In 1983, a tragic accident on the Byford Dolphin oil rig resulted in explosive decompression, immediately killing four saturation divers and BloodVitals home monitor critically injuring another crew member. The rapid decompression occurred when a diving bell prematurely detached from its chamber resulting from unsealed chamber doorways. The incident revealed extreme flaws in safety protocols and led to significant enhancements in commercial diving operations and safety standards worldwide. Saturation divers are professional deep-sea divers who descend to depths of 500 feet (152 meters) or extra to service equipment on offshore oil rigs and undersea pipelines. But not like most commercial divers, who do a number of hours of work underwater and return to the surface, saturation divers will spend up to 28 days on a single job, residing in a cramped excessive-pressure chamber the place they eat and sleep between shifts. Pay is great for saturation divers - between $30,000 and $45,000 a month - however it's intense work in an otherworldly and claustrophobic surroundings.

And it can be harmful. In 1983, four saturation divers and one crew member were killed in a gruesome accident aboard a Norwegian-operated oil rig referred to as the Byford Dolphin. Life support technicians ensure the air mix in the hyperbaric chamber matches the air that the divers breathe underwater. The dive management staff is accountable for working the diving bell - which raises and lowers on a crane - and monitoring the divers as they work. There are even cooks who put together and BloodVitals home monitor serve meals to the men cooped up within the dwelling chambers. They help unspool and retract the "umbilical," the thick line of air provide tubes and communication wires that connect the divers to the floor. Prior to now, tenders had other tasks that included docking the diving bell to the pressurized dwelling chambers. Phillip Newsum, an experienced commercial diver and executive director of the Association of Diving Contractors International.

On Nov. 5, 1983, an experienced tender named William Crammond was in the course of a routine process aboard the Byford Dolphin, a semi-submersible oil rig operating within the North Sea. The rig was outfitted with two pressurized residing chambers, each holding two divers. Crammond had just connected the diving bell to the residing chambers and safely deposited a pair of divers in chamber one. The opposite two divers have been already resting in chamber two. That's when issues went horribly improper. Under regular circumstances, the diving bell wouldn't be detached from the residing chambers until the chamber doors were safely sealed shut. The air stress contained in the Byford Dolphin dwelling chambers instantly went from 9 atmospheres - the pressure experienced while a whole lot of feet beneath the water - to 1 environment, the traditional air strain on the floor. The explosive rush of air out of the chamber sent the heavy diving bell flying, killing Crammond and critically injuring his fellow tender, Martin Saunders.

The destiny of the 4 saturation divers inside was far worse. In response to autopsy experiences, three of the men inside the chamber - Edwin Arthur Coward, Roy P. Lucas and Bjørn Giæver Bergersen - had been primarily "boiled" from the inside when the nitrogen in their blood violently erupted into gas bubbles. The fourth diver, Truls Hellevik, suffered the grizzliest dying. Hellevik was standing in entrance of the partially opened door to the residing chamber when the pressure was launched. His physique was sucked out by means of an opening so slender that it tore him open and ejected his internal organs onto the deck. As a diver descends, the burden of the water around them applies strain to each cell of their physique. The strain even compresses molecules of gaseous nitrogen taken in by the lungs, which causes the nitrogen gas to dissolve into the bloodstream. The absorption of nitrogen itself is not the difficulty. The problem begins if a diver tries to ascend to the surface too shortly.

Consider it like shaking a 2-liter bottle of soda and opening the cap. The truth that there was no interlock on the locking mechanism was instantly apparent, and BloodVitals SPO2 now the presence of appropriate security interlocks on sat diving systems has perhaps the very best priority of all safeguards," Bryan McGlinchy, diving supervisor on the International Marine Contractors Association (IMCA), tells Energy Voice. "What you’ve bought to do is consider the human being within the system and never put these individuals in a position where an comprehensible human error could result in very severe penalties. Our security methods must be designed to be tolerant of human error. On high of coping with the loss of life of her husband, Ruth Crammond also had to deal with the aftermath of the investigation. She additionally by no means believed the Norwegian government's findings because of the years of his years of diving experience. The Byford Dolphin was one of the worst oil subject disasters in historical past," Newsum says, "and it led to sweeping changes within the North Sea and in commercial diving security worldwide.