The Byford Dolphin Incident Fire - Episode 46

In this episode, Ed takes you into the world of saturation diving where you'll learn how the human body can adapt to absorb extreme conditions only found at the bottom of the ocean. 

When we go swimming at the pool, we take it for granted that the depths that some members of society live and breathe in especially when it comes to a lovely concoction called Heliox. 

When you spend weeks under water your body absorbs inert gases like nitrogen and even helium, but when you come to the surface, that gas has to go somewhere. In most cases it's out through your lungs but if you come up too fast, those gases escape through any means possible like through boiling blood and even explosion. 

This is call explosive decompression. 

In this episode, Ed will explore what explosive decompression looks like and what can happen if you're standing too close to the hatch when when you're environment changes from 10 atmospheres of pressure down to one in a fraction of a second. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Deep Dive
• 15:33 Underwater Pressure and Diving Technology
• 29:20 Dangers of Underwater Pressure
• 45:41 Saturation Diving
• 58:19 Deep Sea Sal Diving Industry
• 1:05:34 Deep Sea Diving Personnel
• 1:22:48 Tragic Explosive Decompression Incident
• 1:29:41 Fatal Effects of Extreme Decompression
• 1:42:05 Improvements After Tragic Decompression Incident
• 1:51:54 Improvements in Underwater Safety Protocols
• 1:59:45 Promoting 'Physically' Podcast Show

Transcript

Ed: 0:00

Hey everyone. This is Ed and this is Kira, and this is your day's Dumpster Fire.

Kara: 0:04

Where we don't celebrate humanity's successes but its most fantastic failures.

Ed: 0:23

You know, for this being our uh, our holiday vacation, I feel like we're pretty productive today we are productive today.

Kara: 0:34

I've been making it a point to be productive this week, so yes, same here.

Ed: 0:40

Like, even though I've been traveling to like utah and all that other fun stuff, like man I've been like I wake up, like all that other fun stuff. Like man I've been like I wake up like at six in the morning, I get cleaning done, I'm getting laundry done. Nice, this is our second podcast episode we're recording today. It's like, yeah, I got to do laundry today after this. Oh, so I'll make sure this goes on for like eight hours so you don't have to do it.

Kara: 0:59

Perfect. That's good, which means I'll have to do it tomorrow while you and your family are here with my husband and I.

Ed: 1:09

No, you can just make me fold the laundry, because I've gotten really good at it.

Kara: 1:11

No, I won't do that to you.

Ed: 1:13

It is kind of weird folding somebody else's laundry.

Kara: 1:15

Yeah, a little bit.

Ed: 1:16

Yeah, like shirt, pants, that's fine, but when you start getting into like underwear and bras and socks, it just gets awkward. Yeah, like underwear and bras and socks. Ah, it just gets awkward.

Kara: 1:23

Yeah, just do your wife's, it's fine.

Ed: 1:25

Yeah, well, not even still.

Ed: 1:26

I just crumple it into a ball and throw it in her drawer. That's awesome. So, yeah, speaking of women's unmentionables, today's episode has nothing to do with that at all. Facts yes, today we are going to be diving. Oh, wow, no pun intended, that was a good one. Yeah, we're going to do the whole AI answer Do a deep dive into the very famous and a very horrific bifurcated dolphin incident, which on the surface doesn't sound like a bifuriford dolphin.

Ed: 2:06

It sounds like a cute stuffy that you'd buy from SeaWorld, that's true. But then, when you actually get the details of what happened, you're like oh, oh, oh, oh, golly, that's horrible. So I want to start off with a warning this won't be an explicit episode, because we try to avoid, like, obviously, swearing and and and all that. So we want to keep this, we want to keep this a family friendly uh, podcast, uh, so this won't be explicit that way, but it it will be graphic. Uh, there, this is an incident where four men died, uh, albeit very quickly. They died in like a 10th of a second. Uh, but there's.

Ed: 2:58

There's one where a trigger warning here, where a man gets sucked through a like four or five inch by 24 inch gap in a hatch and you can only imagine what that would look like, and it happened so fast and so violently. Um, it's it. Yeah, if you, if you're kind of squeamish about this sort of thing, uh, I like, I encourage you to listen to it because I'm going to cover a lot of really cool sciencey stuff, uh, leading up to it, and then I will do the trigger warning when we actually get to that part. But just be forewarned um, yeah, there's, uh, we are going to be talking about death here, and the way that you know, some of these people died is kind of horrific, think of like, because we've gotten a couple of people ask us when we're going to do the Titan submarine disaster, and I don't know. I'm holding off on that just because there's still a lot of details that need to be collected and the aftermath of it still needs to be figured out, and it's also very, very recent.

Kara: 4:14

Yeah, the families are probably still working through some of that too.

Ed: 4:19

Yeah, yeah, and I know there's like a lot of lawsuits going on, litigation and like government involvement in terms of like policies and and so like. We're gonna hold off on that one, but the incident that we're talking about today is the exact opposite of what happened with the titan sub. So where the Titan sub, uh, the five people in there that died, were crushed. They were basically millions of pounds of water pressure and closed on them in like a millisecond or two and it was lights out. What we're talking about today is what happens when that same type of pressure comes from the inside of a person, expanding out. So, instead of being crushed, uh or imploded, you're being exploded, but there's no bombs or anything like that. So, are you ready? Have you gotten, uh, gotten a good, uh belly full of food? Ready to talk about exploding bodies? I?

Kara: 5:34

actually had some pretzels I'm staring at them on the counter that I really wanted to grab but realized it was a bad idea.

Ed: 5:41

Oh well, I mean, you know, maybe pretzels will will soothe your stomach. Uh, again, I I will do trigger warnings for, uh, the dicier parts. But let's uh, let's kind of start off, let's do it kara style and let's start at the big bang perfect.

Kara: 6:00

That's contingency, we need it let's go.

Ed: 6:05

So, no, let's. Let's take it like a like our part one here which is like diving 092. It's not even diving 101, just because I don't even know all that much about it, but human beings have been fascinated with going underwater and it goes back all the way to the greeks and Roman times. And what's interesting is that there's a type of diving where what we're used to is you just take a big breath of air and you go underwater and do what you can for you know, like your half a minute, and then come back up, exhale and do it all over again, and then come back up, exhale and do it all over again. And for human beings have been diving like that pretty consistently going all the way up to the 1800s. So you go back to the Greeks and the Romans and stuff like that. They would have these divers because you know they wanted sponges. Wait, 1800s, bce or CE.

Kara: 7:11

Oh, it's ADE, Okay, so like 1800s, bce or ce. Oh, uh, it's uh ade.

Ed: 7:13

okay, so like 1800s like all the way up to oh, I understand. I thought, okay, I hear, I'm here, I'm here now. Yeah, even 1800s, bce would be that's like way before. Even the greeks, um, yeah, so yeah, no, 1800s, as in like the 1800s from like 200 years ago, got it. Um, and humans have been diving, uh, like this, going all the way back to the Greek and the Roman times, and what they would do is people would dive down like 30 meters or 32 yards and they would collect a fancy things like shellfish or sponges or whatever. And these divers got so good Like they could hold their breath for like five minutes at a time, or sponges or whatever. And these divers got so good like they could hold their breath for like five minutes at a time, which is wild when you think about it, like I think if I were to go underwater, I think the most I've ever held my breath is like for a minute.

Kara: 7:58

Considering I am a hundred pound asthmatic artist, I have never been able to hold my breath for very long.

Ed: 8:05

Yeah, yeah, you're probably good for like 10 seconds at a time and then, you're turning purple when you come up.

Kara: 8:12

Yeah, I'm a fair swimmer. I just can't hold my breath for long periods of time.

Ed: 8:16

I'm a fair floater.

Kara: 8:18

Oh, there you go.

Ed: 8:19

I was a buoy in a former life. I just kind of sat in the ocean just bobbingbing up and down. I like seals laying on me and stuff like that. Um.

Ed: 8:28

So yeah, like at that time, realistically your max depth was going to be like 30 meters or 32 yards and what these divers would do is they would like grab like a heavy rock and just dive into the water and that heavy rock because part of the problem is is you actually have to get down that deep and if it takes you say, if you can hold your breath for five minutes, and it takes you four minutes to swim down there, that doesn't give you a lot of time to work with. So what they would do is they would, uh, uh, they would grab a heavy rock, just jump over the boat and just sink to the bottom. That's terrifying. Yes, that was, and of course, you could let go at any time. But even still doing that kind of posed as problems, which we will get into a little later. But for the most part, that's how humans, most humans were exploring the bottom of the ocean was 30 yards at a time, for a few minutes at a time, and then we come along to aristotle or ristototoli is perfect.

Ed: 9:37

That's, that's good one guy, that who couldn't pronounce avondale as a bondily. Yeah, instead of plato, it's Plato. Yeah, this guy was special. Um, anyways. So fourth century BCE, aristotle proposed using cauldrons. Uh, get these iron cauldrons. You flip them upside down. They're heavy, so they sink, but they would basically form what we now call today as a bell or a diving bell. And the idea is you flip the cauldron over and traps a bubble of water underneath it. And that was handy, because one that the bell or the cauldron would weigh like a hundred pounds, so that would get you to the bottom quicker. And then what you would do is you just kind of like, put the bell down, go do your thing for a couple of minutes and then you go back to the bell, lift it up, put your head inside of it where that bubble is, and then you could get some more air, and and you would do that. The only problem is is that you can't smell carbon dioxide. You can't tell if it's there until you start getting really dizzy and then you black out. So I don't know how they calculated how long this would be good for, because they didn't even know what carbon dioxide was back then. But instead of only having like a maximum of five minutes underwater, you could probably squeeze out like seven, eight, maybe even nine minutes, which, hey, for all things considered, if you're trying to catch a lot of stuff underwater, that works and it's not bad, yeah. Yeah, and aristotle was definitely on to something.

Ed: 11:12

In the 16th century, ade, wooden barrels were used to put humans inside with a little window for, like their face. So you would have like these beer barrels that they would kind of like stick together. You would crawl into it lengthwise. They had two holes in there that they would wrap a bunch of leather around your arms to act as like a seal, and you basically went down inside these barrels and it had like a little window on there and then, yeah, you could stay under there for, you know, 10, 20 minutes or so. Uh, it was basically a personal submersible, cool, yeah.

Ed: 11:52

And that was the 16th century and I think that was right around the age that, like the golden age of islam or the tail end of it, where that kind of technology was being developed, it was later decided that you could actually pump air into that and stay down even longer, which, yeah, that's pretty clever. So at around the same time, england and France, they were working on creating basically leather diving suits and then they would have kind of like a bell. They would have this iron helmet like thingy that would then hold on to air. So they were kind of like the first I don't know, air quoting here deep sea divers. They could go down to like 50 meters still kind of sketchy In the early 1830s, going up to the 1870s diving suits along with these giant bronze helmets. So they did away with using cauldrons and they specifically cast bronze helmets and those are the ones that have like the little windows like all over it yeah, those are the, the famous ones that have become like iconography.

