The Byford Dolphin Incident of 1983 | Episode 32

Today, we're going to make you afraid of water and invertebrates and working. We've covered a lot of bad day of work episodes, but this is by far the worst one we've ever done. And we don't just mean by blood volume, we mean by pure existential horror. Enjoy Hello, and welcome to Doomsday Histories Most Dangerous Podcast. Together we are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and non inspiring, but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we are going to explore a job so difficult there are less than four hundred people on the planet who can do it. You're going to hear about the forced expulsion of a thraco abdominal cavity, and you're going to hear the term meat balloon used contextually. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating or even a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life, our work is done. So lull that said, shoe the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. I'm just going to jump right into this. We have talked about some terrible stuff on this program. We've talked about bad days at work, bad places to work, dangerous places to work. But today's story stands alone. We've delved into some history's worst tales of unexpected tragedy and blood loss, but this is the bloodiest episode ever, not by volume, but by indescribable visceral horror. Yeah, it's out there. As of the time of this recording, more than fifty percent of workers are actively looking to change their jobs. This episode may convince you that your job really isn't that bad. Today, we're going to discuss saturation divers a job best described like this. Imagine working in a hostile place that sunlight never reaches and where temperatures can plunge to a few degrees above freezing. All your off hours are spent in a tiny, cramped metal tube, breathing a mixture of gases that make it hard for you to speak and constantly SAPs the heat from your body, giving you a permanent chill. Imagine eating meals delivered through a tiny hatch and catching a few hours of sleep before your next shift begins. Now, imagine being on shift and living like this for months at a time, oh and the entire time. If you try to leave, you will be killed in the worst way possible. It sounds like the kind of job listing you'd barely finish reading, but the pay. Saturation diving is one of the most dangerous jobs you can think of, and if your guidance counselor cared about kids, they would try to steer you away from it. But saturation divers can make up to forty five thousand dollars a month. So before I teach you about how compressible you are, I think I should start with scaring you about the ocean. A lot of you already have a healthy distrust of the ocean. You walk into the surf and you might think you've entered a joy filled paradise. I see it as you have now entered the epiphalagic zone. That's the ocean's skin. You've only begun to touch the first of the ocean's abyssle zones. That's short for abyssopalagic, and it is as bad as it sounds. It comes from the Latin for bottomless, and each of these zones comes with their own unique characteristics around pressure temperature, salinity, biodiversity, and depth. The average depth of the ocean is twelve thousand, four hundred feet. Sunlight only penetrates about the first three hundred and thirty feet of water, and that means most of our planet is covered by a dense, wet blanket of darkness. And not just that, no sunlight means no photosynthesis, which means there are no plants in the deep ocean, which, to extend that logic weeds there are no vegetarians below three hundred and thirty feet. Earth's oceans and outer space are both terrifyingly life threatening, and people have debated which is worse for years. I mean, space tries to kill you passively, but the ocean is full of things that will go out of their way to actively try to kill you. They both want to kill you on contact. But the only thing is scary in space are alien oceans made out of arsenic or fire or whatever. And when you think of aliens or even the scariest beast of the jungle, nothing compares to ocean life. You think the ocean is the shark's house and you should probably stay out of it, but you're wrong. Fang tooths, goblin sharks and crazy light bulbfish are scarier than anything on the big screen, and we keep discovering more crap as we go along. We live on the same planet as something called the vampire squid, and if you've never googled the Japanese spider crab, are missing out. And nothing touches the jellyfish. I mean, lots of things touch jellyfish, and they all have an interesting and venomous, if short lived experience. What I meant was the oceans are chopped full of them, and their body count is five times higher than sharks. The box jellyfish is the most venomous creature on Earth. And it's not just things wrapping tentacles or jaws full of razor sharp teeth around you. Even the water itself can go for you. A few years ago, a woman was dipping her feet in the ocean off Myrtle Beach. Some parts of the ocean are teeming with bacteria, and not the good kinds. Bacteria has been devouring the Titanic for years. Closer to the surface, that woman developed necrotizing fasciitis, the kind of stuff