Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
Speaker 1: there's j j. Let's get started. It's one of the
Speaker 1: most gruesome things that has ever happened in the history
Speaker 1: of the world. Yeah, and probably the most grewesome thing
Speaker 1: that's ever happened on this show. Yeah. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's probably about it and we've talked about some gruesome stuff,
Speaker 1: but we should probably give a little c o a here,
Speaker 1: Like the stuff we're gonna talk about is kind of
Speaker 1: graphic of people dying and being mutilated. So just heads
Speaker 1: up on that one. I just looked at the pic.
Speaker 1: Thank you, yes anytime. I can't believe you hadn't so far. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I avoided it. So until you say the full color one?
Speaker 1: Is that the one you looked at? Just now you're
Speaker 1: talking about the tray of Yes? Okay, alright, so how
Speaker 1: everyone knows what we're talking about? Uh? There was and
Speaker 1: still is. It sounds like a drilling rig called the
Speaker 1: Biford Dolphin. Uh. Now it looks like it's contracted out
Speaker 1: by BP I think so. And in November on November
Speaker 1: that was in the North Sea, a very horrific accident,
Speaker 1: an explosive decompression accident that occurred on the Byfor Dolphin
Speaker 1: or not on the Bifor Dolphin, but but very far
Speaker 1: under the sea. No, no, it was on the Biford Dolphin.
Speaker 1: But does that mean I thought this happened below deck?
Speaker 1: Let me take this, Let me take this. You're ready?
Speaker 1: All right? Good night. So the whole thing, the whole
Speaker 1: thing centers around saturation diving. Yeah, I get it, Sure,
Speaker 1: I get okay, Okay, So well let's explain to the
Speaker 1: peeps at home at saturation diving is then, okay, it
Speaker 1: means you can live down there basically in work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So like if you're working on the Biford Dolphin, you
Speaker 1: could be drilling into, you know, thousands of feet um
Speaker 1: of a bedrock under the sea to get to whatever
Speaker 1: gas or oil you're after. And so you might be
Speaker 1: working hundreds and hundreds of feet down every day, which
Speaker 1: means that when you come back up, as if you
Speaker 1: listen to our cave diving episode, you've got to decompress.
Speaker 1: And if you're going to decompress, that takes time. So
Speaker 1: that means that you know, it could take hours and
Speaker 1: hours every day after your shift to decompress before you
Speaker 1: can finally come up to the surface. So since that's
Speaker 1: just so ridiculously inefficient, um, they've come up with this
Speaker 1: thing called saturation diving, which kind of gets around decompressing
Speaker 1: every day. Yeah. Plus you gotta keep him on the clock,
Speaker 1: you know, while you're decompressing, you gotta pay for the decompressing. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: So the way I understand it is they, like you said,
Speaker 1: it's more efficient to stay down there and work, which
Speaker 1: they do, but they don't live down there necessarily like
Speaker 1: in the Abyss right right, they come back up to
Speaker 1: the ship, but the whole journey from sea floor to
Speaker 1: ship is pressurized at the same pressure, is that right?
Speaker 1: It is? And then once they get to the ship,
Speaker 1: they have to live and stay in these pressurized environments
Speaker 1: so that they don't have to decompress every day. So
Speaker 1: they're working down on the sea floor and then there
Speaker 1: live being on the ship, and then they're traveling between
Speaker 1: the two and a pressurized diving bell. But the point
Speaker 1: is is everywhere they are for weeks on end, during
Speaker 1: their shift or their their stint or hitch, that's what
Speaker 1: they call it, their hitch of working the sea floor,
Speaker 1: they're living in this pressurized environment whether it's on the ship,
Speaker 1: in the diving bell or down on the sea floor,
Speaker 1: it's all pressurized to the atmosphere, the atmospheric pressure of
Speaker 1: the work site down on the sea floor. And this
Speaker 1: makes a lot more sense now. Yeah, I was under
Speaker 1: the impression it was like the Abyss and they all
Speaker 1: just lived down there and played cards and made pithy remarks,
Speaker 1: complained about the food. It was a good movie. Though.