Ed: 13:03

Yeah yeah, and, and they, those were used forever, even up into like the 1960s and 70s. Uh, those types of suits were were pretty common, and the benefit to them is that you could hook up like a closed circuit pump and then you could actually pump air into it. That's pretty cool, yeah, yeah, and so you would have, like some guy in a boat, like constantly working this bicycle pump to get air in there. The other thing, too, is that these worked great for expelling co2, so that's something that people don't think about. You can put somebody in a room, say like the odyssey right in apollo 13, like you could pump all the oxygen you want into that spacecraft, but if you don't get that co2 out, it doesn't do you any good. You'll still asphyxiate, even though you're pumping in pure oxygen. You have to get that basically human exhaust out yeah some way.

Ed: 13:59

So, yeah, uh, 1830s, 18s, they had those fancy helmets that they could handle up to 450 PSI, which is a fair amount of air. When you think about your car tire, it's like 35 PSI.

Kara: 14:17

Yeah.

Ed: 14:18

So one such inventor, harry Flus Flus, f-l-u-e-s-s. He made his suit so successful he was able to go down 30 feet, much longer than anybody else. I think he was down there for like an hour or something like that. But the problem was is that the pumps worked too well, too goodly? In other words, the pumps worked to the point where the guy actually died of oxygen toxicity nice too much so, yes, there is a thing of getting too much oxygen just like too much water.

Kara: 14:56

Uh, yeah, it was too much.

Ed: 14:58

Yeah, like if, like you've seen those athletes like in a football game, like they'll put like those o2 masks on or whatever, they can only be exposed to that for a few minutes at a time and even still that's like 30% oxygen breathing in like pure oxygen can actually fairly corrosive substance all things considered. It's one of the reasons why we age is because oxygen physically wears out our bodies even though we have to have it to live. In the 1920s, technology developed to the point where deep sea diving suits were effective like up to hundreds of feet and divers could stay underwater for like hours instead of minutes. Harry Houdini he was so fascinated with the concept of a deep sea diving suit that he actually invented his own model. It was called the Houdini suit and yeah, it was very popular and yeah, like deep sea diving from like the 1920s, realistically kind of going up to the present, kind of revolved around these diving suits and making it so that people, albeit tethered, they, could stay underwater for very, very long periods of time. Everything changed in 1938 when Edgar End and Max Knoll spent 27 hours breathing air at a simulated depth of 101 feet. So there was a research hospital that these two guys went to and they could simulate using pumps. And in theory you can do this at home, I guess, if you have the equipment. But you can simulate being under so much pressure underwater If you get a watch.

Ed: 16:53

Let's say you buy a watch and it says it's water resistant to 200 meters. Well, the way they test that is they put the watch in, basically like this little acrylic tank, they put maybe a cup or two water in it, so the case is completely submerged. They put the lid on it and then they start pumping in air and that air puts pressure on the water and you can set it so that like, ok, I'm going to pump this thing up to, say, five atmospheres. Well, when you bring it up to that point, you're basically saying like, hey, this watch is under, say, 150 or 200 meters of water, right, so you don't have to have an ocean's worth of water to test these pressures. You just got to have a way of replicating that pressure via air being pushed on you, which sounds kind of weird. Now, actually I'm going to get into that here in a little bit. When it comes to these pressures because that was the biggest thing Like if I were to suddenly just be teleported to say like 600 meters underwater. My body is not prepared for it and I would be crushed like, like physically, the air in my lungs would be expelled out bad deal. But if you are prepared for it, well, now you can start doing some interesting things.

Ed: 18:18

In 1942, elbert r benke bank b-e-H-N-K-E Benke. Benke Now I'm thinking of Benke like a little pacifier. Oh Right, just a little little Benke in the bottom of the ocean. So Mr Albert proposed the idea of allowing the body to fully saturate in inert gases, which allows it to withstand extreme depths of hundreds, if not up to thousands of yards of depth. Why is it important to get saturated? And we will hear this term a lot. So let's well, let's kind of take a look at the human body here, because the only way you can really understand the Biford dolphin incident is to understand why these guys were in the situation that they were in. And, long story short, the human body does a great job handling extreme pressures.

Ed: 19:17

Let's say we are living in one atmosphere. Right, if you are at sea level. Right, you stand in the Pacific ocean. Right, if you are at sea level. Right, you stand in the Pacific Ocean. You have exactly one atmosphere of pressure. Well, the heck does that take a little. We'll take a one inch tube, right, and we'll say this tube weighs nothing. All it's designed to do is just hold a volume of air. If you take that one inch tube and extend it all the way into space, okay, so you're holding a little one inch cylinder of air, okay, and get rid of the rest of the air on earth. Let's just say, like all you are, you're just standing there with a little tube going up like 300 miles and all it has is a 300 mile tall cylinder of air that would be pushing down on you at 15 pounds.

Kara: 20:26

Okay.

Ed: 20:27

Like that's how much that column of air would weigh If you think about it like that's just one square inch. Multiply that by how many square inches a human body consists of. So we'll say like 2,500 square inches. Multiply that by 15. And that will give you an idea of how much weight of air is pushing down on you. All things considered, humans are pretty robust. Like that's a lot of weight of air being pushed on us.

Ed: 21:01

But when you go underwater it gets extreme really fast. For every 10 meters of depth of water it goes up 10 atmospheres. So if you are, say, 10 meters below water or below sea level, you have two atmospheres of pressure surrounding you, or 30 PSI. Okay. If you go down 20 meters, now you have three atmospheres, or 45 PSI. Remember that 45 PSI multiple at 45 by how many square inches your body is, and that's like the total weight being pushed down on you, okay, uh, four atmospheres. Or 60 psi, and so on and so on.

Ed: 21:52

So if you go down 300 meters, that is close to 450 psi of water pressure like pushing on you, and then that is pushing on you for every square inch of your body Sick. So let's say for go down 300 meters, so that's 450 pounds of PSI. So 450 times we'll. We'll use you for an example. I think you're you would be like 2500 square inches. Yeah, uh, because you're tiny, I'm like I'm like 3300 square inches. But if I were to dive down 300 meters underwater at 450 psi so that's 450 pounds per square inch you would have about 1,125,000 pounds pushing on you total all around you.

Kara: 22:52

Sick.

Ed: 22:53

So, and yes, your body can handle that, but not at once. It, you, you, it has to adjust. What's crazy is that, yeah, somehow your body can handle that, if it's given enough time and the right technology. So something to keep in mind is, 80% of the air that you breathe does absolutely nothing for you. 78% of the atmosphere is nitrogen gas, which is inert. Yeah, it does nothing, like it's just a filler. Uh, the 20 percent, uh, 20 percent of the atmosphere of earth is oxygen. So that's the part that you can actually like use, and then the remaining one to two percent is like helium, argonon, neon, it's all those like a whole bunch of other little trace, usually noble gases that they don't do anything. Whenever you take a breath, only 20% of what you breathe in is actually used, and even still you're not absorbing all 20% of that oxygen. You're probably absorbing maybe 3% to 4% of everything that you breathe in, so you don't need a lot of air, all things considered. The rest of it is when you exhale. You exhale up the nitrogen and then you're also exhaling out CO2.

Ed: 24:21

When you start diving to depths of 30 meters, the body will start to absorb the inner nitrogen gas in the bloodstream, basically, the way that it works is your red blood cells. They go from the heart, they go to the lungs, and then the lungs transfer oxygen into the red blood cells. Okay, cool, the red blood cells. They go by your body and then they deposit their oxygen and then they go back up for more. What happens, though, like your body doesn't need nitrogen, it doesn't absorb it, it doesn't do anything with it. So what happens is is that when you're under pressure, say like 30 meters or more underwater, your body will start to take in the nitrogen gas and it dissolves it into the bloodstream Remember, not into the red blood cells, but in the space between the blood cells. Okay, so you're like 70% water. You can dissolve a lot of gases into that water, and so what happens is that you kind of turn into a bottle of soda. Right, you take a bottle of soda and you keep it closed. You shake it. Yeah, it forms bubbles and whatnot, but for the most part, nothing really happens. But when you open that bottle up, then all the CO2 explodes out and you know you've got soda all over the floor and you got a mess.

Ed: 25:49

That is essentially what a human body turns into when you are going into depths like 30 meters and below, your body will start taking that nitrogen and it will dissolve it into your bloodstream, and nitrogen is a gas, so it wants to expand. Well, when it wants to expand, it puts pressure internally in your body. It's pushing out while the water is pushing in. So the idea is a saturation diver is they are absorbing an inert gas that wants to push out while the pressure of the water outside is trying to push in and it balances itself out. It's a pretty cool thing. It's really cool that the body will instinctively do that. It is pretty cool that the body is likeively do that. It is pretty cool that the body is like okay, well, we're being crushed by water pressure, so we need to counteract that by absorbing inert gases. And when your body depending on what depth you are, when your body has absorbed enough inert gases to counteract the water pressure, that means you are fully saturated.

Kara: 27:07

Okay, that makes sense.

Ed: 27:09

I hope so. I'm going to rack my brain out, like trying to figure out how to explain this for a while.

Kara: 27:15

I'm going to make a pop culture reference here in a little bit. That might help.

Ed: 27:20

Okay, do you want to do that now or wait until I?

Kara: 27:24

there's.

Ed: 27:24

There's a reason I'm gonna wait, because I was reading through the rest of it and it applies okay, all right, cool, um, so yeah, basically, when you're down, say 200 meters underwater, your body literally turns into a bottle of soda. You have all these gases stored up in your bloodstream pushing out, which is the reason why, when you pick up like a two liter bottle of soda and you squeeze it like it doesn't give. However, though, if you shake it up and then you open that thing, all the CO2 releases and then when you close the lid and then you squeeze the bottle, it's like squishy, because you don't have anything pushing out anymore. So just remember, gases will take the shape of the container that they're in, assuming that the container is sealed. If it's not sealed, then the gases are just going to go out and do whatever they want. So for as long as you stay underwater under those great depths, the nitrogen just hangs out in your blood and you're fine. You know, for as long as you have air and as for as long as you can expel CO2, you can essentially live in those conditions with a whole bunch of nitrogen in your bloodstream and be just fine.

Ed: 28:43

Let's talk about the bends. This is probably something that they teach in diving school Like the first day. The bends is a common problem for any diver, especially if you're going 30 meters or below. As I mentioned before, the body does a really good job dealing with pressures. However, though, uh, there's like three things that can go wrong, two of which happen when you're going down. One of them is when you're coming back up.

