Five divers suffered most gruesome death imaginable 1,000 feet below the surface

It’s hard not to be scared of the sea. Long lost shipwrecks, sharks, that big fish with the lightbulb on its head and from Finding Nemo, the list is endless – not to mention terrifying.

I mean, there’s a reason they came up with a long, complicated word for the experience of fearing the ocean, right? (thalassophobia, for those who want to know).

Well, the 1983 Byford Dolphin accident is yet another entry to that long, long list, and it’s especially haunting if you also happen to be terrified of workplace accidents.

After all, when you’re working 1,000 feet under the surface of the waves like divers Edwin Coward, Roy Lucas, Bjørn Bergersen, Truls Hellevik, William Crammond and Martin Saunders were, even the smallest fault, human or otherwise, can have fatal consequences.

The six were working as saturation divers near the Byford Dolphin oil rig in Hamilton, Bermuda, and it was their job to construct and maintain parts of the oil rig, despite the challenges of working so far underwater.

Working at that depth makes resurfacing a complicated challenge; in order to survive, divers have to breathe pressurised air that dissolves nitrogen in their blood, and coming up too quickly can create bubbles in their bloodstream – a dangerous, sometimes lethal condition called ‘the bends'.

At the time of the accident, these divers were living in a specially-designed, pressurised facility, with living quarters and a diving bell – a separate, sealed off area usually used to safely transport divers from the depths to the surface and back.

Forty years after the accident, it’s still not entirely clear how it happened, but the diving bell was released too quickly – moments before the rest of the living quarters could be safely sealed off.

The Byford Dolphin rig (Wikimedia Commons/https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ByfordDolphinAtInvergordon2008.jpg)

It was nothing short of a disaster; pressure levels in the crew’s living area collapsed from nine atmospheres down to normal levels – just one – in a matter of moments.

Now, divers working at these depths usually need several days to safely readjust to atmospheric changes, but this happened in the blink of an eye.

Tender William Crammond was hit by the diving bell as it flew away and killed instantly, but things were much worse for the others. For three of them, the rapid depressurisation created huge bubbles their bloodstream – like a supercharged version of ‘the bends’ – basically boiling them from the inside out.

A fourth was forced through a hole just 60cm by the sudden, violent power of the decompression. There’s no nice way to put it except to say he was ‘fragmented’, which basically means his internal organs were expelled by the pressure and strewn around the pod. Investigators found parts of him as far as ten metres away from the site of the accident.

The only survivor of the accident was Martin Saunders, another tender, who was left in a critical condition.

In 2009, the son of British diver Roy Lucas, Stephen, who died during the accident, received a six-figure sum from the Norwegian government, alongside his two sisters.

The decompression chamber as seen from above (Wikimedia Commons)

It was capstone of a years-long fight for justice for Stephen, 36, who said: “We’ve never even received an apology and that’s disgusting. It was December that we were told we did not meet the criteria for compensation.

"It was then that my sister contacted a solicitor and when push came to shove the Norwegian government decided to review the case.

“We ended up receiving a majority vote and now we are being granted the compensation. But it doesn’t matter because no amount of money will be enough."

The siblings were just children at the time of their father’s death, and they lost him just a month before they were set to see him for the first time since he had separated from their mother frances 8 years before.

A legal loophole made it difficult for the family to receive compensation, since Roy was a British citizen, and not registered under the Norwegian insurance scheme.

NDSA spokesperson Tom Wingen made clear it should never have taken this long for Roy’s family to receive compensation: “You can’t really call this a success – this family are getting part of what they were due many years ago.

“This family have had an incredibly tough life. If they had received the compensation or the benefits that they were legally entitled to at the time of their father’s death, their childhood would have been substantially improved.”