Speaker 1: It was a great movie, so this does make a
Speaker 1: lot more sense. So basically, the hatches of the diving
Speaker 1: bell and the ship chamber are all lined up and
Speaker 1: clamped together by these divers that are on the outside
Speaker 1: dive tenders, yeah, dive tenders. And that's where it becomes
Speaker 1: a little bit like a movie. You move from one
Speaker 1: to one and make sure everything is super tightly clamped
Speaker 1: together obviously because it's all super pressurized. Yeah, and to
Speaker 1: like hook the diving bell up to um the pressure
Speaker 1: chambers where they like live and eat and play cards
Speaker 1: and give pithy remarks to one another on the ship.
Speaker 1: That's all pressurizes if it's you know, at nine atmospheres
Speaker 1: down on the sea floor. Even though outside of those
Speaker 1: chambers on the ship it's at one atmosphere, it's at
Speaker 1: sea level pressure. You can't just pop out and have
Speaker 1: a smoke, No, you cannot. You have to stay in
Speaker 1: what's what is that gerbil habitat called you know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. You can put like a bunch of
Speaker 1: tubing and stuff together and let your gerbil run around.
Speaker 1: So this is basically what these divers lived in. And
Speaker 1: it was all pressurized. And so when you're traveling from
Speaker 1: you know, the sea floor up to the chambers on
Speaker 1: the ship and this diving bell and you clamp the
Speaker 1: diving bell onto the pressurized chamber, you need to make
Speaker 1: sure that the tunnel that connects the two is pressurized
Speaker 1: and then you can open up the hatch and then
Speaker 1: move into the chamber, shut the hatch, de pressure eyes
Speaker 1: that that um that little tunnel, and then remove the
Speaker 1: diving bell and you're fine. It's just a lot of
Speaker 1: extra work and thoughtfulness to live like this for weeks
Speaker 1: on end for saturation diving, but it means that you'll
Speaker 1: only have to decompress once at the end of the
Speaker 1: several week hitch before you go out into sea level atmosphere. Right,
Speaker 1: and given what's going on, you would think that there
Speaker 1: is a robust system of fail safes and check marks
Speaker 1: and hand signals to make sure that everything is hooked
Speaker 1: up and sealed tight in order to maintain that pressure.
Speaker 1: And today you'd be right, but in three not necessarily,
Speaker 1: that's right. So we're gonna take a break and tell
Speaker 1: you what happened on November of that year, right after this. Alright,
Speaker 1: So here's what happened on number November five. There was
Speaker 1: a team of four divers down there working in the
Speaker 1: frig gas field in the North Sea. Uh, there were
Speaker 1: two divers in a bell and that's we talked about.
Speaker 1: We I think we did a whole podcast on a
Speaker 1: diving bell, didn't me. Yeah, yeah we did. We totally did,
Speaker 1: which is kind of weird to think of. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember because remember that one cook on that ship
Speaker 1: from Nigeria that went down, he managed to like live
Speaker 1: in like a little air pocket for a couple of days. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the diving bell is is the chamber that takes
Speaker 1: people back and forth. It's the taxi basically transporting them
Speaker 1: from the work site back up to these pressurized chambers
Speaker 1: on the ship. Um it had just been cranked up
Speaker 1: to the surface and they were crawling through this passageway
Speaker 1: it's called a trunk to this attached sealed decompression chamber,
Speaker 1: which is where they lived and worked and or lived
Speaker 1: in eight and made exactly don't forget the cards, and
Speaker 1: you got to complain about the cooking. And then there
Speaker 1: was a chamber another chamber pretty similar nearby that had
Speaker 1: two more of the diving team. And then each of
Speaker 1: these chambers, this trunk, the bell, and the chamber were
Speaker 1: all completely pressurized. And again the system was in place,
Speaker 1: and it had worked pretty well up into this point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but for some reason, on this particular day, one of
Speaker 1: the two dive tenders, one of the divers who were
Speaker 1: outside in the normal pressure atmosphere outside of this pressurized chamber.
Speaker 1: They their job was to assist in making sure the
Speaker 1: diving bell was clamped up to the trunk correctly and
Speaker 1: opening and closing valves and stuff like that. One of
Speaker 1: them unclamped the diving bell from the trunk. Before them,
Speaker 1: the hatch had been shut, closing off the divers in
Speaker 1: their their quarters. They're deep, they're pressurized quarters. This was catastrophic.
Speaker 1: It's what it did, was it introduced the normal one
Speaker 1: atmosphere of atmospheric pressure into the pressurized dive chambers, which
Speaker 1: were pressurized to nine atmospheres, and in a fraction of
Speaker 1: a second, the pressure inside of these things went from
Speaker 1: an extremely compressed nine atmospheres to an extremely decompressed one
Speaker 1: atmosphere again in less than a second. And it was
Speaker 1: it was again catastrophic, is the only way to put it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is something that they would take nine, eleven, twelve
Speaker 1: hours to decompress usually, and it happened in under a second.
