Once diagnosed, long stitches may be required in, a recombinant chamber to be re-adjusted based on the severity of the decompression disease. Imagine working 100 metres beneath the sea, a hostile place that sunlight never reaches and where temperatures can plunge to a few degrees above freezing.Byford Dolphin Accident: How Living Under Intense Pressure Led To One Of The Most Gruesome Accidents In History All your off hours are spent in a tiny, cramped metal tube, breathing a mixture of gases that makes it hard for you to speak and constantly saps heat from your body, giving you a permanent chill. Here you can eat a meal delivered through a tiny hatch or catch a few hours of sleep before your next shift begins and it’s time once again to plunge back into the abyss. Now imagine living like this for months at a time, unable to escape your little sealed world without facing a certain and gruesome death.
Welcome to the strange twilight world of saturation diving, one of the most dangerous – and well-paid – jobs in the world.ĭeveloped as part of the U.S. Navy’s Sealab Program in the mid-1960s, saturation diving is a technique that allows humans to live and work at extreme depths for extended periods of time. Specifically, it is designed to overcome the danger of decompression sickness, better known as the Bends. As a diver breathes pressurized air at depth, Nitrogen gradually becomes dissolved in their body. If they then ascend to the surface too quickly, the drop in pressure can cause this Nitrogen to come out of solution and form tiny bubbles, which can cause crippling joint pain, strokes, paralysis, and even death. To avoid this, divers must ascend to the surface slowly, taking decompression stops at regular intervals to allow the Nitrogen to be slowly and safely expelled from their bodies. However, for long, deep dives like those required in the offshore oil industry, this technique becomes infeasible as divers would have to spend far more time decompressing than working during each shift. For example, a dive of more than an hour below 100 metres depth would require more than 50 hours of decompression. Instead, in saturation diving the divers spend their entire working shift under pressure, spending their off-hours in a diving chamber pressurized to their working depth and travelling to and from the job site in a pressurized diving bell known as a transfer capsule. This practice is based on the fact that after a certain amount of time a diver’s body becomes fully saturated with Nitrogen and cannot absorb any more, meaning that no matter how long they stay below, the required decompression time remains the same. Thus, rather than making multiple dives and decompressions, saturation divers only decompress once at the end of their shift, greatly reducing the risk of decompression sickness. The downside is that this single decompression can take up to two weeks to complete. There are also other hazards, including Nitrogen narcosis, a disorienting euphoria caused by breathing Nitrogen at pressure which divers describe as being similar to alcohol intoxication. Oxygen also becomes toxic below around 80 metres, so saturation divers must breathe trimix, a gas mixture in which much of the oxygen is replaced with Helium. Not only does Helium alter the human voice, forcing divers to wear electronic descramblers in order to be understood, but it also has poor thermal properties, wicking away body heat and leaving divers perpetually chilled.
Breathing Helium at depths below 300 metres can also produce severe neurological effects known as High-Pressure Nervous Syndrome.īut the greatest danger in saturation diving is the high-pressure environment itself, as a group of four British and Norwegian divers discovered in 1983 in a gruesome event known as the Byford Dolphin accident.īyford Dolphin was a semi-submersible offshore oil rig built by Aker Engineering of Oslo in 1974. Weighing 3000 tons and manned by a crew of 100, it was capable of drilling in waters up to 460 meters in depth.
To allow construction and maintenance of the wellhead at these depths, the rig was equipped with a sophisticated Saturation Diving system built by French firm COMEX. On November 5, 1983, the rig was drilling in the Frigg Gas Field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea.
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