Ed: 29:20

So there's a phenomenon called barotrauma, which is where the pressure from the water builds too fast for your body to adjust and the little air filled cavities in your body are affected, like your eardrums, tooth canals you have, like your lungs are sacks of air. Anything that has air inside of your body like that can burst or implode. So you go, let's say, if you go like 10 feet underwater, you probably could feel it in your ears. You can really feel like the pressure on your ears If you go down too fast, too deep your lungs. So, yeah, you've got the stuff inside of your lungs that the blood comes in contact with, but then really, everything below all that stuff is just air and, like those, can burst. So that's barrel trauma. That's where you're physically sustaining damage due to an increase, a drastic increase of pressure.

Kara: 30:21

If you ever want to try it at home, if you have a pool with a deep end, just swim to the bottom and you can feel it. Yeah.

Ed: 30:30

So, yeah, yeah, my grandfather's retirement community. They had a giant pool there that was like 16 feet deep, and my brother and I would like intentionally try to swim down there and see how long we could last with all that water pressure in our ears, and then we'd come up and then we're like trying to get the water out of our ears.

Kara: 30:46

Yeah, yeah, I mean, do it at your own risk, but you, you can experience that in a very um light, non-painful, yeah Annoying way, if you would like.

Ed: 30:57

Yeah, I want to say it's like super painful. It just it just feels weird. Yeah, it just feels weird. Um, I well, I could feel it in my sinuses, like I would feel that narrow, like I'd like it felt like my sinuses were pushing on my eyes, which they they they kind of were. Um, for me it's the tooth canals. Like if you go down to say like 100 meters too fast, your teeth can explode. That's fun. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good time. Um, it's pretty rare. Like you have to have like a cavity, like the tooth has to be weakened, but the idea of a tooth exploding, I'm good, I can, I can live without that. The other one I didn't know about, but it kind of makes sense.

Ed: 31:43

There's a phenomenon called nitrogen narcosis and this can be very dangerous. So, 30 meters or a 100 feet, the body starts to absorb the nitrogen into the bloodstream. However, if you go down too fast the nitrogen, because you have a barrier in your head it's called the blood-brain barrier and what it is is like the brain is supposed to be isolated from the rest of the body. So blood comes up and it does come down, but there's a barrier that keeps it so that, like, certain things will stay in your brain, and one of those things is nitrogen. So, if you have too much nitrogen in your blood stream, that nitrogen will rush to your brain, and that the effects is basically it makes you drunk, it, it messes with the receptors in the brain, it slows everything down and it yeah, you're basically, you instantly become drunk, and uh, obviously, when you're drunk, you can make very poor decisions. When you're underwater, like in a scuba situation, making bad decisions or being drunk or both is not a good combination, and there's been cases where people will take out their breathing regulator, not realizing that you know they're a hundred feet underwater and you need that regulator to stay alive, but they're basically too drunk to realize what's going on, and so that's nitrogen narcosis, which I had no idea that you could get drunk off of an inert gas, but interesting, yeah. The real concern, though, is when you have to surface. This is where you can die.

Ed: 33:36

So, as mentioned above, when you spend enough time at deep depths, your body will absorb excess nitrogen gas and store it in the bloodstream Not in the cells, but in the bloodstream. I've got to make that very apparent. When oxygen is being stored in your cells, it's basically like an ionized form of oxygen and it's not really behaving like a gas. It's behaving like an oxygen molecule is locked into a blood cell. It attaches to the iron in it, so that nitrogen is in the bloodstream and the body will store it anywhere. It'll store it in the bloodstream, it stores in the water in your body, it will store it in between cells uh, it will.

Ed: 34:21

It'll pack it into fat, which, uh, don't take this the wrong way but like there's a lot of fat in you and I'm not saying that you're like morbidly obese, because you're not you're, you're like a average. You're like this itty bitty little thing but there's a significant proportion of your body that is fat and that's important. Without that fat you don't live for very long. So that, like having all that nitrogen be stored in your fat is is a contributing factor. So, like you know, if you're a really, really, really heavy dude going down, you got to be careful in coming up because you're going to have more gases dissolved in the fat structures of your body. So the only way that nitrogen gas can leave is through your lungs. It can only exit the body via your exhales. So if you're underwater and you're under pressure. That nitrogen gas will kind of be an equilibrium to the pressure pushing down on you from the outside water column. But then when you come up, you have to vent that nitrogen out, you have to exhale it out, and that's not necessarily a fast process. Uh, if you have a bunch of nitrogen stored in your fat, well, your fat doesn't actually get a lot of blood, it just sits there. All that nitrogen gas has to be vented and it takes time to work itself out. And, um, there's like a ratio of like. There's, there's charts out there that state like okay, for every, you know, such and such depth takes so much time to vent out.

Ed: 36:06

When you turn up, so, like when you go to the surface, you can't just go from 300 meters up to the surface in one shot. You have to go up and then you have to wait a little bit. Then you have to go up and wait a little bit. If you don't give your body enough time to do that, then you will run into what is known as the bends. So as you come up, the pressure that is holding the nitrogen in a dissolved state in your body will start to form bubbles and will force its way out wherever it is being stored, like an open bottle of soda. So if you come out too fast, it's like shaking a bottle of soda and then just opening it real quick. All that gas is no longer dissolved in the water, it is now just going everywhere and, uh, your body doesn't like that and this phenomenon is called the bends and this is where, uh, it can result in a lot of discomfort because you literally having gas bubbles like forming in your joints. Um, you have gas bubbles forming around nerve endings. You have gas bubbles forming all over in your body and your body doesn't like that. It hurts a lot.

Ed: 37:27

If you come out too fast, you'll go through a phenomenon called the bends or it's decompression and you'll start showing the following range of symptoms. So there's type one. This is one to six hours after surfacing. Uh, like you, you came up too fast, depending on how, how deep you were You'll experience muscle and joint pain, fatigue, flu-like symptoms. Muscle and joint pain, fatigue, flu-like symptoms, lethargy, headaches, nausea. I've heard it explained it feels like a really, really bad flu. You know, like you have a bad flu, like all your joints hurt and stuff like that.

Ed: 38:04

The type one will feel like that, with the worst of the symptoms happening about two hours in after surfacing. So you're going to feel like crap, you're going to be hurting. It's mostly going to affect your muscular and skeletal structures, but you'll be okay. It's just. You're just going to feel like absolute crap for a while.

Ed: 38:28

The type two this is where you are really deep. This is where you're like 200 meters deep and you come up way too fast. So all that gas is you've got a lot of it expanding really, really fast and trying to work its way out of your body and the lungs can't keep up. So type two contains all of the above and this is where it's going to sound like kind of like thalidomide, where you've got like a list of all these side effects associated with morning sickness. But here you have all the above of type one, but you're also going to have the following, and these are issues that pertain to these gas bubbles forming around your spinal cord and in your brain. Your brain doesn't like air bubbles for a multitude of reasons. It can cause like strokes and stuff like that. So at first you'll get like a tingling sensation, a weakness, inability to urinate, pain in the abdomen and back.

Ed: 39:28

As time progresses, the headaches, confusion, trouble speaking, double vision, vertigo, issues with the internal structure, ear structure will set in. Gas bubbles form inside the veins and proceed to the lungs, which causes chest pain. So you'll actually have the blood vessels instead of having like, a nice, even transfer of like. Okay, I'm getting rid of my little CO2 packet and I'm taking in an oxygen packet and then going back in. It's more like the blood gets stuck because there's a big, freaking giant air bubble in the way and it can't do anything until the lungs decrease that air bubble. Multiply that by like thousands of air bubbles so you're going to get really bad chest pains, choking and even asphyxiation, because if there's too many nitrogen bubbles in your blood, your blood can't actually get to the part of the lungs that transfers the oxygen into the red blood cells. That transfers the oxygen into the red blood cells Over time.

Ed: 40:33

Dysbaric osteonecrosis or the death of bone tissue I didn't know bones had tissue, but I thought bones were made out of bones. But apparently bones can die. That's a problem in its own right because that causes severe arthritic pains, not uncommon to require a joint replacement down the road. So if your joints get jacked up because of the necrosis, it doesn't hold on to any sort of like cartilage and it just wears out really, really fast. So it is very common for people to go through stuff like this too many times. They have to get joint replacements. However, the scary stuff is the neurological stuff. So we're talking partial paralysis, stroke-like symptoms, so like half your face just drooping, lack of sensation, brain malfunction, spinal cord damage, permanent vision damage and, worst of all, a very, very slow and painful death.

Kara: 41:39

I can't wait to become a deep sea diver um, I don't know if you've seen godzilla minus one, but it's a great movie. If you haven't seen it, please watch it. It's my favorite Godzilla movie. It's really good. But one of the plans to get rid of Godzilla was to very, very quickly drop him to the bottom of Tokyo Bay, which is almost 2300 meters deep, oh wow. So drop him to the bottom really fast, and then, if the plan B was, if he doesn't get crushed by the pressure, then to bring him back up really, really fast, and then, if the plan b was, uh, if he doesn't get crushed by the pressure, then to bring him back up really, really fast. So you just explained all of the science to the plan to destroy godzilla in godzilla minus one oh wow, did it work?

Ed: 42:28

no, doesn. Doesn't Godzilla come from the bottom of the ocean?

Kara: 42:34

It depends on where you're getting your lore from, I guess. But yes, essentially yeah.

Ed: 42:42

The only Godzilla movie I've ever seen were like the first ones where you get these Japanese people that are talking in English. Where you get these Japanese people that are talking in English but like they'll say something like run, but their mouths are still moving because they're speaking Japanese.

Kara: 42:58

Yep, I grew up with those two, yeah, I love them, I love them.

Ed: 43:02

But the effects, though, are incredible.

Kara: 43:05

Oh yeah, for the time, the first one came out in 54.

Ed: 43:08

Yeah.

Kara: 43:08

And for 54, that's great, but yeah, I mean came out in 54, yeah, and for 54, that's great. But yeah, I mean minus one is set post world war ii, like right after world war ii, okay, and it deals a lot with japanese culture of the time period and it focuses a lot on the human element of it more than the monster element of it. But it's really good.

Ed: 43:25

You should watch it, you'd like it yeah, I know it was on a corridor crew it's on netflix well, and I'm talking about corridor crew, the youtube, the YouTube channel where you get these VFX artists, oh yeah. And then they comment on the good and the great and the bad VFX, and I know they mentioned that Godzilla Minus One was a masterwork of special effects.

Kara: 43:47

Phenomenal. I think it won an Oscar.

Ed: 43:49

And it was only done at a a fraction of the cost and there was like 17 people that worked on it like yep, it was a very, very low budget, but the effects on it were amazing.