that lives to break you down into calories, but diseases too. Scientists aren't exactly sure how plaguy the ocean really is, but so far hepatitis, Legionnaire's disease, MRSA, gastroenteritis, and pink eye are all on the menu. And if you ask why, is because humans treat the ocean like trash can We have seen one hundred percent of the Moon and Mars surfaces, but we barely understand five percent of our own oceans. So let's take a quick dip past the shoreline. Most people are never going to go in water deeper than their own head. Second class divers are qualified down to about one hundred and fifty feet. First class divers can go to about three hundred feet. That said, there have been stories of divers surviving ridiculous steps, of course, not without side effects, and that's kind of an important blanket statement for the show. Survival comes in shades. It's kind of like a spectrum of before and after photos. The deepest dive ever by a human being on record is one thousand eighty two feet, set by Ahmed Gabar in twenty fourteen, an amazing guy. But free divers like Herman Nich replicate these stunts, just holding their breath the deepest he ever dove, The deepest anyone has ever free dove, was seven hundred and two feet. And if you ever asked me, what do you feel like doing today, in no part of the multiverse will you find a version of me saying, Hey, let's go set a diving record. Not true for James Cameron, of course. In twenty twelve, he spent six months doing yoga so he could contort himself into a giant green missile of a sub to travel to the depths of the Challenger Deep Shorthand. It's the deepest part of the ocean that we know of. It's in the Mariana trench sets off Guam runs about seven miles or eleven kilometers deep. The only other humans to ever venture this far were Jacques Picard and Don Walsh. They visited it fifty years earlier. You want to know how much pressure is down there, Imagine having the weight of three Dodge caravans balanced on every inch of your body. This kind of pressure actually shrank their sub. Cameron made it down for a few hours before a gasket blue and he had to resurface the cart and Walsh booked it after one of their windows cracked from the pressure. So yeah, space is scary, obviously, but it isn't trying to eat you or implode you or spit you out. The ocean, on the other hand, is described as a cruel and beautiful arena of death. I've heard it described as a watery murder dungeon. And by the numbers, people are more comfortable dying in the cold, unfeeling vacuum of space than having their remains eaten by bacteria and deep sea dwellers and the lightless abyss of the sea. Oh you know all those little light flakes you see snowing around in footage of the deep ocean. You know what that is. It's organic particles like the dandruff of dead creatures and the ocean creatures that eat it. They look like nightmares. But somehow what we see is nightmarish evolution from a different planet. Nature sees as a perfect adaptation to their awful environment. Although snaggle teeth and bioluminescent lures and gelatinous flesh actually check a lot of boxes. Back in the nineteen sixties, the world sat in awe as the US and the USSR fought to put people into the vast horrific emptiness of space. No one was paying attention to the other scientists learning to survive in the numbing cold and pressure beneath the waves. Experiments all the way back in the nineteen thirties showed that after a certain time at pressure underwater, a body actually becomes saturated with inert gas. Apparently a saturated diver can hang out at depth indefinitely. We'll get into all that. The US Navy created Sea Lab back in nineteen sixty four to study all this. Sea Lab aquanauts could move effortlessly between their pressurized underwater home and the surrounding water. All they have to do is decompress at the end, and it's not much warmer than nice. So these guys are not exactly doing this in speedos or aquatic thongs. So you rock a pressure suit and this is strong enough to keep the protective bubble of gas around you equal to the water pressure outside. So that's great, But even the lightest malfunction can create a vacuum inside the suit, reducing the wearer into a kind of semi gelatinous paste. Knowing all this, the Sea Lab program was a way of understanding the physical tolls of trying along with all the psychological damage a human can absorb before they turn into a kind of deep sea jack. Torrents populaction go crazy. Today, commercial divers around the world live inside saturation systems, mostly on ships or rakes. So why don't people want to do this job. Let's get into the dangers of spending too much time in an environment that doesn't care about you. While a diver is still on land, they're said to be on the beach. For comparison, Once they're in a diving chamber, they're said to be in storage. And back on the beach, a column of air the shape of you from your shoulders all the way to space, hangs above you. We call that one atmosphere, or about fourteen point seven pounds per square inch, pressing down on every inch of you. Water works the same way. For every thirty three feet you go down, you feel another fourteen point seven pounds. That's cool and all, but eventually