The WORST diving accident of ALL TIME

in 1979 two men would become trapped at the bottom of the ocean in a small metal box these men were working as saturation divers or divers who work at dubs exceeding what is normally humanly possible but before we get into that story I'd actually like to talk about another saturation diving accident and one of the worst ones that has ever occurred the Byford dolphin incident when you dive into water the water exerts a pressure on you and the further you go into the water the more water is above you and the higher that pressure is which means that when you're breathing air at those depths some of that air actually dissolves into your tissue the amount of gas that's dissolved depends on how deep you dive and for how long you spend diving but the more gas you absorb the longer it takes for you to release that gas as you ascend to lower pressure areas of the ocean if you go too fast you risk decompression sickness where gas rapidly bubbles out of your tissue which is extremely painful and also possibly fatal now naturally some people want to work at depths in the ocean particularly people working on oil rigs and the problem for these oil rigs is that they can't have divers going down into the ocean and having to come up and spend forever decompressing so one of the solutions that came up for this problem is called saturation diving and saturation diving instead of coming back up every day after working on you know like an oil drill or something you just stay at the bottom of the ocean in what's called a diving bell this way a diver would only need to do a decompression Step at the end of their Journey the life of a saturation diver is not very good their living quarters are frankly put terrible space isn't an absolute premium down at the depths of the ocean and the divers really feel that as they are quite literally packed in like sardines because they have to remain saturated with all that gas the diving bell itself is pressurized which means that it may end up holding 20 times the amount of air normally in a room this affects the diver's joints it causes pain and clicking as the cartilage expands and shrinks and the work is so unimaginably brutal that most people only last a few years in this profession you know at most but as you can imagine it does pay pretty well so in the end it still attracts people then of course the divers also have to deal with the ocean itself many saturation divers have made accounts of seeing unidentified alien looking fish as well as reporting the feeling of being watched and seeing large shadows in the distance just beyond their lamps Vision some divers even panic because of these feelings and end up accidentally hurting or even killing themselves the the dubs bring other problems for the divers though nitrogen can cause intoxication at depth and oxygen becomes toxic below 80 meters at certain concentrations this forces the divers to breathe what is known as trimix which replaces a lot of the oxygen with helium strangely enough breathing helium as a lot of you probably know distorts your voice it causes it to become really high pitched and so it can actually be difficult for them to even understand each other and at over 150 meters depth breathing helium can actually cause what's called high pressure nervous syndrome however there's one effect that's even worse than all of those which saturation divers talk about and that's the one that the divers and the Byford dolphin got to experience at 4 AM British divers Edwin and Roy were resting in a dive chamber while Norwegian divers Bjorn and trolls were in a transfer capsule this big Contraption was live lifted out of the water by diving Tenors William and Martin dive tenders are basically experienced divers who assist saturation divers and in this case the normal procedure would have been the following first close the diving belt door and increase the pressure in the diving bell to seal the door then close chamber door number one and slowly depressurize the trunk until it's at one atmosphere which is the same atmosphere actually all of us are currently experiencing finally the clamp is open to separate the diving bell from the chamber system for an unknown reason William opened the clamp before depressurization could occur this meant that the inside of the diving bell which was at nine atmospheres rapidly decompressed first the explosive Rush of air pushed the diving bell away and actually physically killed William luckily the other diving tender would actually survive but he would be the only one amongst the six of them to survive this one of the divers had actually been crouching in the trunk near where the clamp was which would have caused him to experience the highest pressure gradient of anyone on board his body was then forced through a partial opening meaning that his body had to physically contort and distort itself to fit through this opening this instantly dismembered him and Scattered his body parts all over the deck of the ship later his liver would be found outside of his his body like it had been perfectly dissected they would also find his spinal cord 10 meters above where the chamber had been looking at the autopsy photos which I absolutely cannot show um it also looks like he may have been completely degloved meaning that all of the skin on his body came off of course the other three divers in the chamber did not fare any better whatsoever the rapid decrease in pressure caused their blood to flash boil and a bunch of fat ended up in their veins and arteries and heart luckily they most likely died instantly however as violent and gruesome as the biford dolphin instant was in my opinion the next story involving saturation divers is even more disturbing at 11 PM August 7th of 1979 divers Richard and Victor were working on board the will Drake ship and they were sent down in a diving belt to check repairs on an underwater installation in the North Sea now normally this diving bell would be lowered through the moon pool on the ship which is a big circular opening at the bottom of the ship but instead they decided to lower it off the side of the ship this time this meant that a lot of the safety features aboard the diving bell such as the diving bell stage and the clump weight which served as emergency recovery features were actually taken off so it could fit through that moon pool additionally the bells drop weights another secondary recovery feature were lashed to the frame of the bell with nylon to prevent their accidental release normally in the event of an emergency these could be dropped to help the Bell rapidly Ascend upwards however there'd been an instant recently where the drop weights released without the divers wanting it which actually resulted in their accidental deaths which is why they were lashed onto the diving belt in this instance now both Richard and Victor were really unhappy about all these safety features being removed Richard actually wrote in his diary that he felt that the ship's management was completely terrible and that he wasn't even sure if he was going to come back from this dive alive so as they were lowered down Richard went outside of the diving belt to start checking repairs and they were going to work in pairs so he went out completely by himself keep in mind that they were working at a depth of a hundred and fifty meters meaning that they could see almost nothing past their light and Richard's suit was his literal Lifeline these suit supplies everything to the divert surprise oxygen IT Supplies hot water which keeps the diving suit insulated