Ed: 43:59

So yeah, really good anyway yeah, if you need to kill godzilla or want to try to kill godzilla, um, the bends is the way to do it, yeah. So, um, in lot of and a lot of cases, uh, if you were like a Navy diver or you know professional commercial divers, something like that, uh, the only course of action they have if you come up too fast and you start experiencing the bends is they throw you in a pressurized chamber and they pump it with enough air pressure to equate, basically, to where you're at underwater and then they very slowly release that pressure over the course of hours. That's really the only thing they can do. Uh, if it's a minor case of the bends, they can give you like a lot of oxygen and hope that works, but for the most part, yeah, it's called recompression therapy and obviously not everybody has access to one of these things. But yeah, it's scary stuff. I know, uh Abby was talking about, cause she's Abby's, one of our students who is like 12 and she's already had a more interesting life than mine.

Kara: 45:11

It happens.

Ed: 45:13

Yeah, yeah. No, she's like a, she's like a certified diver and all that kind of stuff. And she was talking about the bends and and and whatnot. And it was her talking about that. That kind of inspired me, like last year, to do an episode about the Biverd Biford dolphin disaster. So let's get into part two. Okay, I promise we're getting there. So part two how saturation divers work.

Ed: 45:41

Saturation divers are considered the absolute pinnacle of modern diving. They are the most elite divers in the world and they are for a multitude of reasons. So not only do you have to go and get your commercial diving certificate, which that's a training thing on itself. It's not like something you can just knock out in a weekend. You have to. It's almost like flying. You have to have so many hours underwater and you've got to take all these courses. And yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a process to be a commercial diver. Then, once you get that, then you also need to take a bunch of other courses like saturation, diving, underwater welding, mechanics, search and rescue, emergency and a bunch of others.

Ed: 46:24

So a saturation diver at the commercial and even military level, these aren't people that are just collecting sponges, these are people that you send down to the bottom of the ocean and they have to do a task like you know search and rescue. Well, mostly search. There's not a lot of rescue at the bottom of the ocean, but like, or you have to weld something or there's a mechanical thing that needs to be worked on On top of all that, you have to have hundreds of hours of experience of a commercial diver before you can even be recommended for sat diving school. And even still, like a lot of sat divers like I know my dad, because he was a pretty talented machinist and welder they were looking at him to be a saturation diver, just because, like, you need to know how to weld and welding underwater is a completely different animal than welding above water. It is a whole nother thing into itself. And fortunately unfortunately, I guess my dad didn't qualify because he smoked like four packs of cigarettes a day. Qualify because he smoked like four packs of cigarettes a day. Apparently smoking is bad for your lungs. Who would have thought that? You know you need good working lungs if you're gonna be diving to like 300 meters below the ocean. What I know? Oh, and he was, and he was a pretty accomplished alcoholic, so I guess you need a working liver too Dang, it's so demanding these days. Like you gotta have working lungs and a liver Both. Yeah, it's like man. We can't get anywhere in life.

Ed: 48:01

Saturation divers also. They have to work in wild shifts. Typically this is the crazy part A saturation diver may have four jobs a year and like you could talk to a welder today. You know, let's say you're a welder in a shipyard, you're working eight, nine hours a day and you'd be working on a ship for like a year at a time and you'd be doing that for like a regular salaried shift position. You know, nine to five, monday through Friday, and you'd be doing this for years. A saturation diver they only do four jobs a year and they're out on four to eight week long missions, so they're gone for like a month to two months Instead of diving to your work area, ie 100 to 1,000 feet below sea level, and working for just a few hours and then having to spend hours coming back up to decompress safely.

Ed: 49:03

Saturation divers work differently.

Ed: 49:06

Divers descend in what is known as a bell Thank you Aristotle this bell while they're inside of it as it goes down, and it can take like a day for the bell to get down to where it needs to go, but as the bell goes down it's slowly increasing the air pressure in it.

Ed: 49:23

They maintain the oxygen at 20%. That remains the same no matter what, but they fill it with an inert gas. And they do that instead of nitrogen because they don't want people getting that barotropic not barotropic, it's that nitrogen. What is it? Nitrogen narcosis. So they don't actually feed a lot of nitrogen in there. Instead they feed in helium, which is funny because you ever watch videos of these deep sea divers going down the bell. Like they start off talking normally and then the voices get higher and higher and higher. And here are, like the most bravest men in the world. These are burly deep sea divers and they're talking like a chipmunk for weeks. That's amazing. Yeah, it's super funny. It's like it kind of reminds me of the movie Up. Remember that alpha dog? His voice thing was all messed up and he had that really, really high pitched voice.

Kara: 50:21

Yeah.

Ed: 50:21

Even though he's like this super strong manly dog, but he sounds like an idiot. That's literally what's going on here. So the reason why they use helium instead of nitrogen is because helium is a noble gas and it doesn't react with anything, so it can't make you drunk or anything, and the combination of helium and oxygen is called Heliox. Helium also decompresses from the body faster than nitrogen and, yes, it does make your voice sound a little weird, but the long-term is that it's better for you.

Ed: 50:58

The idea is that the divers essentially live underwater for weeks at a time and they can work anywhere between six to 14-hour shifts. As we will see with the Biford dolphin incident. These welders were underwater, um, they were working 16 hour shifts and then they were given like three hours to sleep and then they had to prepare and go back out. So they are living inside this bell, which is about the size of a minivan, for weeks at a time and they and so they don't have to decompress every single day. They are just living in this bell and then they suit up and they dive out the bottom and they go do their job and then they come back up and you know, take a break, man.

Kara: 51:45

Yeah.

Ed: 51:46

Uh, these saturation divers also work, uh, 24 hours, like they work in shifts and you would send a crew down to work in like shifts of three. So, as a result, you don't have all your divers down at once, you don't have all your divers under like in the water at once. You'll have some underwater, you'll have some in the bell and then you'll have some up top decompressing. So after a few weeks underwater it's time to come back up. So the rule of thumb is that divers need to spend one day for every 100 feet of depth to decompress so that you can come up really, really slowly, right, and you can spend, you know, six, eight days coming up to the surface. So if you think about it, if you're 650 feet below the surface, then you need about seven to eight days to decompress to avoid the bends. If you're 650 feet below water and you come up like instantly, the bends would be so extreme that it'll probably kill you instantly. So that's a good time. Yeah, so usually the ascension phase takes place underwater, but it's also possible to pressurize the bell to how many atmospheres are down there. So you pressurize the bell and then you bring the divers up to the top quickly because you're still under pressure. Then you connect the bell to a system of decompression chambers and it's above water, you actually get daylight, you know you've got food coming into you and all that stuff.

Ed: 53:29

It's basically you're living in like an apartment for, you know, a week to 10 days to decompress. So you can either come, spend six to eight days slowly coming up to the top, or they could just pressurize it, pull you up, throw you in a decompression chamber which kind of works like a space docking system where you have to hook the bell up to a trunk, they have to pressurize the trunk, you have to move the divers over, you have to close everything. Then you've got to slowly decompress the trunk and then decompress the bell and then your divers are inside, uh, this chamber which looks like three or four minibands kind of like, stuck together and they have like bunks in there and they have, you know that, television. The newer ones now have like video game consoles. You are literally just chilling inside of this thing for a week to ten days.

Kara: 54:26

Yeah, I was thinking about. You know how sci-fi movies have their compressors between like the space, and then you have your little room and then you have the station.

Ed: 54:36

Yeah, that's what it reminds me of. It's pretty much like that, yeah, what's so crazy is that these chambers are pressurized to like nine atmospheres and they are pressurized atmospheres and they they are.

Ed: 54:53

they are pressurized and, if you think about it, the pressure difference between inside those chambers and the outside air is similar to that of being in space okay, yeah, that makes sense so like space is almost a perfect vacuum and if you're up there at one atmosphere to like you're, you know you're at 15 psi inside spacecraft and then you go outside where there is no pressure. It's the same as going and actually kind of worse. If you're at nine atmospheres going down to one, you're going from like 12, 1300 PSI down to 15.

Kara: 55:26

Yeah.

Ed: 55:26

Like instantly. So, yeah, it works a lot like space in that regard. So yeah, uh, the only problem of putting divers in above water level decompression chambers is that it can be dangerous If things go wrong, as we will. If you probably haven't already guessed, um, if things go wrong, it happens fast and there's not a whole lot you can really do about it. So, all things considered, life in the Bell and or Decompression Chamber has come a long way. Back then you had a book and you just sit there and read Jurassic Park for eight days straight. Now there are televisions, rec centers, there's even a gym. In fact, they encourage you to be on the treadmill because the more you breathe, the more of the inert gases you can expel. Shockingly, there's no smoking allowed. They don't because they pump in pure oxygen.

Kara: 56:29

Makes sense.

Ed: 56:30

Yeah, last thing you need is this thing turning into a bomb. Yeah, there's like game consoles in there. They actually have special chambers where, like, the cook will make you your three meals a day and then they have to put it inside a chamber, close it, pressurize the chamber and then you open up another hatch on inside and there's your food. Uh, usually these guys eat very well because, well, you need them to be healthy, and if there's even communication now they have like internet and and all that kind of stuff.

Ed: 57:05

So, I don't know, to me, like, being a saturation diver today may not be that half bad of a gig, other than when you are working and, mind you, you're only working a couple of weeks out of the year but it is grueling, dangerous work and you really have to know what you're doing.

Ed: 57:23

So a saturation diver or a sat diver will be gone for a month or two at a time. Most of the time, they only work for a couple of weeks out of the year, and then the rest of it is like hurry up and wait. However, though, the pay is where it's at. So at the beginning, a beginning set diver can start off making nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year for just four months out of the year. So they have eight months where they're home and just doing their thing and then they may go out for like a month or two and then come back, and then go out for a month or two and then come back. Experienced, capable sat divers especially if you've got like a welding background or mechanic background or whatnot they can make $50,000 per job. So they're making $50,000 for being underwater for two weeks.

Kara: 58:19

This is like one of those jobs, though, where I'm not mad about it.

Ed: 58:24

You know, like a doctor I'm not mad about it, I'm not jealous of a brain surgeon or like an ER surgeon, like these surgeons that are on call that you have to go in at two in the morning to put somebody back together again. Yeah, no, that's hard work. Yeah, it's hard work. It's a lot of education, a lot of experience to get there. So, yeah, when they pulling up in their McLarens and their Mercedes and their Bentleys, they're earning that. They've earned it. Yeah, yep, because they also have like $2 million worth of medical school debt and all that crap.

Ed: 58:58

Yeah, on top of that, there are bonuses and incentives. So like, hey, if you're like, yeah, sign me up, I will do this job in the Arctic Circle. I can do this in the middle of a hurricane. I can do this with the middle of a hurricane. I can do this with extreme currents or extreme depths. You know, you get bonuses on that. Like, hey, we'll give you $25,000, start to come out and once you finish your job, we'll give you $50,000 for doing the job. Okay, all right. And if you think about it, yeah, you're busting your butt on the bottom of the ocean for like two weeks at a time, and then you come up and you sit inside of a decompression chamber with a TV and internet and all that kind of stuff and you're just hanging out. You know that's not. That's not too too bad, but for me I don't know if I could handle living in a minivan at like 650 feet deep for a week to two weeks at a time.