all that added pressure makes it kind of hard to breathe. Our bones and our non compressible parts. They barely care. But say your sinuses, or your ears, or your eyes or your lungs, for example, ooh, they very much do. As a diver, if you can increase the pressure inside your squishy parts, you can keep them from getting squished. It's a balancing act. The further you go down, the more pressure and the more counter pressure needed the balance out to keep you safe. So you're a diver, you're below the surface, and you're breathing from a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, and those gases get dissolved in your blood the same way carbon hydes in a can of pop. You give it a shake and pop the lid, and you've equalized the air pressure, and now all that hidden carbonation goes shawshank. Now you're not a soda, but if you come up too fast from the depths, the SAME's going to happen. But in your blood stream, and all these tiny bubbles come and loose can cause crippling joint pain, strokes, paralysis, even death. They call it decompression sickness. In sixteen seventy, Sir Robert Boyle put a snake in a vacuum chamber and then sucked all the air out. He noted that the snake reacted like it was in a penis pump. Then eventually it started to blister, and this was the first recorded case of decompression sickness. Humans have been diving back beneath the water for thousands of years, but it wasn't until the invention of compressed air that things really started to open up for them. Underground miners were the first to be described with the ailment, which remained a mystery for years. They call it the benz because it curls you up in pain. And here's the question, if you found yourself doing a little offshore adventuring, would do you know how to keep yourself safe? Scuba diving increases in popularity every year. The Professional Association of Diving Instructors and the National Association of Underwater Instructors are two organizations that certify individuals to become recreational divers. According to the Divers Alert Network, there were forty one cases of decompression sickness out of one hundred and thirty seven thousand recorded dives. So according to the numbers, as long as you follow the rules, your chances are about one in thirty five hundred that you'll develop the bends as a diver to censor the depths, the pressure all around them increases owing to the weight of the ocean pressing on their bodies. The divers have to adjust as they move up or down. Decompression sickness happens when you change that pressure too fast. It can cause excruciating pain, confusion, paralysis, even death. Like we said, and once diagnosed, decompression sickness can require a long stint in a recompression chamber. You know, to readjust based on severity. What you initially wanted to do was come up slow. It lets the bubbles form and release through your lungs naturally over time. Think of it like when you just open a cap on a bottle to let some of the carbon out slowly. It's exact same idea. And like we said, though, the longer or deeper you go, the longer it takes. So if a deep sea diver spend an hour more than three hundred feet down, it would take two full days sitting in a decompression chamber to fully decompress. Decompress too quick, and the air expanding in your lungs can and will burst the tiny litt layer sacs that make breathing such a successful habit Till now, same thing in your blood, all the compressed gas in your blood wants to expand a bubble. An air bubble and an artery can cause a blockage or embolue that can shut off your organs. An air bubble in the wrong place can result in a heart attack or a stroke. Nitrogen narcosis is a kind of disorienting euphoria caused by breathing nitrogen at pressure. They describe it like being drunk, but it's not all fun and games. This is the kind of drunk that might make you think you can breathe underwater, so you remove your regulator, bearing that it's really not uncommon to have a headache after you dive, but if you experience anything really out of the ordinary, tell someone. Type one symptoms usually revolve around musculo skeletal pain, rashes, itching, swollen or painful nodes in your armpits, and behind your ears a crotch. Type two symptoms are a little more potentially life threatening. Ringing in your ears or tonight's or hearing loss can lead to vertigo and nausea. Doesn't sound so bad until you start to appear confused and you may be unable to support your own body weight. These could be neurological symptoms. If you develop a dry cough or any difficulties breathing that is a cardiopulmonary symptom. As post dive symptoms go, these are the ones that could prove immediately life threatening. You need to find yourself in a hyperbaric chamber. They seal you in, change the internal pressure to whatever you were before you surface too fast, and they give you a second chance to decompress at the right speed. And here's the thing about finding yourself in a bend situation. Ego plays a part in diving, and a lot of divers make excuses and hide symptoms. But if this is you, if you don't feel well, tell someone. It could save your life. We said before, how we all breathe a mix of oxygen with hydrogen, a little nitrogen, and