Speaker 1: It caused an explosion. A decompression explosion killed all four
Speaker 1: of these divers, uh, and the dive tender immediately. Uh.
Speaker 1: They did a follow up study, of course, they found
Speaker 1: that the three of the divers were were literally killed instantly.
Speaker 1: And I guess we need to say this right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so the diver, uh, their bodies ruptured. Basically, the diver
Speaker 1: closest to the door, his organs, spine, and limbs, it said,
Speaker 1: were ejected, and his remains exploded through a narrow gap
Speaker 1: in that chamber door. Yeah. Before this happened so fast
Speaker 1: and he was pulled apart so violently that before that
Speaker 1: chamber door that he hadn't gotten shut yet could slam shut.
Speaker 1: About half of them shot out in a burst of
Speaker 1: like blood and gore through that that narrow opening. As
Speaker 1: this the hatch door was slamming shut from the pressure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they said that they found his liver on the deck
Speaker 1: of the boat, quote complete, as if dissected out of
Speaker 1: the body. Right, And so they think what happened. So
Speaker 1: the other three they all died instantly, But the other
Speaker 1: three their bodies were intact. But what had happened is
Speaker 1: the their their organs and their blood vessels at all
Speaker 1: rupture because the gases that were dissolved in their blood
Speaker 1: at that moment suddenly just expanded and just burst everything
Speaker 1: inside of them. But the guy who was pulled apart
Speaker 1: exploded so violently because he was the closest to that
Speaker 1: pressure gradient in between one atmosphere and nine atmosphere, and
Speaker 1: he was he was pulled apart by that pressure gradient,
Speaker 1: like part of him was a little further away from
Speaker 1: the door than the rest of him, and that difference
Speaker 1: was enough to just be pulled apart by the by
Speaker 1: this explosion. Yeah. The only thing that I can say
Speaker 1: that is good about this was that it was so
Speaker 1: fast there was not even a moment of panic. Of
Speaker 1: what just happened. There was no fear, even much less pain.
Speaker 1: It was just you're going back into the chamber and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden you wake up sitting on a cloud,
Speaker 1: going what just happened? Where did I get this loot? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Basically or herp it's a heart. At least it was
Speaker 1: that fast that there certainly was no pain involved, but
Speaker 1: also no fear or anything. It was just lights out right,
Speaker 1: And so you might think like, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: how did this guy even begin to get this clamp
Speaker 1: open that that allowed the pressurized chamber to depressurized catastrophically. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what a lot of people said afterwards, and so
Speaker 1: the Norwegian Oil Directorate and the regulations body Norsk Veritas
Speaker 1: basically said, this can never happen again. If you have
Speaker 1: an old like um saturation diving system set up, you
Speaker 1: have to retrofit it following these new specifications that make
Speaker 1: it this impossible, Like you couldn't possibly open a clamp
Speaker 1: um before the trunk has been like depressurized, before the
Speaker 1: hatch has been shut, before all this stuff happens to
Speaker 1: the its an actual fail safe. Yeah, And the thinking
Speaker 1: all along was that it was a human error, that's
Speaker 1: what the report said, fatigue or just you know, somebody
Speaker 1: made a mistake. But it seems like years later some
Speaker 1: of these relatives of the of the gentlemen that were
Speaker 1: killed got their hands on a report that said it
Speaker 1: was actually faulty equipment. So there you go. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: where did this come from? Who do we have to
Speaker 1: thank for this? We've got a lot of people to thank. Um,
Speaker 1: everybody from History Channel too. There was a guy on
Speaker 1: Reddit actually named spectrum Merrow who did a great job
Speaker 1: of explaining saturation diving in this particular accident. So I
Speaker 1: gotta got a handful of people to thank for this one.
Speaker 1: Good stuff, Yeah, well, terrible stuff but interesting nonetheless. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. Check. I think he saved us at
Speaker 1: the last minute. Uh. Well, thanks a lot for joining us.
Speaker 1: We hope that you can carry on the rest of
Speaker 1: the day without um shuddering good luck. Uh. In meantime,
Speaker 1: short stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Rady Knows How Stuff Works. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. H M