Kara: 59:57

I don't know if I'd want to do it. It definitely takes a special person.

Ed: 1:00:02

And knowing too that if anything happens to that bell gone, like, yeah, there's no slow leak. Gone like, yeah, there's no slow leak, there's no. Uh, oh, no, we've got 10 minutes to figure this out. It's like, oh, you have 0.5 seconds to figure this out before you're gone. So yeah, I think it. It really does take a very special kind of person and what's really funny is that I was reading um like a firsthand account from a sat diver yesterday and he's like saturation divers they can hate each other above water, but when they're underwater completely different dynamic.

Kara: 1:00:46

Yeah, that makes sense though.

Ed: 1:00:48

Yeah, they. They're like family when they go underwater. Uh, when they get up they could beat the crap out of each other or whatever, but for the most part, like saturation divers when it comes to the job, these guys and women seriously.

Ed: 1:01:03

They, they take it very seriously and they're watching out for each other. It's pretty cool. So, yeah, that is a saturation diver. That's kind of the idea behind it is. Instead of having them come down, work for a little bit and then spend you know four to six hours decompressing on the way up, no, let's just keep them down there, uh, saturated in in Heliox, for a week to 10 days. We can get a ton of stuff done and we pay the guys very well, and then we just bring them up, throw them in the decompression chamber. After you know eight to 10 days they're good to go. And then they always have them on rotation.

Ed: 1:01:43

There will always be, and usually most deep sea sat divers that you see. They're like working on oil rigs, that's like the most common scene. But they can work on everything from like salvaging ships to, you know, laying underwater cables to all sorts of stuff, but mostly it's oil. Drilling rigs is where you see them hang out. Rigs is where you see them hang out. And that brings us up to part three, the Biford dolphin incident.

Ed: 1:02:18

The actual Biford dolphin incident, or part three, here on November 5th 1983. This is one of the worst disasters, if not the worst in saturation diving history and it all took place in less than a second. I think it's like 0.11 seconds or something crazy like that. So the actual Bifur Dolphin rig was a deep sea oil drilling platform. It looks like an oil rig. Minus the superstructure, it's really just a oil rig. It's like a floating platform that drills holes in the bottom of the ocean and you have to have a deep sea divers go out there and like anchor into place as well as weld a bunch of stuff and and whatnot. So they kind of travel all over and they're kind of pushed around and tug boats.

Ed: 1:03:05

It was up in the North sea uh, kind of up there, like where Svalbard is. I still need to do the research on Nathaniel Svalbard incident, but yeah, it's way up there by Norway up in the north. It's like close to the Arctic Circle. It's cold, the weather sucks. It's a pretty intimidating place. It was built 1974 and then it was dismantled in 2019 for scrap, so thing has been around for a minute. The rig was somewhat notorious for safety issues where people got hurt prior to decompression. So there's like people that got like head injuries or people that have fallen. Like it kind of had a reputation already for being a somewhat sketchy place um when does that become like a nature problem versus a human?

Ed: 1:04:01

problem okay. So, obviously, if it's nature induced, like a sudden gust of wind or a crazy wave or you you know, rough waters or whatever, that's one thing. But when we're talking about something that happens on this platform or inside of the platform, that is like human caused, like uh, you know, uh, a gust of wind doesn't cause like an I beam to snap loose and fall on somebody's head. A gust of wind or a bunch of rain doesn't cause, you know, like something falling inside and hitting somebody. So they, we do a pretty good job kind of segregating like a nature thing. But also to the way humans look at it is like, okay, nature is going to do what it wants to do whatever it wants to do it and humans need to prepare for that. And if a human being doesn't prepare for that, then it's on them, makes sense. So, especially when you look at like you've got safety parameters where you know you're working people 16 hours straight, like of of course, things are going to go wrong, it's what it is. But for the most part, though, the bifurcated dolphin did meet strict Norwegian safety guidelines. It's just one of those things. Where it's located, it's a dangerous place. It's kind of like the crab fishermen up in Alaska. You go there knowing that it's a dangerous place. So in total there were six men involved in the incident and you can say it was. You know, as I mentioned before, these deep sea sat divers. They all know each other. It's kind of a close knit community and you could say, in this case it was an international fair because you had British divers and you had Norwegian divers, which is nice because, like the British divers, the names are easy, the Norwegian divers not so much. So let's talk about the four divers here and you'll know which ones are the British ones and which ones are the Norwegian ones pretty quickly. So Edwin Coward, 35 years old, very British. Roy Lucas, 38 years old, very British. Bjorn Bergersen, 29, norwegian, and then Truls Hellevik, 34, norwegian, okay. Kruljus Hellevik, 34, norwegian, okay.

Ed: 1:06:41

The entire process of moving the divers from bell to decompression chamber for the next 10 days or so was monitored by dive tenders. So you got Willem Crammond, 32 years old, british, and then you've got Martin Saunders, who was I didn't pick up an age, I think he was in his early 30s and Martin Saunders, again very British, to be a dive tender. So these are the two guys that sit outside. So the bell connects to the trunk, which is like the tunnel that leads from the bell to the actual decompression chambers. And then you have these two guys, crammond and Saunders, outside. They monitor the whole process and they're the ones that regulate the pressure and all that stuff. And they have to be experienced divers themselves, right. So at least they got that going, like they're not just throwing you know two kids fresh out of high school Like, hey, you're going to be a dive tender now. No, like these guys actually in a lot of respects had a harder job than the divers themselves. They were accountable for a lot. Let's just say that.

Kara: 1:07:44

Well, they had to make sure to keep an eye out for certain things, I'm sure, and they had to know they're the ones that were the keepers of the safety procedures.

Ed: 1:07:54

Yeah, again, we're dealing with nine atmospheres of pressure here, which, if you do the math, it's like a contained explosion. Those are the kind of pressures that we're dealing with here. These guys were very versed in the procedures and I'm going to go over the procedures here shortly, but, yeah, they were the ones that had to monitor everything and they were the ones that were responsible for the opening and closing of various hatches at the right times, as well as pressuring and depressuring various parts, chambers, as necessary, to make sure that nobody got injured or got the bends or explosively decompressed. Given the depth and time that these divers were working with, the divers needed to be in an environment of nine atmospheres to gradually be reduced down to one atmosphere. In other words, the outside atmosphere was approximately 15 PSI. So, like you're standing on the deck of this drooling rig and you have 15 pounds per square inch pushing down on you. However, though the divers bodies were saturated to 132 PSI, there's a big gap there, and you take that 132 and times that by their body volume or surface area, boy, so I mentioned this earlier, but I kind of go real quickly again. So, like as you're sitting here and listen to this podcast, if you measure out one square inch of your skin, you'll have about 15 pounds of air pushing down on it. Now that's at sea level. As you go higher, it goes down. As you go lower, it goes higher. As you go, like, closer to sea level, it gets closer to one atmosphere, and then of course, you go below water and all that fun stuff. So level it gets closer to one atmosphere, and then, of course, you go below water and all that fun stuff. So the average human being, we'll say the average adult male, has a surface area of 2,800 square inches. Multiply 2,800 by 15 and you get 42,000 pounds of air pushing down on you. And you're like, why am I not being crushed? Well, because our bodies have evolved to handle it right. It's the same way, like if you take one of those you know those blob fish. They look all weird and everything, but in the bottom of the ocean they don't look like that bottom of the ocean, but they're under super pressure. They look like normal fish, but then when you put them up to the top they get like all bloated and creepy looking. It kind of works like that, like they don't die because they've evolved to those conditions and it may not seem like it, but yeah, we're engineered to handle those sorts of pressures quite well. In fact, if we go below 15 PSI too much, that can cause a lot of issues too, like blacking out and whatnot. The four guys inside the two decompression chambers their body's been accustomed to handling 369,600 pounds of total pressure on their bodies. So if you think about the differences between inside and outside, it is greater than a spacecraft inside and the vacuum outside. That's a lot. Yeah, it's almost like you're better off experiencing a decompression in space than you are in this setting, if you think about it. So yeah, these guys, they had to be decompressed for 10 days or so and they were basically inside an unexploded bomb. That's the pressure that we're dealing with here.

Ed: 1:11:43

Here's the layout, and we'll post a picture of this on our website, thedaystemsoffirecom. Imagine you have like three cans sitting, like three soda cans, sitting horizontal to each other. On the left can is chamber number two, and there was two divers in chamber number two. Already In the middle can you have chamber number one, and chamber number one is where the docking portal is for the bell. So the bell would attach to chamber number one via two hatches. Right. So you're in the bell and you pressurize chamber number one. You open up the bell and then you crawl through the trunk and then you open up another hatch and that hatch puts you into chamber number one and then chamber number one has its own hatch and trunk that leads chamber number two. That way you can have two sets of divers at different stages of decompression, so you can regulate how you want to decompress them.

Kara: 1:12:56

And it makes rotations easier.

Ed: 1:12:59

Yeah, yeah, way easier. And then the third can on the right. That's the escape capsule. So once everything is completely decompressed and and you're good to go, then you would exit out the escape capsule, which is like, uh, almost like an air interlock type of thing. So just try to envision that three soda cans turned horizontally and they're all attached by their own little tunnel. The middle can has a special port on it for the diving bell to come up.

Ed: 1:13:30

So Lucas and Coward were already in chamber number two from a previous dive session. They had just gotten up there before and I think they were asleep, like they were resting in chamber number two. Chamber number one this is where Helovik and um, yeah, it was Helovik. And who was the other guy? Oh my God, I'm forgetting all their names. It was Helovik and um, oh my gosh, oh, there we go. So Helovik and Bergersen they were coming in from their shift. So chamber two and chamber one were open to each other and then chamber one had the bell attached to it. So basically, helovik and Bergersen got out of the bell and they crawled through the trunk and they're in chamber number one. Okay, everything is pressurized to nine atmospheres at this time. Chamber one is located in the middle between chamber two on the left and the escape capsule on the right. Once all four men were sufficiently decompressed, then they would move to escape capsule accordingly and move on with their lives.