kind of trace gases. Let me just call it air. But that's land lubber talk. Did you know the further you travel underwater, the more our beloved oxygen actually becomes toxic Saturation Divers breathe helios or trimix. I know they sound like lawn fertilizers, but they're actually a mixture of helium with oxygen and a little nitrogen, which helps avoid nitrogen narcosis. But that comes with its own problems. Never suck on a helium balloon ever. Imagine listening to that voice for a month. Divers sometimes have to wear electronic descramblers to be understood because the helium makes their voices so cartoonish. Helium also doesn't hold heat all that well, so divers are constantly shedding body heat, which means they have an impossible time staying warm. Breathing helium at depths below three hundred meters can also produce severe neurological effects known as high pressure neurological syndrome. They used to call it high pressure nervous syndrome, and it brings anything from a headache to tremors to full on psychiatric freakouts. And it's not just the potential thread of becoming uncontrollably wacky winging over you the whole time. Don't forget about the existential dread and exhausting claustrophobia. Today's story takes us to the Kingdom of Norway, the land of countless Fiords, reindeer, and winter Olympians. Norway is, by all accounts, home to more natural beauty than almost anywhere on Earth. It's no real wonder why they use it as the model for Viking Heaven. Now, let me tell you something quick about Norway. The King's Royal Guards Colonel in chief is a penguin named Niles Olaf, the third penguins from the Edinburgh Zoo in Scotland have held the role for fifty years. People salute him and he even walks the line to inspect the troops, and he wears a little epaulet on his wing to signify his rank. It's sweet and it's cute, and that's pretty much the last sweet or cute thing you're gonna hear. I just wanted you to have one nice memory from today's show. We are leaving the stunning scenery, the mountains, the fjords, the beaches, and heading about two hundred and thirty kilometers or one hundred and forty miles off shore. Why see Back in the nineteen seventies, the world faced a kind of oil crisis. Without getting into it, a bunch of stuff went down in the Middle East, oil supplies got weird, lineups at gas stations went all mad Max, and offshore oil and gas rigs popped up everywhere like Starbucks. Everyone was searching for cheaper supply and because of that. Today we're visiting the frig gas field the what ew why well, not all oil fields are you know fields. The frig lies on the bottom of the ocean right on the subseeed border between Norway and England, beneath the North Sea. Norway discovered oil on its continental shelf back in nineteen seventy one, and the period the fall of that saw a rush for oil in the North Sea. It's a shallow arm of the Atlantic that sits between the British Isles in northwestern Europe, leading towards the Arctic Shallows. Relative of course, the frig oil field sits at a depth of about eight hundred and fifty meters that's just over six thousand feet deep. They named it after Frig the all mother and Queen of Asgard, wife of Odin and mother of thor Rene Russo Plazer in the movies. We're going to spend our time aboard a semi submersible offshore oil raid called the Buyford Dolphin. It was built by Aker Engineering in nineteen seventy four and weighed about three three thousand tons or six million pounds or fifteen hundred dodge caravans. I'm sure you can picture one. You've got a set of legs, a huge flat surface with a kind of industrial city scape of modules for everything from crew quarters to drilling equipment, all perched above. Trying to drill in the ocean is not that much fun. Trying to drill from a boat is a wobbly mess. Trying to secure a platform to the bottom in deep water can be prohibitively difficult and expensive. So they came up with a hybrid semi submersible platform. They could just drag around with tugboats and set up wherever you like. When you picture an oil rig at sea with the likes disappearing beneath the waves, they're actually attached to a complex of pontoons stabilizer tanks. Then when you think of a drawing of one, you imagine a single well lined leading from each platform all the way to the bottom. But wells dot these fields. A single rig mite service wells five or six miles away. To borrow an idea, it's a bit like drinking a milkshake with a dozen straws at once. Commercial diver are needed to service the network of wells and rigs and pipelines and remotely operated vehicles they just don't have that finesse. The rig was home to a sophisticated saturated diving system, came with its own subsea managers, dive supervisors, life support supervisors, life support technicians, basically everybody that you need to help you breathe and eat and supply personal necessities. They even have to help you remotely flush the toilet. That's its own story, and it really makes these people sound like astronauts. And the comparison is closer than you think. Let's take a look at our workspace. The layout of the saturation system here was said to be roomy compared to others. But you enter the first hatch into a tiny round room known