moment of the incident, all six blokes were on duty beneath the waves, conducting routine maintenance on the rig at a jaw-dropping depth of 295 feet.
To safely carry out their tasks, the crew were housed in special compression chambers for their planned 28-day shift.
This was to prevent an excessive accumulation of nitrogen in their bloodstreams. Within these chambers, the divers would breathe a carefully measured blend of gases tailored to their dive’s depth – typically a mix of oxygen and helium.
They employed a technique known as ‘saturation diving’, which enabled them to spend prolonged periods at significant depths underwater.
This method was designed to ensure the crew could avoid decompression sickness, commonly known as ‘the bends’, when they surfaced.
The men used a specialised transport vessel, a diving bell, to shuttle them safely between their living quarters and their underwater work site.
On November 5, 1983, divers Hellevik and Bergersen were finishing a gruelling 12-hour shift. Assisted by dive tenders Saunders and Crammond, they used the diving bell to return to their sleeping quarters.
The safe operation of the diving bell required the crew to ensure that the transportation vessel was sealed and correctly reconnected before transitioning back into their highly pressurised sleeping chambers.
This procedure was crucial to prevent rapid decompression in the body, which could be lethal. Once inside, the divers had to close the door which would create an airtight seal, and the pressure in their chambers would automatically adjust.
This action would isolate the chambers and connect it to the dive bell, which would then slowly depressurise for the safety of the divers.
However, disaster struck on that day when the internal crew chambers 1 and 2, usually pressurised to nine atmospheres, plummeted to one atmosphere in an instant.
This sudden change occurred because an external diver made a critical mistake and unlatched the diving bell too early, before complete depressurisation had been achieved.
This error caused the clamp – responsible for keeping the chambers sealed – to open prematurely before Hellevik had fully closed the chamber door.
As a result, the pressure in the sleeping chamber abruptly changed from the equivalent of being 295 feet underwater to surface air pressure, reports the Mirror.
Coward and Lucas were said to be resting in chamber 2 at a pressure of 9 atmospheres when the tragic incident occurred. The sudden, forceful rush of air exiting the chamber caused the diving bell to be violently propelled, striking Crammond and killing him instantly.
It’s believed that three of the four divers inside the sleeping chambers died immediately as the nitrogen in their blood would have turned into bubbles, effectively boiling them from the inside and reducing their bodies to countless fragments.
Hellevik, the fourth diver and who was nearest to the partially closed chamber door, was pulled through a tiny 60cm wide gap, resulting in his organs being expelled from his body.
The post-mortem report stated: “The scalp with long, blond hair was present, but the top of the skull and the brain were missing. The soft tissues of the face were found, however, completely separated from the bones.”
His abdominal and thoracic organs had been horrifically expelled. Hellevik’s body was reportedly sent for autopsy in four separate bags collected from various locations around the rig.
Each part of his body inside the bags of bone and tissue reportedly displayed some sign of injury.
Saunders, the only survivor of the dreadful accident, sustained life-threatening injuries, including collapsed lungs, fractures in his back, and a broken neck.
The tragic incident was also blamed on engineering shortcomings, as the Byford Dolphin oil rig utilised an antiquated diving system from 1975.
This system lacked crucial safety features such as fail-safe hatches, external pressure gauges, and an interlocking mechanism – a feature which would have stopped the divers’ sleeping chambers from opening whilst under pressure.
The Byford Dolphin oil rig continued to operate with upgrades and changed hands over the years, until it was finally decommissioned in 2019. It was eventually sold for demolition in the 2020s.
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