Five men suffered one of the most gruesome deaths imaginable at an oil rig.
On one fateful day in 1983, a horrific tragedy now known as the Byford Dolphin incident unfolded.
It has gone down in history as one of the most ‘brutal’ deaths.
The Byford Dolphin, operated in Norway, was a semi-submersible drilling rig.
Saturation divers – professional deep-sea divers – work at depths of 500 feet (152 meters) or more to maintain equipment on offshore oil rigs and undersea pipelines.
Unlike most commercial divers who return to the surface after a few hours, saturation divers can spend up to 28 days on a single job, living in high-pressure chambers between shifts.
It’s lucrative pay but intense and dangerous work.
When diving to extreme depths, divers must ascend with great caution, allowing sufficient time for decompression to prevent decompression sickness, also known as “the bends.”
As a diver descends, the increasing water pressure affects every cell in the body, compressing nitrogen gas molecules inhaled through the lungs and dissolving them into the bloodstream.
The issue isn’t the absorption of nitrogen but rather the danger of ascending too quickly. Under pressure, the dissolved gas can rapidly form bubbles and expand, leading to serious health risks.
Phillip Newsum, an experienced commercial diver and executive director of the Association of Diving Contractors International, says (per How Stuff Works): “Nitrogen bubbles will form in the bloodstream and those can prevent the circulation of blood, including to the heart.
“That’s when you run the risk of getting decompression sickness.”
Decompression sickness can cause severe joint and muscle pain, delirium, paralysis, heart attacks, and strokes.
It can be treated in a hyperbaric chamber if caught early, where the individual is placed back under pressure, and the pressure is slowly released over hours or days.
But the best prevention is to ascend slowly, allowing the body to ‘off-gas’ the nitrogen naturally.
But commercial divers work at depths far beyond recreational scuba divers, which requires a different decompression method.
A failure in this system led to the Byford Dolphin disaster.
Instead of decompressing gradually like recreational divers—which could take days to reach the surface—saturation divers rely on pressurized diving bells and decompression chambers.
For every 100 feet (30 meters) they descend, they must spend about a day in the chamber to adjust.
To maximize efficiency, saturation divers remain under pressure for up to 28 days, traveling in pressurized diving bells.
The final week of any saturation dive is dedicated to a slow and controlled decompression process before safely returning to normal atmospheric pressure.
Saturation diving operations require a whole crew.
Life support technicians manage the air mix, the dive control team operates the diving bell, and cooks are there to prepare and serve meals for the divers in living chambers.
Tenders support the divers by managing the ‘umbilical’ – the air supply tubes and communication wires.
On November 5, 1983, an experienced tender named William Crammond performed a routine procedure on the Byford Dolphin.
He had just connected the diving bell to the living chambers and safely deposited two divers in one chamber. The other two divers were already resting rig in another chamber.
This is when everything went terribly wrong.
The diving bell detached before the chamber doors were sealed, triggering what’s known as “explosive decompression.”
Newsum described it as a “death sentence,” stating, “You won’t survive.”
In an instant, the air pressure inside the living chambers plummeted from nine atmospheres to just one.
The sudden rush of escaping air killed Crammond and critically injured his colleague, Martin Saunders.
The four saturation divers inside the chamber met an even more horrific fate.
Autopsy reports revealed that Edwin Arthur Coward, Roy P. Lucas, and Bjørn Giæver Bergersen were essentially “boiled” from the inside as the nitrogen in their blood rapidly expanded into gas bubbles.
Truls Hellevik, who stood near the partially opened door, was violently sucked through a narrow gap, his body torn apart as his internal organs were ejected onto the deck.
“Due to the sheer speed of the incident, it is believed that all the divers perished instantly and without pain—but the aftermath was beyond gruesome.” notes IFL Science. rig
The disaster exposed severe safety protocol flaws, prompting significant improvements in commercial diving operations and safety standards worldwide.
It was a wake-up call for the commercial diving industry, which responded by tightening safety measures to prevent such tragedies in the future.
It took decades for the Norwegian government to take responsibility for the Byford Dolphin accident and provide restitution to the victims’ families.
In 2009, an undisclosed sum was given to the victims’ families, including the injured Saunders.
A report into the tragedy suggested it was faulty equipment, not human error, that was to blame for the accident.