as the wet pot. From there we visit the living space. And I'm saying all this in quotes, which has been repeatedly referred to as being about the same size as a booth at Applebee's, or something about using a booth at Applebee's as a unit of measurement. That kind of appeals. Once you're hunger down, the heliox has increased, which fill your lungs and saturates your tissues until they're basically equal to the pressure outside. From there, you went to a diving bell or a transfer capsule, which is similarly pressurized, and you travel to whatever work site needs you. Imagine being at the bottom of the ocean trying to swing a hammer or torque wrench in a big, ugly suit. It's difficult ass work. It requires incredible focus, and the water is black. You can't see sht. Your helmet has a divelight, but that can actually make things worse, like high beams and a blizzard down there. The top side dive supervisor's voice in their helmet guides and troubleshoots for them, but ultimately they are all alone and time has no real meaning under the sea. In the decompression chamber aboard the bi for Dolphin, two Norwegian divers were being put in storage. Bjorn Bergenson twenty nine and Truls Helvic thirty four were just arriving from their shift aboard the transfer bell. The capsule was hoisted aboard the Dolphin from the deep and docked to the dry chamber. It was four in the morning and they were just finishing up, so yeah, time. Berginson and Hellovic entered well crawled really into the dry chamber through a short and narrow connective tunnel called a trunk. They left their wack gear and the trunken set up camp in Chamber two. Two British divers Edward Coward thirty five and Roy Lucas thirty eight, were already chilling in Chamber one. Four am could be lunchtime for these guys. For all we know, the tender welcome them aboard. Dive tenders are the personnel working most closely with the divers in storage. William Crammon and Martin Saunders were tending the divers this night, and even though they were only feet apart, the tenders and the divers might as well be on different planets. The pressure difference is so intense our brains aren't designed to really appreciate it. Chamber two was connected to Chamber one, and they were both connected to the diving bell. It's held against the incredible pressure with powerful clamps operated by the tenders on the outside. With the divers on board and the bell no longer needed, the decoupling process goes like this. The diving bell doors closed, the diving tender slightly increases the pressure in the bell to seal it nice and tight. Then they closed the chamber door so the trunckunk is sealed from both ends, The trunk gets depressurized to regular room pressure, and just like that, the bell and the decompression chamber can be safely separated. The clamp is released, and the diving bell is free to go back to work. It's a simple, but incredibly important and dangerous five step process. Step three takes some help from one of the divers in course to seal the chamber from inside. Before everything separated, the bell's door had been closed and pressurized, and just as Helovic was about to seal the door to the chamber, it exploded. Crammond released the clamp holding the hack shut while the chamber door was still open. He accidentally jumped straight to step five. The date was November fifth, nineteen eighty three. Elevik had been about to close the door when the entire decompression chamber explosively decompressed. So what does that mean? This is the least upsetting way I can say this. You can be injured if you aren't able to adjust the pressure on your body while breathing compressed air. Ugh. Okay, so the tank the men were in held nine times as much air as the space outside it, so they went from a pressure of nine atmospheres to one in a fraction of a second. Going from one hundred and thirty pounds of pressure per square inch to almost fifteen in a moment is a hell of a party. Trick Halloween party maybe. Back in nineteen ninety six, NASA had this vacuum chamber they designed to test spacesuits. Jim LeBlanc was testing a Gemini spacesuit when he entered the vacuum chamber, but his pressure hose disconnected and in ten seconds all of the oxygen leaked from a suit. He lasted about another four seconds and could feel the saliva boiling off his tongue before he finally blacked out. But what happened here aboard the Buyfer Dolphin was nearly instantaneous. You know what happens when you put mentos in a half liter bottle of diet coke. Can you imagine if the same thing happened to your blood, like all your blood at the same time. For the men inside the chamber, their blood literally boiled as nine atmospheres of compressed gas tried to exit their bodies. The effect caused all the fat and proteins and their veins and arteries to congeal and cook like sizzling butter on a fry pan. So you know, the body holds five liters of blood, and all that blood ideally wants to stay inside the skin. People have described what happened to the men as some of the grotesque and excruciating deaths of all time, excruciating but fast. But for Helvic, I'm sure his blood freaked out too, and that's terrible. But Hellvic had been standing by the hatch. He was just about to