Ed: 1:14:37

Bergeson and Halovik came up to the surface via the bell, which was highly pressurized capsule designed to saturate the divers on the way down to the bottom, and this is where they would hang out between shifts. So when they were welding below they would go out underwater, weld for like 16 hours, come back up to the diving bill to take a break and then the next guy would go out, and it was always a constant flow of divers coming out. The bell would be brought up to the all rig. So instead of having the guys just wait in the bottom of the ocean and slowly come up for 10 days, they just brought them straight up to the decompression chambers. That's like the preferred way of doing it nowadays and the bell would be brought to the old rig and the main hatch would be locked to the decompression chamber via a tunnel called the trunk. Cram and Saunders would oversee the connection phase of the bell to the trunk and monitor each other and each hatch door. So they had like little windows that they could see in and there's a hatch door for the bell and then you could see through the tunnel and you could see the hatch door for the trunk that would go into chamber number one and then from here the specific procedures must be followed to a T when transferring divers from the bell to the decompression chamber. So here are the steps, and it's like only five, but five really important ones Crane hoist, the bell to the trunk, and Crammond and Saunders would connect the two with a series of incredibly strong clamps.

Ed: 1:16:17

It's, I think it's like five or six of these giant clamps that go all the way around that hold it in. Each one of those clamps can hold tons and tons of weight, so these things aren't coming off easily. Once an airtight connection is made, the trunk is then pressurized to nine atmospheres so the bell hatch could open. You'll notice that a lot of these hatches can only open inwards, and the reason why is that you can't accidentally open something that is under pressure accidentally, like you can't just swing the door in when there's thousands of pounds of air pushing out.

Kara: 1:16:57

Yeah, that makes sense. It's a safety thing.

Ed: 1:16:59

Yeah, it's kind of like our um, our vacuum chamber at school, Like once you pull a vacuum you can't get that lid off because earth's atmosphere is pushing it down so much that you can't you can't pull it off. It's kind of the same principle. So you'll notice that, like in the diagram, like you'll see the hatch doors all of them open inwards, so that way nothing can be accidentally opened while it's under pressure. That's okay, that makes sense. So once the trunk was pressurized, the divers would move into the trunk and wait there for chamber one to come to nine atmospheres of pressure. Once that was done, the two divers would move into their new chamber and close the hatch behind them. From there the trunk and bell would be depressurized and then made ready for the next set of divers to go down. It's kind of convoluted but it's basic sense, right, Like don't open up anything and don't disconnect anything until everything's at the correct pressure.

Ed: 1:18:01

Yeah, I mean it makes sense to me. Well, the first half of the procedures worked fine. Uh, because these divers and these dive tenders, they have done this a million times and they could do this in their sleep. In fact, they probably were, given how long these guys have been awake. However, though, it was when Hellevik and Bergersen were inside chamber number one and getting ready to close that hatch door. So once they close that hatch door, then the trunk and then the bell would be depressurized and moved on. Bergersen and Helvick admitted to chain number one, which was at nine atmospheres, and and this chamber was open to chamber number two. So one and two were sharing the same pressure and they were open to each other, so they could actually like talk to each other and stuff like that. And chamber number twos were a coward and Lucas were waiting slash asleep. At this stage, the bell trunk, chamber one and chamber two were all open. Basically, helovik was standing by the hatch, by the trunk, and he was getting ready to close it. And because, at that time, the bell, the trunk, everything was open and they look back at it now and they should have, what they should have done is left the bell going to the trunk, close the hatch for the bell and then get into chamber number one and then close the hatch to the trunk. But at this time it just so happened that all three hatches were open, at least somewhat.

Ed: 1:19:42

Yeah, so the escape route presented itself. So we are in a chamber that is 132 pounds per square inch stored in an area the size of a minivan or a couple minivans. Imagine all that surface area. We're talking like hundreds of thousands of inches at 132 PSI. So 132 PSI times 100,000 square inches, we are now millions of pounds of stored pressure Just gas, just trying to escape at all costs. So remember, the more you compress a gas, the more pissed off it gets, the more that it wants to repel each other. So just bear that in mind here.

Ed: 1:20:33

The escape route that the gas was looking for found its way out when the bell suddenly exploded off the trunk. The bell actually went flying out. This thing weighs like eight, nine tons. This bell went flying like 30, 40 yards, like it it. It went almost a third of the length of a football field and it just exploded off and in less than a few milliseconds the trunk and chambers one and two instantly decompressed from nine atmospheres down to one atmosphere and that interval of time in that 0.11 seconds. Five out of the six men involved died instantly Jeez Bergeson, lucas Coward died where they stood. Helovik died differently. So three of the guys inside they just kind of like they just collapsed and died.

Kara: 1:21:38

Yikes.

Ed: 1:21:39

And we'll get into, like, how they died, because it's very different than Helovik. So what do you want to hear first? You want to hear about how Helovik died, or you want to hear about how the three other guys died first?

Kara: 1:21:51

I don't know. I guess we'll go with Helovik. Okay, sure.

Ed: 1:21:56

Okay, so this is where the trigger warning comes in. This is. This is where the trigger warning comes in. This is where it gets pretty graphic. I am going to sugarcoat it, but it also for the sake of what happened. There's no way of describing this without it painting a very gruesome image in your head. This without it painting a very gruesome image in your head, so like, if you don't want to hear this, skip forward, you know, like five, six minutes or whatever. Uh, make it seven minutes just to be on the safe side. So just letting everybody know this is, this is the, the dumpster fire here. Fyi, yeah, he was the one.

Ed: 1:22:48

Helvick was the one that was closest to the chamber, one hatch door to the trunk. He was getting ready to close it when he experienced the full force of explosive decompression. As he was closing the hatch when the bell exploded off, there was a 24 inch long crescent shaped gap that was about four inches wide. So that hatch that he was standing towards was only open by four inches and there the crescent. Because these are circular hatches, it made a two foot long crescent that was four inches wide. It kind of looked like a, you know, like a miniature crescent moon. That crescent was now exposed to the vacuum of earth, basically, and when the bell blew off he was essentially quote unquote extruded through the small gap. The front part of his body was blown into the gap with nine atmospheres of pressure behind him.

Ed: 1:23:47

Trying to get out His body for a brief fraction of a second sealed the gap. So this is like 0.01 seconds. But the pressure differential was so great that his torso split open and basically all of his internal organs shot out like sprayed out all over the deck of the oil rig. Jeez Louise. His internal organs were found dozens of feet away, including his liver, stomach. Most of his small intestines were basically strewn out by yards. Parts of his spinal column were found 30 feet up into the rig's structure, above Yikes he was. Basically his stomach came in contact with that gap. All that pressure just ripped him open and all of his innards were gone. So that's like the first part that goes through. The rest of it is where his body has to kind of collapse and then the rest of him then goes through arms, legs, head and all that.

Kara: 1:24:52

Yeah.

Ed: 1:24:52

His arms and legs were ripped out of their sockets and blown out into the ocean. So that's how far out they flew out into the ocean. So that's how far out they flew. Parts of his trachea and his and parts of his small intestine they remained inside. So, like his throat and a few feet of a small intestine, they actually stayed inside. Uh, they didn't make their way out, but the rest of them was all over the place. Uh, the grizzliest part of this whole thing was that obviously his head is bigger than four inches. So in the process of his head being extruded through this four inch hole, his face was ripped off and blown out into the ocean like a mask. In fact, his face was just kind of floating in the water. When they had a guy in a boat out there like collecting body parts, and they saw his face just kind of like laying there.

Ed: 1:25:45

Oh, that's a lovely yeah yeah his skull was completely crushed in like. It was instantaneous, like as gruesome and as painful as this is. The only consolation is that hevick died within a fraction of a second. He wouldn't even know what happened, he wouldn't even have heard anything.

Kara: 1:26:06

Yeah.

Ed: 1:26:07

So that's the only thing going for it. The blood in his brain would have immediately boiled. So you know how. We would take a cup of water, put it in a vacuum chamber, pull a vacuum and then the dissolved gas, like the air in the water starts to come out and it causes the water to boil at room temperature. That's what would have happened to Helovik, and, like a millisecond is instantly, everything would have started boiling because he's got all that compressed gas inside of him trying to get out.

Ed: 1:26:38

Yeah, um, yeah, it's, it's brutal and that probably would have killed him quicker than being extruded through that four-inch hole. He would have no comprehension. It would have been like the Titan sub but in reverse. So instead of everything imploding, he exploded and he was gone just like that. When they actually brought him in for the the coroner, when they did the autopsy, he's like, okay, let me see hellevik, and it took four guys carrying five trash bags and they tried to reassemble them to represent some sort of a body to try to figure out the cause of death. But so much of it was destroyed and there are pictures out there if you are crazy enough to want to look at it, but there is basically like a cookie sheet. Okay, they have a cookie sheet and they have like a piece of trachea. They have like the skin that was on his face is now like a mask, and then they have like a small little pile of entrails and then like part of an arm. The rest of it was completely ground up. Man, uh, yeah, and I could only imagine like his wife would have seen that picture. Probably I I can't imagine like seeing something like that, especially when they had to bring her in to identify the body, like, hey, is this your husband? How, uh, what was left? Yeah, that makes sense. Actually, they kind of took like the skull and they kind of like I hate to word it this way, but it was like plato they kind of formed it back into something of the shape of his skull and then laid the face over it. So basically, it happened so fast that he wouldn't have known what had happened. Man, so that's crazy.

Ed: 1:28:29

Let's talk about the other three divers, okay, Okay. So, uh, coward and Lucas. They were in chamber number two and it is believed that they were asleep, so they went to bed, never woke up. I'm hoping that is the case. Uh, bergeson was behind Helvick when he was getting ready to close that hatch and even though Bergeson was much closer, if it wasn't for Helvick Helvick's body absorbing that full decompression, bergeson would have followed close behind. But since Halovik absorbed most of it, bergeson died, much like Lucas and Coward next door, which just dropped to the ground. When Coward's, lucas and Bergeson's bodies were brought in for an autopsy, the coroner assumed that the bodies had been dead for weeks Just looking at them and all that stuff. Given their condition and whatnot, they're like like when did these guys die? Like three weeks ago. And they're like no, yesterday.

Ed: 1:29:36

And the coroner was like when a person dies. So like someday, hopefully many, many, many decades from now, uh, you'll die and what happens is the fats in your body. Basically, it's weird that the fats, the lipids, the cholesterols you have many different kinds of fat inside of you. You have all sorts of different fats cholesterols high density lipids, low density lipids Like you'd be amazed at how much fat is inside of a body, even if somebody is as skinny as you. Uh, I think my smartwatch said I'm like 33%. I think my smartwatch said I'm like 33% fat. You're probably like 10 to 15%. So even if we, even if you weighed like a hundred pounds, like 15 pounds of you, you would just be a blob of fat.

Kara: 1:30:31

Yeah.

Ed: 1:30:32

It's kind of weird, um, that that stuff starts to melt and when it melts, it melts into the bloodstream. It will melt into the organs, like, for example, you have a lot of fat that surrounds your kidneys. It's actually when you're butchering an animal like a cow, you want that fat around the kidneys. It's called kidney fat. It's a very white, very pure form of fat, perfect for rendering, making tallow, frying stuff with it, whatnot Like the fat that surrounds your organs and everything it will permeate in. So, yeah, when you die, your fat essentially melts and work their way into the bloodstream and the organs. However, due to the extreme decompression, the bodies behave more like being blown into space without a spacesuit. Right, and this is what I was talking about before.

Ed: 1:31:25

Ok, you get a cup of water, you put it in a vacuum, you pull a vacuum. After a few minutes you start to see the water boil. It's not boiling because of heat. It's boiling because the gases are no longer being held in with the surface tension of water and they're escaping in the form of bubbles. Gases have a higher entropy, they have a lot more action going on than water and you know, you pull the vacuum, they get to escape.

Ed: 1:31:53

So imagine putting an open bottle of soda. So like, you grab a bottle of soda, don't shake it, just take the cap off, put it inside of a vacuum chamber where there's a lot of CO2 in there and you turn on that pump, that thing is going to overflow and almost I don't want to say explode, but the CO2 is going to leave it really really, really fast. That's what happened with these guys. When the incident happened, the chambers went from nine atmospheres down to one. Instantly, all the gases and the three divers instantly expelled from their uh, expelled from their blood, and their blood boiled and, like I said, in like a few milliseconds this alone would have been enough to kill a human being. So like, imagine the blood in your brain boiling.

Kara: 1:32:44

Yeah, I don't want to.

Ed: 1:32:46

Like all those gases, all that helium and everything is now boiling. The blood vessels expand and it literally. This sounds really weird, but it crushes the brain from the inside out. It's like a reverse concussion in a way, and just in the process of those blood vessels expanding, your brain would shut down and that would be it. That can't be good. Having your brains boiling, that's a bad deal, that's a no-go.

Ed: 1:33:15

The stored gases in your fat Remember we talked about this before like hey, when your body is saturated, it stores gases wherever it can, including your fat. So, like I said, even if you're skinny, fat is, you know, one of the most important substances to have in your body, believe it or not, and there are many different kinds of fats and different densities and lipids and cholesterols, and your organs are surrounded by it, your heart is surrounded by it. Basically, the fats in these guys' bodies boiled and rendered down. What would take, you know, say like an hour. Take like a bunch of fat from like a steak or a ribeye and you put it in a frying pan and you turn on on the stove like a medium high. Over the course of like 20 minutes or so, that fat will render down it's called tallow and then you can do all sorts of good stuff with it. What would have taken, you know, hours for somebody's fat, or days or weeks for somebody's fat to just naturally render down? It rendered down in that 0.11 seconds. It rendered down in that 0.11 seconds and the fats rendered down or denatured. The structure of the fats in the blood organs was so insoluble, or in other words, in a state where the body can't do anything with them, that the body was basically completely saturated. Where the gases were is now fat.

Ed: 1:34:42

And, yeah, they found, like the liver, you know. They looked at the livers and like, were these guys like chronic alcoholics? No, how long had they been dead A day? And the coroner was like, what? Like? How is this possible? In small quantities, your body can handle these denatured fats. Right, it's kind of what it's designed to do. But when the whole full body fat melts down, you are essentially and I'm going to quote our students here you are literally cooked, as the kids would say You're cooked, yeah, because they all cringe. Oh yeah, well, I mean, the cook thing isn't so bad. It's that other gen alpha talk that shows us up the wall. So funny anyway, I. I think I would have if I was their age. I probably would have used the term cooked if I was ever in trouble yeah, that was not too bad I don't mind that one, yeah, um, all the other ones are just like.

Ed: 1:35:42

Signed me up for a decompression, um, so, as I mentioned rendering, uh, which is something that is done with heat. However, their bodies were at room temperature. Um, because that was the other thing is, the corner is a. How hot were the bodies when you found them? They're like they were cold. If you take water at room temperature, put in a vacuum chamber, pull a vacuum for like five minutes and then you let the air back in, you feel that water it's actually much colder than it was before. Yeah, so, like the heat, the combined heat, the 98.6 degrees fahrenheit of these guys, bodies were were gone. Yeah, it's crazy, much like Helovik. Their deaths were so sudden and extreme that they were dead before they could even hear or register a problem. I believe Lucas and Coward were asleep, so when this happened, they basically went to bed and they woke up at the pearly gates.

Kara: 1:36:39

Yeah.

Ed: 1:36:41

Right and the gatekeeper is like so what brings you guys here? I don't know where am I I have no idea, like this isn't the decompression chamber, like what? What is going on here? That is like the only silver lining in all of this yeah, is that they?

Kara: 1:37:00

they didn't feel any pain and they didn't even have any recognition of what happened to them yeah, they had no idea at all.

Ed: 1:37:09

Yeah, what had happened? Kind of like those, uh, that and the titan sub. Um, it was concluded that they lost power and as they lost power, the nose of the sub basically pointed straight down and then they dropped for like 40 seconds. So that would have been terrifying, that would have sucked, because all the dudes would have been piled on top of each other at the nose but they would have no idea because it was pitch black. They would have no idea exactly what was happening. And then gone Dang, that's it. In fact, the water pressure was so great that when that sub imploded, you would have seen a bright flash of light, because if you take carbon compounds organic carbon compounds and you compress it enough, it will actually ignite. That's how diesel works. A diesel engine just takes a very thick, nasty gasoline and it compresses it so much that it ignites and explodes and it makes the pistons go up and down. That is. That is basically what would have happened to you If you were down there with those guys. You would have seen like a camera flash and that's it. That. That that would have been. That would have been gone.

Ed: 1:38:28

And what's really interesting is that there was a large volume of air inside of that sub, you'd be thinking like, well, eventually the bubbles would have made it to the surface, right? Well, no, because they were so deep. As the bubbles went up, the ocean absorbed the air, and so by the time they got to the top, it had been completely dissolved in the ocean. Kind of like my CO2 system for the plant tank. Like I send out these little bubbles of CO2 for the plants to live off of, and they start off big at the bottom of the tank, but when they get to the top they're tiny, because Bubbles of CO2 for the plants to live off of, and they start off big at the bottom of the tank, but when they get to the top they're tiny because they're being absorbed. So what about the two dive tenders though? So that that's that's.

Ed: 1:39:13

I think that's an important question here, because one of them did survive, crammond. He did not survive. His injuries were a combination of one being crushed by the bell Right, a four or five ton metal flying objects coming at you, that'll do it. He also would have suffered something very similar to a percussion wave. So if you're near an explosion, not enough for it to like blow you to pieces. What happens is that shock wave hits your chest and it blows up all the tiny little blood vessels in your lungs. Right, because you've got the little capillaries in there where the blood comes up to get oxygen and then it goes back to your heart to be distributed throughout the body. Well, if the percussion wave is strong enough, it will actually burst all those little blood vessels and then you eventually bleed to death through your lungs.

Ed: 1:40:07

I remember years ago, during the the war on terror, they had, like Osama bin Laden's, like 15th third in command.

Ed: 1:40:16

It seems like every week America was taking out one of bin Laden's third and commands.

Ed: 1:40:21

Or it's like, how many of these guys does he have? He has like 15 third and commands. But this guy was particularly bad and they dropped a bomb outside where he was hiding and he was outside and he caught that shockwave and it blew him back like 50 yards and then they rushed in and took him and uh, yeah, he was still alive. They he thought he was going to live, but then over the course of days, because all the blood vessels were blown in his lungs, he slowly suffocated and given the heinous, heinous crimes that this guy committed, it wouldn't surprise me if they tried to keep him alive as long as possible.

Ed: 1:41:00

He was the one who was responsible for all like the beheadings and and all the torture and all that kind of stuff. So, um, if it wasn't for that diving bell crushing him, that would have been the other thing that would have done him in. Is that shockwave that came out. Um, so, instead of being at one atmosphere, or nine atmospheres going down to one, it's like you're at one atmosphere and you're being hit with nine. It's the reverse of the guys inside dying in reverse of the Titan sub implosion.

Kara: 1:41:35

Okay.

Ed: 1:41:38

Okay, a lot of reversals here. So, yeah, creme didn't make it. Now, saunders did live. Uh, he had like multiple broken bones, uh, concussion, head injuries. That guy, he took a beating but he did survive and his life was essentially ruined because of all this.

Ed: 1:42:05

And this is where part four comes, in the aftermath, obviously, a decompression incident of this graphic proportion can't be swept under the rug Like you just can't say, oh yeah, there was an incident, there was a slight accident on the Biford Dolphin. Like, oh yeah, there was an incident, there was a, there was a a, a slight accident on the bifurcated dolphin. Like, no, no, no, no, no, uh, there was. Another problem is how do they deal with the divers who are underneath? They only had one decompression chamber, so, like the, you have to factor that in now is what do you do about those guys? Which actually just occurred to me right now that's not actually not in my notes, but news of the incident, of course, spread all over the world and it captivated the general population as well as researchers, much like the Titan sub has captivated the media. Like that's everything that everybody was talking about for weeks. Was what happened there? Probably because it's such a unique thing, right. We are used to seeing, oh, you know, a truck driver died, crashed his truck fire, house burned down. We're so used to that. What we're not used to seeing is people exploding through decompression. That's not something that you hear about every day, that's fair. So that's the reason why it's like, oh, this is unique. I hate to word it that way, but that's kind of what your brain does like well, that's, that's new. Yeah, add that one to the list. So, yeah, researchers, everybody got involved. And there was two questions that had to be asked how in the hell did something like this happen? And then question number two is who in the hell is going to be responsible for this incident? Like that's, that's, it's everything. That is basically the two questions that need to be answered.

Ed: 1:43:59

Needs to say, the popular consensus is that the incident was due to human error on part of one or both of the dive tenders. So Crammond was blamed the most because he's dead, so he can't tell his side of the story. And Saunders kind of got a bad rap as well, because it's like well, you guys were responsible for this, you guys were the ones this like. You guys were the ones in charge, this is your fault.

Ed: 1:44:24

Uh, many believe that either saunders or cram and accidentally released the clamps of the bell prematurely, thus causing the bell to blow off the rig. Those clamps you just can't under pressure, you can't just go and take them off. Yeah, these clamps are under thousands of pounds of pressure and they're not just gonna be undone willy nilly like that. But you know what people you've got to blame, somebody kind of like what you're saying. Is this a nature thing or is this a human thing? And that question comes up here what did these two guys screw up? Or was there something else at play?

Ed: 1:45:09

The opinion of why this could have happened range from sheer incompetence, laziness to follow protocol, ignorance of the procedures, exhaustion I could see that one being a viable one, given how many hours these guys worked or even the feeling of remorselessness to kill someone Like they were. Some people actually blamed them for, like intentionally doing this, like they wanted to see somebody get extruded through a four inch hole. That's messed up, yeah, yep, it's funny up. Yeah, yep, it's funny how people be peopling in 1983 as they are today. Yep, people be peopling. It does it never ends.