because the the sea is so cold and also because helium which is that what they have to breathe to prevent oxygen Narcosis has really bad thermal properties meaning that when you're in helium you're going to lose heat a lot faster than you would otherwise now at first everything on the repairs was going well and Richard was actually just finishing up his shift and he was going to head back towards the diving bell um and when it came into sight he noticed there was something wrong with it it had become tilted on its axes and when he reported this the people on the ship told him hey you got to get back here as soon as possible and what they realized had happened with the Bell is that it had come loose from what's called a lift wire due to a pin falling out and now it was dangling on What's called the umbilical cord of the diving bell just like the diving bell supplies Richard with everything the umbilical cord supplies the diving belt with everything so it gets its Communications it's heat it's electricity all of that from the umbilical and for now everything was actually okay because even though the Bell had started to tilt the umbilical cord was still working and there was no immediate crisis to begin with but you know remembering that a lot of their safety features on the Bell had actually been gutted uh Richard and Victor were really unhappy about this and they started to get pretty nervous and they're waiting around and suddenly they get a communication from the dive supervisor that they're going to try and winch the umbilical cord and bring the tank back up now this sounded really odd Richard because the umbilical cord isn't designed as a method of retrieval but both of them at this point they just they wanted to get out of there and so they were willing to go along with pretty much anything so up on the ship they put the umbilical cord into the winch and as they started to winch it became immediately apparent that this was not going to work the umbilical cord isn't braided so it just started to stretch and tear as soon as they started and they immediately had to stop and down in the Bell itself you know Richard and Victor feeling this and they're feeling themselves being jerked up and down suddenly and violently and they're they're really scared and then you know eventually things go still and they start to calm down a little bit when the dive supervisor calls them again and says hey you know that didn't work now we're gonna try and lift you with our Crane and Victor and Richard are like wait hold on what like something just didn't work and you're already gonna try something again like I don't think this thing is designed to be lifted but they go ahead and they get the crane attached to the umbilical cord and the divers are just sitting in the Bell biting their fingernails praying that this works and they're able to get lifted out successfully but almost as soon as they feel themselves getting raised up things start going wrong the lights start flickering and Richard he immediately runs over the communication and starts yelling stop stop you have to stop this when suddenly all of the power on the diving bell gets cut out completely not only is the power cut out at this point but Richard and Victor realized that the Bell is it's sinking they have been cut loose from the umbilical and eventually they hear a thud they have reached the bottom of the ocean inside of the Bell it was completely dark and the divers had just lost their only means of communicating with the ship above them and they knew that very soon they would run not only out of breathable air but that the air would start to rapidly cool off because of the helium in it they knew at this point it was only a matter of time before they died they needed help now now there should have been other emergency recovery options possible we mentioned the dive weights earlier they should have been able to swim outside and cut these weights off and so that the the diving bell could actually rise all the way back up but if you remember the clump weight and the diving bell stage which would stop it from actually impacting on the bottom of the ocean those were removed so that it could go off the side of the ship and instead of through the moon pool this also meant that they couldn't just swim outside of the Bell and get transferred into a different one because the hatch that should open up to the sea was just showing the the sea floor instead now while this was happening in the Bell on the ship they started to communicate with another nearby ship called the staina welder and asked if they could come help since the will Drake had no other opportunities to lift their Bell so the staina parks itself above the diving bell what the divers were trapped in and it lowers its own diving bell down towards them it took these Stena divers Phil and Eddie over two hours to find the will Drake Bell because right before they had decided to lower the will Drake Bell they'd actually removed the transponder device so the state of divers were just you know they were rapidly swimming around looking for where this will Drake Bell was at when finally Phil found it and when he swam up to the Bell he could he could see him through one of the portholes on the bell and he can see that the divers inside were actually giving him a thumbs up you know we're still okay but you know please rescue us so Phil calls the staina and he's like hey you know we found the Bell can you send down a crane wire so we can pull it out of the ocean and after waiting for a while he got back the response that they weren't given permission by the will Drake and that the will Drake wanted to use their own crane wire so then Phil and Eddie had to spend another two hours fumbling around with this crane wire from the will Drake and hooking that up to the diving bell and at this point they swim up to the will Drake's diving bell porthole again and they're looking through it and they see that the movements of the divers inside have started to become erratic you know it was clear that they were running out of time and they really needed this attempt to work so Phil calls up to the staina and gives the signal hey you know start pulling it up unfortunately what no one knew was the diving bell had become stuck under the structure that Richard and Victor were supposed to be originally working on and because they were trying to pull it out at a 45 degree angle instead of straight up and down the diving bell became wedged against the structure and the line snapped by the time the divers relocated where the Bell was they looked through the porthole once again and this time they saw that Richard and Victor were very still the two divers for staina were completely exhausted at this point and they had to be relieved by two new divers and those divers were able to successfully attach the cable to the wildrig bell and they were finally able to pull it out but at this point the two men inside had already passed away the official cause of death was hypothermia due to the helium gas inside of the Bell if you enjoy dark and mysterious Tales please subscribe to this channel I will be uploading more content in the future and give the video a like if you liked it goodbye

Channel: MoonBubby

Views: 63,113

Keywords: byford dolphin, wildrake incident, saturation diving accident, diving accident, diving accident decompression, diving stories, mrballen, byford dolphin accident, diving, scary story, mystery, byford dolphin explained, wildrake accident explained

Id: esdnPsQL3N0

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022