seal it when it blew open. And when it did blow open, it ripped the bell off the chamber, which can weigh thousands of pounds, and scent it flying contact with cram and killed him instantly. Saunders was terribly injured, but amazingly he would survive. But for Helvic, let me say this, there are three things that determine just how horrific an accident like this can be. The size of the pressurized vessel you're sitting in, the difference between the pressure inside versus outside, and the size of the leak or the whole. The hatch between the egg and the chamber was a very snug twenty four inches in diameter, and if Helvic had just been a little shorter than twenty four inches, he could have been cleanly blown out of the chamber, but he wasn't. What he was was exposed to the highest pressure gradient of all the divers. The other divers had been situated where the air wanted to leave, but he had been standing where it wanted to go. He was exposed to about twenty five tons or fifty thousand pounds of air pressure trying to squeeze past him. I'm trying to think of the best way to say this. For all intents, a human body is a bit like a skin balloon full of meat. The rushing air forced Helvik through the hatch. Make an imaginary two foot circle in front of you, now imagine standing in front of it and being forced through it. In the blink of an eye. Helvic was folded and violently had his appendages dismembered. His treatment by the air completely bisected him, and it forced the expulsion of his thrasco abdominal cavity. All the organs from his chest an abdomen had been ejected and spread around the rig. The report used the term complete disintegration. In other words, meat balloon. All of it was found thirty feet above the exterior pressure door. Most of his spine was found dangling from a derek above the chamber like history's worst missiletoe. His liver managed to escape in such good condition they thought it looked autopsy good. My guess is if you have one perfect organ surrounded by viscera that looks like something out of that annual Latomatina Tomato Bay street fight they hold in Spain every year. Yeah. His trachea and a bit of a small intestine and spine remained behind, but the body itself was reduced to the kind of thing you could spread out and reorganize countless ways without successfully identifying it as a body. Telvik's remains were sent for post mortem exam in four plastic bags. His scalp still had his long blonde hairdoo, but the top of his skull and brain were missing. His face was found separately, as well as one of his knees. His various feet, hands, and lip were so damaged. I seriously can't even get into it without turning this into an hour long episode. His pelvis was trisected looking down from the neck through the larying sin of the chest. Cavity. You could see your own hand waving from you know where his stomach used to be. But what about his junk? Ever hear of the term invagination. His penis was turned inside out or folded back on itself to become a kind of cavity or pouch. And I gotta say, the number of similarities between this story and our first ever episode on America's first nuclear accident are surprising. So what the hell happened? Well, it wasn't Krammon's first day. He'd done this before, but somewhere between steps two and three he finked up. He accidentally released the diving bell clamp before Helvik had sealed the inside chamber door. It blew open so hard it had to be removed with an acettlene torch. Investigators didn't think that anything malicious or purposeful had happened, but Cramon died, so we'll never really know what he did or why he did it. It concluded that fatigue and deck noise must have confused them, which led to a miscommunication that led to the disaster. They booked it all down to human error, and the concerned parties, like the families, they never found out the details, which yea good for them, but that kind of thing raises questions, lots of questions. Somewhere near the top of the list, they wanted to know why when Norwegian oil and gas regulators recommended that diving chambers be fitted with interlocks and pressure gauges to prevent them from being accidentally disconnected while pressurized. How come, then, ever happen? Like what happened? Well, nothing happened, And that's kind of the point. You're probably familiar with the sad but all too common idea that, say, car companies or airlines will balk at safety measures hitting their bank sheets until they blow up in their faces. You know, the idea that if they figure out a repair or a tweak is going to cost X, but the lawsuits from doing nothing costs why. As long as why is less an X, then they just carry on. With the oil crisis in full swaying, oil companies were desperate to find new sources of oil, but not really highly motivated to find ways not to go broke while doing it. I know, it's easy to kick the oil companies around. They don't have any feelings. Well, what they do have is a long history of oversight errors and fiduciary mismanagement, ep oil spill anyone. It's entirely likely that they're in action could be chalked up to normalcy bias. The bad thing you're worried about hasn't happened before, so it's unlikely it's ever gonna happen. No big rush to get