Ed: 1:45:50

Nope, uh, saunders spent like the rest of his life trying to prove to the world that Kraman wasn't at fault. Um he. He later said that everyone was exhausted because the dive tenders and divers were working like 16 to 18 hour shifts. It was only three hours of sleep and the weather was starting to pick up around the bifurcated dolphin. So here's that nature thing creeping in. So there was like a huge push hey, the weather's getting nasty, we don't want this bell like waving all over the place on the crane. So there was a push to get them unloaded and get fresh divers going and below water before the weather got too bad.

Ed: 1:46:34

Saunders believes that there was no way Crammond would have released the clamps too early. One because the guy was highly experienced, he was highly qualified, he had done this before, and two, physically it just wasn't possible to undo the clamps early. Saunders had to live the rest of his life on disability because his back was shot, his bones were broken, he was able to walk around and stuff like that, but he couldn't work. He couldn't do any manual labor. For the rest of his life he almost lost everything. His wife had to support the family and it took years and years and years before he finally got a Norwegian disability which was $200 a month Meanwhile, like during this time he was bedridden. There was just no way he could function in society, not to mention the survivor's guilt was extreme.

Kara: 1:47:34

Oh yeah.

Ed: 1:47:34

Like his depression from this is like why do I survive, but none of these other guys do a very, very common thing to have go down, like after a war. You know, you see a lot of soldiers like why is it that I survived but the rest of my squad didn't? And it's a it's.

Ed: 1:47:53

It's a hard psychological thing to wrap your head around yeah so saunders he had to deal with that the rest of the families of the lost divers had to wait 26 years before they got a settlement check from their norwegian government, which was an undisclosed amount of money. So this thing would have been an investigation for a very long time. From day one, the norwegian government attributed the disaster to a faulty clamp, while the rest of the world wanted to see heads roll. I think if, if both sides of the families and the government could have agreed sooner, the payout would have happened quicker. But you know, people want to see a human being take responsibility for this, not just some clamp. Right, and so if they both agreed that, okay, yeah, let's say it was 70% clamp, 30% human related. All right, cool, we agree. Here's the payoff. But since both sides were pushing for two different causes, they're not going to pay out anything until something finally gets approved Years later. The general consensus I think they determined this in the late 90s the general consensus is that the bifur dolphin was using antiquated safety measures at the time, as well as a faulty set of clamps being used to anchor the bell to the trunk. So really really old technology and probably clamps that were overused and failed that way. So after this, the following improvements were recommended Use clamps that can't be disengaged while the device is under pressure. Yeah, makes sense. That's not how these clamps were designed. They were designed to be taken off while under pressure, but it just so happened that they were very, very hard to take off while under pressure. But going forward they're like no, no, no. If you had a clamp that has like five PS psi behind it, that thing should not be able to be disengaged, so they had to redo these clamps that are a lot more sensitive in that regard. Uh, use automatic butterfly valves inside the trunk just in case the bell is knocked off. So basically, as you crawl through, you have a round disc that then folds up and locks into place, and it's automatic. So once you cross, then like in 15 seconds, you'll hear like an alarm go off and then the butterfly valve switches up and it locks it automatically. So even if there is an explosive decompression, then the bell can fly off and everything is fine.

Ed: 1:50:46

So install accurate and reliable gauges. I didn't know this, but there was like one gauge, one pressure gauge, on the entire thing and it was like way at the end where nobody could see it. So it's like really how, how are these dive tenders even regulating the pressure for the whole thing? How do you regulate the pressure if you've got some people in chamber number two that's under four psi, but then you also have people that are in chamber number one at eight psi or, uh, eight atmospheres? Like how do you with only one gauge? How do you check that? Yeah, so now they have like multiple gauges on the bell, multiple gauges on the trunk, uh, you have multiple and then redundant and backup gauges, as well as digital gauges and sensors on each of the decompression chambers, and all of that is fed into a computer which then can monitor everything. And then you also have more than just two dive tenders, I think now there's like six at any given time and they have to be rotated out like every eight hours. So that makes me feel a little better about it.

Ed: 1:51:54

The other thing too is they had no way of communicating with the divers inside. This wasn't so much of a uh like a main leading cause to the Biford dolphin incident happening, but it's like they used a megaphone they yelled into like an old school megaphone and then the people on the inside would have to tap on the side to let them know that we were moved over. Now they've got microphones all over the place, so basically, you crawl in. You can say, okay, uh, helovik here, ferguson, here we are in and the hatch has been closed. Okay, cool, decompress and then move forward. So like using a megaphone and yelling not, not the best, not the best, the best. So but that's been improved a lockout and tag out system. This is a game changer. They they've used this now for a number of years.

Ed: 1:52:52

So basically, if you're going to shut something down, you have to lock it, like physically, remove the key to operate it, and then you put a tag on it.

Ed: 1:53:04

So that way, if, like, you move Helovik and Bergersen over, then if they want to lock that chamber and they need to do it from the outside as well, what you do is Helovik needs to remove his key from the inside, put a tag on it and then, once that has been undone because that's the only way you can lock the hatch is by doing that like lock it, turn the key, pull the key out and then, on the outside, then Saunders or Crammond would turn their key and then they would lock the other hatch, because the only way they could do.

Ed: 1:53:40

It is if they had the key turned and then they pull it out, tag it. Then once you see that there's two tags on both of these locks, then you know with a 100 degree of certainty that everything is locked and sealed. Yeah, the log, lockout, tagout thing is a pretty effective way. Uh, they have to do this when they're uh like, uh, battleships in world war ii. The pistons on these engines were like 48 inches in diameter and you could actually crawl in using a ladder, crawl inside the piston to clean it out. But they had to do a lockout tagout, meaning shut the engine down, physically, remove the key, put a tag on there so the engine can't accidentally be fired up.

Kara: 1:54:22

Yeah.

Ed: 1:54:23

Cause imagine being inside of a piston.

Kara: 1:54:25

That'd be terrible.

Ed: 1:54:28

The other thing too is regular maintenance and inspections, uh, as well as records keeping and audits. So these things are constantly being checked. Uh, today most pressure vessels have a date range. So, like those who ever go paintballing, you know those CO2 tanks that they use in the paintball guns there's actually a date code on there. Same thing with fire extinguishers and all that stuff.

Ed: 1:54:52

And if the tank is too old, like if I think it's over five years, it has to be retested and then recertified or replaced. Years, it has to be retested and then recertified or replaced. Now, like these clamps, they have to be tested. If they're too old, screw it, just get new ones, put them on. And, like, even the decompression chambers themselves have to be certified periodically. And then, of course, better operator training and protocol enforcement. So, yes, you can have your dive tenders there, but you also have somebody watching the whole thing and checking off to make sure that, one, they're trained in. Two, they're following these steps perfectly and they actually have a checklist that, and they can't proceed until everything is checked off. Yes, all this stuff adds a lot of time, a lot of expense and a lot of wasted money. But how much money do you put on the price of four living human beings that are doing work that will generate tens of millions of dollars for your company.

Kara: 1:55:55

Yeah, I'd say it's worth it.

Ed: 1:55:58

So yeah, that is the Byford Dolphin incident. Yikes, yeah, it's a dumpster fire that happened. Start to finish before you could even understand what's going on. It's the fastest dumpster fire I've ever talked about. So, yeah, that's a rough one, well, good deal I guess, yeah, good good deal, bad deal like uh.

Kara: 1:56:29

However you want to word that I I don't know how to segue out of that, so I know on a lighter note like hey, let's check out, yeah website's up to date as of the time of this recording.

Kara: 1:56:43

All the episodes are there and all of that good stuff. So if you want to go check it out, it is at thedaystumpsterfirecom. You can also email us there. You can shoot us a message on Instagram at thedaystumpsterfire. If you have any ideas or suggestions or whatever. You can reach us in either of those ways. Or we have a little link on the show notes where you can click that and you can send us a text message and it'll go directly to us and we can see it. So that's another option think I have right now but uh, don't forget to check out kara's artwork.

Kara: 1:57:27

Yeah, that too uh km smalls dot draws over there on the instas yeah, she's the one that, if you look, look at our logo now.

Ed: 1:57:37

Uh, kara drew our dumpster fire logo with, like, our heads on fire. It looks pretty sick I, I like it a lot. So, uh, kara tends to well, she could draw anything, but she can do theme based stuff pretty well. Like, like. I'd be curious to see what your artwork would look like for the bifurcated dolphin.

Kara: 1:58:03

I don't know if I would make artwork for it. To be honest, there are certain, certain topics that I won't do.

Ed: 1:58:11

I mean, I can see you like drawing like an, like an oil rig, right, and you have like a tiny little decompression chamber up there and then you see like the diving bell, like flying out into the ocean yeah, it's just, and maybe even put that like this flies out there. Uh, we don't need to be drawing body parts all over the place, but yeah, no, carrie does a lot of theme stuff for our episodes which we upload onto the website. I wouldn't mind getting a shop going for that, because her stuff is is. It's pretty incredible, like my home office recording thing. I've got like one, two, three, four, five.

Ed: 1:58:54

I got yeah, I got six pieces of her work Dang Hanging up in my office. I know you can't see it because I got my sound barrier on there, but yeah, I got Zelda, I got Link, I got the 20 episode one that you gave me for my birthday. I've got your Deadpool one and then I've got Napoleon the Napoleon one or the Deadpool ones, one that you drew up for me when you left our previous job. You remember you did drawings for everybody. Yeah.

Kara: 1:59:23

It's up after some years.

Ed: 1:59:26

Yeah, so it's like a kind of a weird Kara's art shrine in here. I don't know how I feel about that. Hey, I'm not praying to it, so that's true. But, yeah, make sure you check out her artwork. We want to get a shop going for her because her stuff is really really good. Be sure to remind people about the show Physically. Grab their phones, sign them up for it.

Ed: 1:59:51

We can be found anywhere. We're on Amazon, we're on iTunes, we're on Spotify, we are, you know, anywhere you get your podcasts. Yeah, yeah, podcast Addict, that's the one that I use a lot. I'm going to be experimenting with Pocket Casts here pretty soon. That's another one that's really popular.

Ed: 2:00:12

So, yeah, wherever you get your podcasts, you can also go to our website and get them. In fact, that's probably the easiest way. So, like, if you go to our website today's them to firecom, you can click on the actual episode itself, listen to it there, and that way you don't have to deal with ads and all that stuff like Spotify likes to put in Um or you can. You can find us on a buzz prep. We also have it on there. So, uh, if you go to either place like, that helps our numbers, that helps us get found. You can leave reviews. You can yeah, you don't have to give us money to support the show. You can tell people about us and leave reviews, leave comments, give us suggestions and, yeah, spread the good word, because if you're having a bad day, just remember it's not a bifur dolphin disaster day. Yeah, that's fair. So, yeah, in the meantime, keep it a hot mess. Bye, thank you. You.