The Byford Dolphin Accident
I am hosting the Carnival of the Blue today, Monday, the 5th of November. I thought it would be interesting to check Wikipedia to see if there was anything especially nautical or oceanic that happened on this day. What I found was rather grim.
The Byford Dolphin is a semi-submersible Norwegian oil exploration rig converted from a diving rig. It floats in the North Sea to find and drill crude oil deposits.
As a drilling rig, the Byford Dolphin is near the top of its class. It is equipped with advanced drilling equipment and has to meet very high levels of certification under Norwegian law. However, the rig has suffered some serious accidents, most notably an explosive decompression accident in 1983 known as the Byford Dolphin diving bell accident that killed five workers and badly injured one more.
At 4:00 AM on November 5, 1983, four divers were in a Decompression chamber system attached to a diving bell on the rig, being assisted by two dive tenders. One diver was about to close the door between the chamber system and the trunk when the chamber was explosively decompressed from a pressure of 9 atm to 1 atm in a fraction of a second. Five of the men were killed; the other was severely injured.
If you want to read what happens next, click the link. It’s pretty grisly. And a reminder of the risks that diving and exploration entail.
- Wikipedia: Byford Dolphin
wow…
the description on the provided link leaves very little to the imagination… while i’ve always heard about explosive decompression (mostly from movies) i never really thought about the effect that violently changing pressure would have on a human body…
well, now i know…
note to self: always securely wrap myself in duct tape before entering norwegian submersibles…
The “Wikipedia” entry you have linked to provides a very poor and hopelessly inaccurate version of events. In examining the actual causes of the accident it became extremely convenient to place the blame firmly on the shoulders of one of the men who died and who could not therefore defend himself.
The “accident” was put down to “human error”, which is correct but the areas in which “human error” played a part were rather wider spread than the “official report” mentions. Incompetence, negligence and human error existed in the following organisations which were actually tasked with safeguarding the diving operations being conducted from the Byford Dolphin:
- The Diving Inspectorate of the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate;
- The “Operating Company” responsible for the North-East Frigg Field Development, ELF AQUITAINE NORGE AS.
- Master, Safety Officer and Company Safety Department of Fred Olsen Shipping subsidiary Dolphin Drilling AS.
- The Management and Safety Department of COMEX NORGE AS the diving company responsible for diving operations onboard Byford Dolphin.
If personnel employed by the above organisations had actually done their jobs the “accident” would never have happened.
Other contributary factors:
- Fatigue
- Missing and broken equipment
- Alterations to procedures imposed by broken and missing equipment
The “Wikipedia” article also gives passing mention to an engineering failure and to corrective actions introduced after the “accident”. This part of the article is complete and utter rubbish.
Old Diver - Thanks for stopping by and leaving such a detailed message here. However, I also encourage you to join Wikipedia and help with writing the Byford entry. Remember, Wikipedia is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” If the information you have can be supported with authenticated sources, then your contribution will go a long way to improving the information there and make it hopefully more accurate.
Interesting, this article just came up in my aggregator today:
Norwegian court overturns lawsuit by divers