Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Byford Dolphin Incident

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's JJ. Let's get started with one of the most gruesome things

that has ever happened in the history of the world. Yeah, and probably the most gruesome thing that's ever happened on this show. Yeah, I don't think there's a probably about it. And we've talked about some gruesome stuff, but we should probably give a little COA here. Like the stuff we're gonna talk about is kind of graphic of people dying and being mutilated.

So just the heads up on that one. Yep, 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 said- Did you see the full color one? Is that the one you looked at just now? You're talking about the tray of-

Yes. Okay. All right, so everyone knows what we're talking about. There was, and still is, it sounds like, a drilling rig called the Biford Dolphin. And now it looks like it's contracted out by BP. I think so. And on November 5th, 1983, there was in the North Sea a very horrific accident,

an explosive decompression accident that occurred on the Biford Dolphin, or not on the Biford Dolphin, 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 ready?

All right, good night. So the whole thing centers around saturation diving. Yeah, sure, I get that. Okay, okay. So well, let's explain to the peeps at home what saturation diving is then, okay? It means you can live down there basically and work. Yeah, so like if you're working on the Biford Dolphin,

you could be drilling into thousands of feet of 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 got to decompress.

And if you're gonna 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, they've come up with this thing called saturation diving, which kind of gets around decompressing every day.

Yeah, plus you gotta keep them on the clock, you know, while you're decompressing. You gotta pay for the decompressing, yeah. All right, 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 seafloor 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 seafloor, and then they're living on the ship, and then they're traveling between the two in a pressurized diving bell. But the point is, is everywhere they are for weeks on end during their shift or their stint or hitch, that's what they call it,

their hitch of working the seafloor, they're living in this pressurized environment, whether it's on the ship, in the diving bell, or down on the seafloor, it's all pressurized to the atmosphere, the atmospheric pressure of the worksite down on the seafloor. Okay, this makes a lot more sense now.

Yeah. I was under the impression it was like the Abyss. Right. And they all just lived down there and played cards and made pithy remarks and complained about the food. It was a good movie though. It was a great movie.

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 then make sure everything is super tightly clamped together, obviously, because it's all super pressurized. Yeah, and to hook the diving bell up to the pressure chambers where they live and eat and play cards and give pithy remarks to one another on the ship.

That's all pressurized as if it's 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. Yeah, you can't just pop out and have a smoke. No, you cannot. You have to stay in, what is that gerbil habitat called?

You know what I'm talking about? Sort of. 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 the sea floor up to the chambers on the ship in 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, depressurize 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 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 1983, not necessarily. That's right. So we're gonna take a break and tell you what happened on November 5th of that year, right after this. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so here's what happened on November 5th. There was a team of four divers down there

working in the frig gas field in the North Sea. There were two divers and a bell. And that's, we talked about, I think we did a whole podcast on the Diving Bell, didn't we? 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 days. Yeah, so the Diving Bell 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. 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 in, or lived in eight and made pretty jokes. Exactly, don't forget the cards. Right, the cards. And you gotta complain about the cooking.

Sure. 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, their job was to assist in making sure the diving bell was clamped up to the trunk correctly and opening and closing the valves and stuff like that. One of them unclamped the diving bell

from the trunk before the hatch had been shut. Closing off the divers in their quarters, their depressurized quarters. This was catastrophic. 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, again, catastrophic is the only way to put it. Yeah, this is something that they would take nine, 10, 11, 12 hours to decompress usually. And it happened in under a second.

It caused an explosion, a decompression explosion, killed all four of these divers and the dive tender immediately. They did a follow-up study, of course, in 1988. They found that the three of the divers were literally killed instantly. And I guess we need to say this, right? Yeah.

So the diver, their bodies ruptured basically. The diver closest to the door, his organs, spine and limbs, it says 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 blood and goer through that narrow opening as 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, end quote. 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 their organs and their blood vessels had all ruptured 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 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 this explosion. Yeah, the only thing that I can say

that is good about this was that it was so fast. Yeah. 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 harp, it's a harp. 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 allowed the pressurized chamber

to depressurize 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 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 before the trunk has been like depressurized, before the hatch has been shut, before all this stuff happens, so that it's 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, somebody made a mistake, but it seems like years later,

some of these relatives of the gentleman that were killed got their hands on a report that said it was actually faulty equipment. Yeah, so there you go. Yeah, and where did this come from? Who do we have to thank for this? We got a lot of people to thank. Everybody from history channel to,

there was a guy on Reddit actually named Spectromero who did a great job of explaining saturation diving in this particular accident. So got a handful of people to thank for this one. Good stuff. Yeah. Well, terrible stuff, but interesting nonetheless. Yeah, there you go, Chuck.

I think he's saved us at the last minute. Well, thanks a lot for joining us. We hope that you can carry on the rest of the day without shuddering. Good luck. In the meantime, short stuff is out. The stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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