WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT The fatal incident took place on a semi-submersible oil drilling rig where a team of six had been deployed to undertake a deep-sea diving mission — five of the six perished.
In a harrowing story, a tragic incident involving six men and a fatal miscalculation that occurred underwater resulted in what have been described as some of the ‘most gruesome deaths’ in all of history, with five out of the six men perishing.
The freak incident took place on a semi-submersible oil drilling rig where the divers had been deployed to undertake a deep-sea diving mission. While the rig itself didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary, during the period it was operable, it was unfortunately the site of numerous accidents involving workers. One such horrifying accident occurred on the rig in 1983.
The horrific 1983 tragedy
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 the November of 1983, a group 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 complete a deep-sea diving mission.
At the time of the incident, all six men were on duty underwater, carrying out routine maintenance works on the rig at a staggering depth of 295 feet. In order to safely complete their job, the crew had been confined in special compression chambers for the duration of their proposed 28-day stint. This was done to alleviate the excess build-up of nitrogen in their bloodstreams. In their chambers, the divers would inhale a calculated concoction of gases adjusted as per their dive’s depth — usually a mix of oxygen and helium
Deploying a method known as ‘saturation diving’ — which allowed individuals to spend extended periods of time at great depths underwater — the technique was in place to ensure the crew were able to avoid ‘the bends’, or decompression sickness, when they ascended to the surface. A specialised transport vessel called a diving bell was being used by the men to safely transport them between their living chambers and their work site underwater.
On November 5, 1983, divers Hellevik and Bergersen were coming off a 12-hour shift, assisted by dive tenders Saunders and Crammond, as they made their way back to their sleeping quarters using the diving bell. For the safe operation of the diving bell, the crew had to always make sure the transportation vessel was sealed and properly reconnected before they moved back into their highly pressurised sleeping chambers. This was done to avoid rapid decompression in the body, which could otherwise prove to be fatal. Once inside, the divers had to shut the door and adjust their sleeping chamber’s pressure to ensure an airtight seal. This would then isolate the chamber and link it to the dive bell, which in turn would gradually depressurise to ensure the diver’s safety.
However, on the fateful day, the inner crew chambers 1 and 2 (which are typically pressurised to nine atmospheres) dropped to one atmosphere within a split second, as one of the external divers made a human error and unlatched the diving bell prematurely before complete depressurisation had taken place. This caused the clamp — which was keeping the chambers sealed — to open before Hellevik had fully closed the chamber door. This meant that the sleeping chamber’s pressure abruptly switched from that found at 295 feet underwater to surface air pressure.
Coward and Lucas were reportedly resting in chamber 2 at a pressure of 9 atmospheres at the time of the fatal incident, as the massive and sudden gush of air exiting the chamber resulted in the violent propulsion of the diving bell which struck Crammond, killing him instantly. Three of the divers inside the sleeping chambers were believed to have been killed instantly, as the nitrogen in their blood would’ve turned into bubbles, essentially boiling them from the inside and disintegrating their bodies into countless fragments.
Hellevik, the diver closest to the partially closed chamber door, was sucked through a tiny 60cm wide gap, which caused his organs to be expelled from his body. The autopsy 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.
Sustaining life-threatening injuries, Saunders was the sole survivor of the horrific accident, suffering from collapsed lungs and fractures in his back along with a broken neck.
The fatal incident was also attributed to engineering failures as the Byford Dolphin oil rig used an outdated diving system from 1975 which was not equipped with fail-safe hatches, outboard pressure gauges, or an interlocking mechanism — a feature which would have prevented the divers’ sleeping chambers from opening while the system was under pressure. The Byford Dolphin oil rig kept on operating with upgrades and changed ownership, until it was finally decommissioned in 2019, eventually being sold for demolition in the 2020s.
