Five Divers Suffered Most Gruesome Death Imaginable In Accident At Oil Rig

Five individuals tragically and horrifyingly lost their lives in an incident on a tricky diving rig.

If there's one thing that human history has taught us, it's that death can come in a lot of horrible ways.

However, five "saturation divers" operating close to the Byford Dolphin Oil Rig on November 5, 1983, met a very horrible end in an event.

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

Technical divers work on oil rigs, conducting underwater maintenance and construction. Getty Images

An oxygen and nitrogen mixture specifically designed for deep diving must be used.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is unknown exactly why the diving bell was discharged before the doors were completely closed, but we do know that it did.

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

The placement of the people in the capsule. Wiki

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

William Crammond was murdered by the diving bell after he was struck while working as a tender.

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

The swift depressurization caused the nitrogen that was saturated their blood to burst inside of them like bubbles.

However, one diver suffered a particularly horrific end.

This is because his body was "fragmented" as a result of the pressure from the depressurization forcing it through a 60-cm hole.

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

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