Five Divers Suffered The Most Gruesome Deaths Imaginable In Oil Rig Accident

Five "saturation divers" operating close to the Byford Dolphin Oil Rig on November 5, 1983, met a very horrible end.

We must define "saturation diving" precisely in order to comprehend the circumstances surrounding the incident.

When you dive very deep underwater you have to use a special mixture of oxygen and nitrogen.

This is compressed to help the body withstand the pressure that is placed on it around 1,000 feet below the surface.

Sometimes divers spend days at a time living in a pressurized container to facilitate routine maintenance and building work.

They are spared from having to go through the pressurization and depressurization process again as a result.

However, as the five people who were in this chamber discovered, this can be quite dangerous

The group had been residing in the pressurized facility, which included living quarters and an area known as "the diving bell," while they were on assignment.

Since this was where the divers could depressurize, it was closed off from the other units.

While the precise causes are not known, what we do know is that the diving bell was released before the doors were fully closed.

As a result, the crew's living quarters saw an abrupt drop in surface pressure from nine atmospheres to one atmosphere.

You can imagine the horrifying outcome—divers often need days to safely depressurize from the kind of depth they were working at.

William Crammond was working as a tender and was hit and killed by the diving bell.

Yet, divers Roy Lucas, Bjørn Bergersen, Edwin Coward, and Truls Hellevik met terrible ends.

The rapid depressurisation made the nitrogen saturating their blood to turn into bubbles, effectively bursting them from the inside.

However, one diver suffered a particularly horrific end.

This is because the pressure from the depressurisation forced his body through a 60cm hole, resulting in it being 'fragmented'.

The pressure forced his internal organs out of his chest cavity, scattering them all over the pod, some of which were discovered 10 meters distant.

The only person who survived the horrifying event was Martin Saunders, a fellow tender who was left critically injured after it happened.