those extra valves. And hey, did you all just lose your hearing? Yeah? See, I thought about this a lot, and I cannot even begin to imagine the sound that was created during the disaster. But back to the money. With the report done and filed, guess what wasn't mentioned let alone deeply investigated the equipment itself. And if you think I'm being cynical, already check this out. It means they didn't have to pay the families of the divers any compensation. Sorry for your loss, but they brought it on themselves. They were told the accident happened after air escaped because gages had been tampered with. Well, I don't know wheny Norwegians swear, but the aggrieved families could have taught me. All of them. They were pissed, and they criticized the Norwegian government, claiming that they showed no remorse for the tragedy. One of the relatives said, we've never even received an apology and that's disgusting. We were told we did not meet the criteria for compensation. The families went ahead and formed the North Sea Divers Alliance and they sued the government to review the case. We ended up receiving a majority vote and now we are being granted the compensation, but it doesn't matter because no amount of money will be enough. The British families had it worse. They were stuck in a legal loophole that said that British citizens weren't registered in the Norwegian National Insurance Scheme, which basically means thanks for your interest, but the door is that way. The NSDA pushed up legal action all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. A core case had also been taken up against the government by twenty four former divers, questioning the morality of Norway's actions during the oil boom. The families of the divers claimed their loved ones were treated as human guinea pigs and were made to work thirteen hour shifts. The families of the dead spent many difficult decades fighting for What's Right. A statement by the Norwegian Labor Ministry said, the Norwegian state has not denied that the divers have been injured in a consequence of diving in relation to the petroleum activity in the North Sea. The state admits a responsibility on the basis of moral and political aspects, but does not acknowledge any legal liability. Then, in two thousand and eight, just twenty five years after the accident, the families finally received a settlement, but they didn't consider the eventual victory worth celebrating. Their lives could have been immeasurably improved if they'd received the compensation or the benefits that they were legally entitled to at the time of the accident. When they finally authorized payments, they didn't do it for the foreign divers. The families of many British divers killed in the North Sea over the years have never been tracked down or compensated. The Buy for Dolphin is still in operation. It's currently on conquer tracked with British Petroleum, so at least it's in good hands. As you know, this podcast could have just as easily been called the Bad Day of Work podcast, and we have covered some of the worst of the worst. But this was the worst of the worst of the worst. But unlike previous episodes, this is a bad day at a bad, extremely well compensated, but existentially horrific job. The history of diving is full of people who never came back from the depths. There's something about the isolation and discipline of working on the very edge of human capability that really appeals to people, you know, like one percent of one percent of one percent of people. Newer rigs have more safety systems and intelucks to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again. But as the search for oil in the North Sea starts to wrap up, the search for oil goes deeper and deeper, to the point where saturation divers are eventually gonna be unemployed and they're going to have to become like canyon motorcycle jumpers or something. They are a very small club, like astronauts, but only in their case no one's ever heard of them. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or you can fire us an email at doomsday pod at gmail dot com. Older episodes can be found wherever you found this one. And while you're there, Please leave us a review and tell your friends and don't forget. As a special offer, join our Patreon for any amount and receive a free bottle of Pecker Nectar to help make sure your Southern gentleman is a gentleman of good taste. Find out more at patreon dot com, slash Funeral Kazoo Orpecronectar dot com. If you want to support the ongoing production of the show, you can buy me a coffee at buy Me a Coffee dot com slash Doomsday. But if you can spare the money and had to choose, we ask you to consider making donation to Global Medic. Global Metic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They are often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy five different countries. You can learn more and donate a Globalmedic dot ca. On the next episode, We're gonna cheer things up a bit with a special episode that'll put a little glow in your heart and probably your feet, your hands, brains, all the soft tissues. Really, it's the Goana radiological Happening of nineteen eighty seven. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening.