As a lot of you probably know, I'm terrified of the ocean. And while most of my reasons for being terrified of it come down to its size or the things that live inside of it, the ocean is so terrifying that sometimes you don't even have to be in it for it to kill you. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Because in 1983, one of the most gruesome deaths in recorded history took place. What began as a normal workday became one of the most brutal stories in nautical and industrial history.
And perhaps what's most terrifying about this story is that something so horrific can happen by simple miscommunication and physics. Hello everybody. Today we're going to be talking about the Biford Dolphin incident.
If you've been around on YouTube for any length of time, then you've almost certainly heard of this story. It gets covered on every scary ocean like top 10 list. It gets covered when people are talking about the most gruesome deaths imaginable. It also gets talked a lot in a bunch of scientific communities just for how bizarre the scenario was. And I kind of want to look at it from every angle at once.
There's a lot of interesting things that happened on the scientific side of things, and a lot of sad horrific things that happened on the human error side of things, as well as developments in the past several years that point to cover-ups and potentially figuring out what was responsible. I'm going to put a big viewer discretion over this entire video as well. I'm not going to be showing any of the autopsy images.
or anything too graphic, but I am going to be reading from things like the coroner's report, which is pretty heavy. So if you're uncomfortable with that, you may want to skip this one. We've got a lot of ground to cover.
I've got some chess pieces to lay out to make everything make sense in the end, but if you're interested in hearing about something absolutely terrible, then stick around after the ads as we get into the Biford Dolphin incident. And this ad is important because it's not only a really cool poster for Stalker Shadow of the Zone. but also early access to the film. We've once again partnered with Invis, the same people who brought my Legacy of the Wendigo and Legacy of the Mothman posters, to bring you a movie poster for Shadow of the Zone. The posters come in this size, an 18x24 as well as a smaller 11x17 size, with a hundred of the 18x24s being signed by myself, Evan Royalty, Stephen Hancock, and Josh Gray, the entire creative team behind the film.
And as mentioned, along with your purchase of this poster, you unlock early access to the movie. That's because with your purchase of a poster, you'll be able to watch Shadow of the Zone on Enviz's website. Now to clarify, the movie itself is still free. It's gonna come out late October, plans for that haven't changed. We just figured if you guys are going to support us now by getting a poster, we might as well find a way for you to actually watch the movie that you bought the poster for.
So for a limited time, if you buy the poster, you can watch the movie directly on Enviz's website. And because the movie is still early access, I kindly ask that you keep spoilers to yourself, at least for now. But for now, we still want it to be something special and hopefully worth the wait.
So again, if you get these posters while they're available, they'll only be on sale for a limited amount of time and then they're gone forever, especially the 100 signed ones. then head to the link in the description at invis tv slash collection slash sotz or shadow of the zone to get in on this exclusive offer while you can. So check out the poster if you're interested and hopefully enjoy the film.
If you weren't able to get into one of the live shows or can't wait till October, we wanted some way for you all who have been supporting us up to this point to get to see what all of our hard work and your money went to and hopefully you enjoy it. And again, for the support on everything involving the film and pretty much everything else I do, it means the world. I don't deserve it and you all are a blessing.
It means a lot. So that's enough for that product placement. Let's move on to our other product placement. And it's a new brand this time and it's really cool. It's not just the same 14 things over and over.
I can adapt sometimes. Over the past year, I've been trying to watch my weight. And for the most part, I'm pretty happy with the results.
And while I attribute the majority of my weight loss to exercising every morning, another big factor in losing weight is watching what I eat. Which is why I'm a huge fan of today's sponsor, Control. Control spelled C-T-R-L just like a keyboard.
Get it. video game reference, is here to give you a healthier eating option while tasting good as well. Control's primary product is their meal replacement drink.
And to be honest, when I heard about the company, I was very suspicious because I have tried a ton of these meal replacement or protein drinks. So I tried my first sample of Control. It was this one, the cinnamon toast flavor. And it was the only protein drink I think I've ever had that actually tasted as it was advertised. And while I would normally feel guilty about snacking, with Control I don't have to, because each serving contains 23 grams of protein and 8 grams of fiber, along with 22 vitamins and minerals, while only having 230 calories and only 1 gram of sugar.
And one of the reasons Control is able to taste that good while being that healthy is because its formula contains real inclusions. And while I use 2% milk for my mix, it works just the same with almond milk. oat milk, or even cold water. The meal replacement shake is great for a meal or to hold you over till the next one, and of course is far healthier than any junk food. On top of that, Control even has their protein cookies, including this recent collab that they did with Rainbow Six, because their cookies, just like their shakes, are loaded with proteins and include real ingredients like peanut butter or chocolate.
Again, not enough to be unhealthy, but just enough to taste how it's supposed to. The same can be said about Control's protein meal bars, which taste a lot like the cereal bars you probably grew up with as a kid, you know minus all the sugar and stuff and the current weight of dying nostalgia. Control is cool because it's a healthy and delicious alternative to a bad diet.
Having a healthy lifestyle is hard enough, but now you've got a friend in your corner, so let Control help you take control of your diet today. They didn't ask me to say that. That's not a tagline or anything.
I just came up with that while I was sitting here. And right now, if you're interested in control, then there's never been a better time to get in on the offer. That's because right now, if you head to the link in the description at drinkcontrol.com slash windigoon, you will be able to get your control order for 10% off.
That is right, 10% off. What's really cool too is if you go to the website and do the bundle option where you bundle like five items together to get 20% off, you can do the windigoon discount. on top of that. So once again, that's drinkcontroldrinkctrl.com slash windigoon to get in on this incredible offer today. Thank you all so much for watching the ad.
Thank you so much to Control for sponsoring this video. It's a product I really care about and you're definitely going to see more of in the future. So it really does mean the most.
Hope you all check them out. Link is in the description and we are back to the video. We are going to go ahead and get into it, but as always, thank you for watching. Well, to start off, what was the buy for Dolphin? while the Biford Dolphin was an oil drilling rig located off the coast of Norway in the North Sea.
The rig is what is known as a semi-submersible, meaning that not only is the rig itself mobile, but it can be raised and lowered in the water through a series of ballasts. The rig is also a feat of engineering. Not only is it massive, but it can operate in waters as deep as 1,500 feet and drill as deep as 2,000 feet. Despite its impressive construction, the Biford Dolphin would be no stranger to accidents. The first accident would occur on March the 1st of 1976, when the Biford Dolphin, at the time named the Deep Sea Driller, would run aground in the North Sea, causing the entire rig to list.
In the following evacuation, a group of six people would make their way to a lifeboat that would then capsize. And in the capsizing, all six of the crew members were killed. Now this accident has nothing in relation to the accident we're going to be focusing on today, and none of the mechanical pieces carry over from one to the other. This is just to say that things had already gone very wrong on the rig before.
The rig was rated to hold a 102 person crew, and while I'm sure a lot of the occupations on the rig were dangerous, the four we're going to be talking about today were especially so. And that's because, at least in 1983, Four of the people operating on the Biford Dolphin were saturation divers. And you may be asking yourself, well what's a saturation diver? Well, oil drilling operations like that of the Biford Dolphin are complicated.
Not only are there a ton of different systems to keep the rig steady above water, but there's a lot going on under the water as well. Several anchor points, as well as the mechanism of the drill itself, are all located on the seafloor. So if any maintenance is needed or anything needs to be adjusted with this equipment, it can be pretty difficult. And the hard part isn't that this requires someone to go underwater, it's that this requires someone to go under a lot of water.
Even if you have oxygen and all the appropriate equipment, anyone who's been a diver can tell you As you add depth, you add problems. See, as you go deeper and deeper into the water, the pressure becomes greater and greater. And while we have diving suits and equipment to get around that, one of the things we can't get around is the need to breathe.
See, when you're very deep underwater, you're not only affected by the pressure around you, but the gases in the air you breathe are affected as well. See, when we're above water, we breathe in a lot of gases like oxygen, nitrogen, and what have you, and then exhale them and everything's fine. However, when you're under pressure, those gases get into your system and then have a hard time getting out.
Things like nitrogen begin to build up in your blood vessels and circulatory system. And while this can be fine on the way down, it's not fine on the way back up. That's because as you begin to swim up and ergo reduce the pressure your system's under, All of the nitrogen gas in your blood suddenly begins to bubble, and this is not a good thing. Imagine if right now all of the blood in your lungs and arteries and bones and heart and brain just started bubbling. This condition is called decompression sickness, or more commonly, the bends.
In minor cases, it causes a lot of pain, and in serious cases, you just die. The nitrogen keeps popping and bubbling until eventually something gives out. While there are things like oxygen treatment and recompression chambers to help level yourself out when you get back to the surface, the further down you were, the more difficult it is to come back up.
This is why divers have to take breaks whenever they're re-ascending after a dive, because as they're breathing out, they're getting rid of the gases from the high pressure down below and breathing in gases from this more moderate pressure. And they just keep that stair process up until eventually they come to the surface. All of that to say, you Doing work on the seafloor with an oil rig takes a lot of time.
Because oil rigs like the Biford Dolphin are operating in several hundred feet of water. So you would need to hook a crew up and then send them to the seafloor and then they could be down there working for a few hours before it takes a few days for them to come back to the top. At this rate, everyone would have to take off a week to only be able to work an eight-hour shift.
It's not really feasible. Well that was until the US Navy in the 1950s came up with something known as saturation diving. Remember how I said the going down is the easy part you can get all the gases in your system and that's fine it's going up that causes the issue?
Well saturation diving asks the question what if you just don't come up? Because saturation diving is the process of becoming fully saturated with the amount of gases that a diver experiences at great depths and then just staying there for the duration of the job. Researchers discovered that once the body has become acclimated to a certain pressure, it doesn't really matter how long you're in that pressure as long as you don't try to come out of it too quick. And that at some point, your body is fully saturated, meaning you can't take on any more of the high-pressure gas than is already in your system. In other words, it doesn't matter if a diver at, say, 100 feet is there for 10 minutes or 10 days after being fully saturated with the high pressure gas, it's going to have the same effect.
So saturation diving keeps the diver at extreme pressures for weeks on end. This is sometimes done by building underwater facilities for the divers to work out of, or as in the case we're going to talk about today, above water facilities that are pressurized as if it's deep water. Saturation diving is one of the highest paid jobs on the market.
Industry standard is for the diver to not work more than 28 days on a shift, not counting the days it takes to come out of depressurization. And most saturation divers only work for about half a year. But despite that, most of them are bringing in $150,000 to $250,000 a year.
Some reporting saying that saturation divers make as much as $45,000 a month depending on the depth and specificity of the job. And there is a very good reason for that. Because it is one of the most dangerous jobs I can possibly imagine.
I oversimplified a little bit a second ago when I said there were no issues with being at high pressure for long periods of time. Being in a high pressure environment like that can cause a lot of strain on the body. Like, for example, regular nitrogen blends of oxygen can cause problems for people who have to breathe them in too long, at least in the high pressure setting. So most of the time, people are breathing in an oxygen-helium solution. There's also the heavy psychological implication that once you are on a job, you are not getting out of that job until somebody lets you out.
Because until someone on the outside begins the decompression process, there's no way for you to get outside of the pressurized bubble that you're in. And there's also just a lot that can go wrong. One just auxiliary story I read about during this case.
There were two divers inside of a diving bell that was, you know, several hundred feet under the water, and then the counterweight on the diving bell fell off. So they just shot up to the top of the water, and would you look at that. They ascended too quickly. They're dead of the super bins.
All their blood bubbled up. It might be a well-paying job, but not a lot of people are up to do it. According to a 2015 statistic, only about one out of every ten commercial divers are saturation divers. And perhaps one of the reasons not a lot of people want to be saturation divers is because of the incident we're talking about today. So I've laid out the groundwork enough.
You can understand my yapping at this point. Let's talk about the accident. On November the 5th of 1983, a crew of four saturation divers and two diving tenders were working on the Biford Dolphin. Diving tenders, by the way, are assistants to the divers.
They're not in the same pressurized condition. Working underwater with the divers, they're just there to make sure everything goes smoothly with the divers. Of the four divers, two were from Britain and two were from Norway.
The two from Britain were Roy Lucas and Edwin Arthur Coward, and the two from Norway were Bjorn Bergersen and Truls Hellevik. The two tenders, again stationed outside, were William Crammond and Martin Saunders. Again, the way this whole system worked is once the divers were accustomed to the high pressure, they were never removed from the high pressure until their job was done. This was done by keeping the crew in an out of water pressure chamber during the duration of their job.
The chamber being out of water helps a lot as you can imagine. If you need someone to do maintenance on the chamber, they can just do it on the rig without having to dive underwater and repeating the whole process again. They can have food transferred through these pressurized chambers.
And you know it probably helps psychologically for the four people inside not to look out at the abyss of the ocean every second of every day. The way they would be transferred from this chamber to the ocean, which they were operating at about 300 feet of depth at this time, the way they would be transferred to that depth is through a diving bell. This diving bell would be attached to the side of their living quarters. and then pressurized to the appropriate level before two of the workers at a time would climb into the diving bell, be lowered to the bottom of the ocean to do their job, before they'd hop back in and the process would repeat itself in reverse. The bell is then attached to the living chambers, the two crew members step inside, and then the bell is depressurized and removed.
The reason the bell has to be depressurized before you take it off is because having a super high-pressured pocket of air exposed to the outside air around it would be bad. Foreshadowing. The pressure inside of their living chambers and the diving bell and the bottom of the ocean was about 9 atmosphere. That is compared to the 1 atmosphere of the air around them on the oil rig. So effectively, despite being above water, it's as if the crew is under 300 feet of water, at least in a pressure sense, at all times.
The series of events that would lead to this gory and horrific accident would happen at four in the morning again on November the 5th of 1983. So to help you visualize that better, let me take you to my stupid diagram. To talk about the accident more accurately, I have drawn this comprehensive diagram. Look, if you want to see actual drawings and reports of what everything looked like, you can go to a news source or a better YouTuber, but if you clicked on this video, that's not what you're here for. In most of the incident reports that you'll read, it reports three chambers in the diver's facility.
There might have been another chamber or path connected off somewhere, like I know they had an entrance somewhere that food would be delivered through, so maybe there's more added on to this, but for the sake of the accident this is all you need to know. And keep in mind the pressure inside of all of these chambers as well as the diving bell is nine atmospheres, whereas the air around them on the outside is only one atmosphere. because again the whole facility is setting above water.
Also to clarify this isn't a sideways look at it it's not like the bell's coming from the bottom this is a top-down perspective. So imagine that all of this is flat and the bell connects sideways. Again this entire process is to keep the divers at the same pressure as the ocean floor and therefore keeping the gases in their system in equilibrium with the gases that would be found at the ocean floor. At 4 a.m. on November the 5th, it seems that Edwin Coward and Roy Lucas were already asleep in Chamber 2. At the same time, it seems that Bjorn and Truls were coming back from a deep sea dive.
Originally, they were only supposed to be out there for a short amount of time, but they had spent several hours on this dive, again now getting back at 4 in the morning. So, it's dark, they're tired, and everyone wants to go to sleep. So again, the two...
Dive tenders William Cramond and Martin Saunders begin to hook the bell up to chamber one. This is done using a device called a trunk. It is effectively a tunnel that connects the door of the diving bell to the door of chamber one.
Again, so everything remains a consistent pressure as the divers move around. It's also worth mentioning that at these three different points, there are doors that can seal off an individual chamber from the environment around them. It seems like the doorways from chamber 1 to chamber 2 and chamber 3 were open at this time.
And of course the door from the bell is open as the divers are moving out of the bell into the chamber. So Bjorn and Truls are clearing everything out of the bell and for the moment everything is okay. The way this transfer process is supposed to work is like this. The diving bell comes up to the side of the pressurized living facility.
The trunk is connected and then everything within the trunk is made to be 9 atmospheres, so it's all equal. The divers then walk across the bell into the chamber and then seal the door behind them. After they do that, the bell and trunk can be depressurized so that it can be taken off and, you know, not explode as soon as it's pulled away from the rest of the chamber.
If you've ever had a balloon that's full of air and then let go and watched it take off, like, into the sky, That is what would happen to the diving bell if you all of a sudden disconnected the trunk while it was still at 9 atmospheres. Only this isn't a balloon, it's an 8,000 pound piece of metal. And of course, you don't want to start depressurizing the bell until this door is shut, because if you do, everything in here is going to get depressurized as well.
Since every time you depressurize this bell, there's no one inside of it, you don't have to go slowly and take several days like you would if there was people inside of it. You just have to let... off the pressure internally so that again it doesn't explode. So again the beginning of this process is completely normal.
Trolls and Bjorn have just made their way into chamber one and now it's time for Trolls to seal the door behind them so that the bell can be detached. And that is when disaster struck because at 4 0 8 in the morning for reasons that we will never know, Cramond undid the locking collar that connected the trunk to the chamber and the bell. He did this as Trulls was in the process of shutting the door to the bell.
However, the door was not completely shut. Again, procedure is to shut this door, then depressurize this, then you can take off the locking collar, whereas Kramer took it off before either step had been completed. Again, we'll never know for sure why this happened.
There's a lot of contributing factors that might have caused it. For example, it was very loud on the rig, and I've heard some reports say it was storming or at least very windy that night. And Cramond was attempting to communicate to a dive manager who was above them on the main portion of the rig. Cramond was trying to communicate when to shut something, when to turn it off.
So perhaps Cramond heard he's shutting the door or the door's being shut and took that to mean that everything's shut down. Maybe Cramond heard a false go-ahead from someone on the inside. Maybe someone gave him a thumbs up and they shouldn't have. Who knows?
All that we know is as soon as the locking collar was popped, this diving bell flew off at incredible speeds. As a matter of fact, the bell popping off of the chamber was so severe that the impact of it against Craymond would kill him on the way to the hospital. Saunders received several injuries, including spinal injuries and a lot of broken bones, but he did survive.
But the reason that this event has such a high kill count is because, as I mentioned, Trules had not yet shut the door. Meaning that at the moment this bell flew off, the chamber that had been pressurized for weeks on end at this point was now completely exposed to open air. And as I'm sure you know, pressure likes to move from high concentrations to low concentrations.
So all of the pressure within this entire living facility instantaneously went from 9 atmospheres to only 1 atmosphere. Remember when I said you have to be very careful when saturated at deep... depths because for however deep you were it takes a long time to come back up. The rule of thumb for saturation diving is every 100 feet that you're underwater it takes one day to come back from that.
So these guys should have been reintroduced to one atmosphere of pressure over the course of three to four days since they were operating at 300 feet and instead that happened in a few thousandths of a second. And the most evident effect of this event was Trull's. Remember how I said Drools was in the process of shutting this door when all of this went down?
Well, the door was nearly shut, but in the process of the depressurization, the door had begun to close. He becomes stuck when all that remained was about a two foot tall hole in a crescent shape along the side of the porthole. Since all of the pressure inside of this chamber is now moving out to the exit, Trulls moved with it. His entire body went from standing upright to crammed through this metal narrow opening in less than a second. And really, I could describe every single thing that happened to him, but we have a coroner who already did that.
So I'll let you hear what the medical examiner said about these injuries in the examiner's publication. The scalp with long blonde hair was present, but the top of the skull and the brain were missing. The base of the skull was a collection of tiny bone fragments only.
The soft tissues of the face were found, however, completely separated from the bones. The left upper arm had been separated from the body just below the shoulder joint. The right upper arm was torn to pieces but still attached to the body. Both hands had been separated from the lower arms. Their right thigh, leg, and foot were missing, but the knee joint was found.
The left thigh had been separated from the pelvis just below the hip. The pelvis itself had been divided into three parts. To one of these parts, a small segment of the small bowel was attached.
The penis was present, but invaginated. Oh, okay, okay. The soft tissues of the abdomen and the back had been cut straight through at a level about midway between the umbilicus and the pelvis, and thus had been separated from the pelvis.
These soft tissues formed an empty sac. From above, one could look down through the larynx. All the thoracic and abdominal organs had been expelled, except the trachea and a fragment of the small bowel. Even the spinal column and most of the ribs had been expelled. The liver had been found somewhere on the deck.
It was complete, as if dissected out of the body. Maybe we just stop talking to the ocean. However, the expulsion of all internal organs from the thoraco-abdominal sac including the spinal column and the ribs, suggests that he also must have exploded. You don't say.
To be ripped out of the front of the chamber with such force that it sends organs 30 feet away, pieces of spine and your liver and your entire face being completely ripped off, sounds supernatural. I'm not going to show the photographs of the really grisly stuff because I just. don't think there's a need to upset you that much for no reason.
But I can confirm those photographs are out there and I can also confirm that that medical examiner wasn't lying. His entire face is peeled completely off. It looks like a Halloween mask. You find it Party City or something and it's just laid across the ground completely intact. It's so wrong.
However, one of the most bizarre outcomes from this entire accident is what happened to the other three. Bjorn, Lucas, and Coward all died as well, again at the moment of depressurization. However, unlike Trull's, their bodies were intact.
As a matter of fact, until closer examination was performed to see that there was a kind of tension inside of them, on the outside, it looked like they had simply fallen asleep. That was until an autopsy was performed. The most striking thing inside of the bodies was the condition of the circulatory system and several arteries and veins. Or in other words, as if a lot of trauma had happened all at once.
And the reason for this is, I'll let you hear what they said. In the cardiac chambers and in the great vessels around the heart, both arteries and veins, large amounts of free fat were found. This fat was mixed with gas bubbles and looked like sizzling butter on a frying pan.
Ugh, I hate that. Gosh. The most conspicuous finding in this case was the presence of large amounts of free fat in the cardiac chambers and the great vessels, as well as in the smaller vessels of both the systemic and the pulmonary circulation.
The occurrence of fat embolism in decompression accidents is well known. However, an embolus is particulate matter transported by the bloodstream from one part of the body to another. In our cases, The blood must have begun to boil instantaneously, leading to an instantaneous and complete stop of the circulation. The fat cannot have been transported from anywhere, but must have dropped out from the blood in situ. Possibly, the boiling of the blood led to a denaturation of the lipoprotein complexes.
The nitrogen in their body bubbled so quickly, that it created enough heat to flash boil their blood, leaving behind the stuff that couldn't be burnt off or flash boiled or what have you, like the fat deposits. Sometimes I think about this stuff, and it really does seem like we opened Pandora's box with a lot of our discoveries of the world. I don't think humanity was ever designed for a situation where our blood can boil inside of us, killing us in milliseconds.
But when we interact deep at the bottom of the ocean, and we get into situations like this, it's incredible what kind of dangers can befall us. Horrors that we couldn't even comprehend a few hundred years ago are now right here for the taking. None of that to say we should never dive or we shouldn't try to go to the bottom of the ocean.
I don't mean anything along that. We just have to be very careful of it. Because complacency with the vastness of what we're dealing with leads to situations like this.
The one upside between all of these men, not counting, you know, Cramond and Saunders, is that they're not just men. is the four inside of the chamber surely died in nanoseconds. I am sure that they died so quickly, there was never even a comprehension that they were dying, much less any felt pain or realization.
Trolls probably lost his brain before his brain could even register that he was moving. To everyone else on the oil rig, it sounded like an incredibly loud blast, and the first people that got there saw the carnage that ensued. As you can imagine, a large investigation went into everything that I just talked about.
The Norwegian government, initially at least, found that there was no wrongdoing on their behalf. And instead, most of the blame lied on Crammond for unlocking the collar when he did, which is also convenient because he's dead so there's not really anyone to prosecute. However, people started to ask questions around this entire case. For example, how is this designed in such a way That one guy can just choose to unlock a collar and it causes the death of five people.
Directly from the coroner's publication about all this, it was tragic that the door between the chambers and the trunk jammed as it did. If the construction of the hinge mechanism had been such that the door would have closed automatically in case of an external pressure drop, these four divers and the tender might have survived. And again, while the Norwegian government or the drilling company didn't claim any wrongdoing in this initially, one thing a lot of people pointed towards is that in the days leading up to this, everyone on the crew had been very overworked.
As a matter of fact, 38% of bell excursions went over eight hours, which eight hours is supposed to be the max. These guys can be on a job. So yeah, you have a whole crew who's been overworked for days on end.
They're getting in from a late shift at four in the morning. It's loud. It's rainy.
There's construction going. and there's like a string of three different people to try to figure out when they're supposed to take the collar off, it's no wonder an accident happened. And while in 1983 there was no reprieve given for the families of the victims, that would all change in recent years. Originally, the Norwegian government stuck to the story that everything that went wrong was the fault of the workers who were there. It was a mistake in protocol, not equipment.
That was until more information around the incident came to light. For one, and perhaps most frustratingly, one year before this accident happened, there was a new kind of locking collar developed that made it impossible to be unlocked while the trunk was under pressure. Not only that, but it had been mandated for all oil rigs at the time. But the Biford Dolphin got an exception because I guess it was so big and was working under old tech that it was given a pass.
And basically... told update it when you can. If the pressure resistant clamp had been used at the Biford Dolphin incident then it would have been impossible for the mistake that was made to have been made in the first place. And on top of that there were other safety features that were put into place in the industry that the Biford Dolphin just hadn't adopted.
because it was an older design. Things like gauges on the outside of the structure for the tenders to see what the pressure is inside of the thing they're operating on without trying to hear what the diver says. Or green or red lights outside of the structure indicating what doors were open or shut. Any one of these implements, if put into place, could have saved the lives of five people.
As a matter of fact, in 2006 it came out that the Norwegian government knew that this was the case with the Biford Dolphin. but that it omitted that information from the initial report after the accident happened. As you can imagine, family members weren't too happy about this.
So the family members of the deceased formed the North Sea Diving Alliance and in 2008, now 25 years after the disaster, finally sued the Norwegian government and won. The amount of money they were granted isn't publicly known, but whatever it was, I promise it wasn't enough. Imagine having like your dad die and then finding out there were like 18 different ways he could have survived and no one wanted to foot the bill. Finally in 2019 the Biford Dolphin rig would be scrapped.
For many given its hallowed history this could not have been a moment too soon. Thankfully the Biford Dolphin taught us a lot and ever since then there have been several safety mandates put into place to prevent things like this from happening again. And at least on the bright side Nothing as drastic as the Biford Dolphin incident has happened since.
People die in the ocean a lot, that still happens, just not in, you know, spontaneous explosions. At least I hope not. So, hopefully, despite all the gore and tragedy, maybe we can learn from it. And maybe you learn something new, like someone's face can just simply come off of their body. I am going to be thinking about that image for a while, but...
At least I profit off of it because hey, what else is YouTube for? And while I deal with the reality of whatever that means, I just want to say that hopefully you enjoyed the video. And above all else, thank you for watching. I understand that stories like this can be pretty rough, but if you've stuck around this long, I hope you found it at least a little bit interesting.
I apologize for some of the uploads lately. They've been kind of short. I mean, well, I mean, they're like 40 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever.
Long for most people, but short for me. So I apologize for that. I've been everything between the tour and, you know, traveling.
I've got like three different weddings this month to go to and stuff like that. A lot of good, blessed things happening in my life at once. And sadly, you guys paid the price for that. And I apologize.
But I promise the long videos will be coming back soon, as soon as I have time to, you know, record them and edit them and all that. They will be making a return. I've not given up on that. I've just given up on them for a time to get done with everything else I need to do. But thank you all so much for the support you've been showing on the videos, regardless of that.
Thank you so much for the support you've shown on the podcast, on the tours, on the merchandise, on everything. You guys are a blessing. And anytime I have any inkling of an expectation for something, you blow it out of the water.
And I can't thank you guys enough for that. It's so weird being in a position where it's like, yeah, what? Whatever I put out there, as long as I'm earnest about it, someone's going to pay attention. And that's just a blessing I can't really describe other than to say thank you.
Thank you all for that. So I'm going to get to editing this video. In classic Wendigan fashion, I'm recording this like 48 hours before it has to be up. So go me.
But I hope you enjoyed. It was good to bring back out the whiteboard. I miss her from time to time.
But no really I hope that you enjoyed. Once again get a hold of the poster while you can and unlock early access to the film at the link in the description. The film is going to be free for everyone here in like a couple months from now around Halloween We just figured that if you get the poster you might as well get to see it early, right? And on that same note to prevent spoilers for everyone and from people just like leaking the whole thing there will be like, you know copyright stuff for it until it's free for everyone.
And then after that, you can use clips from it wherever you want. We just want to keep it special while it's still special, while not everyone's had the chance to see it. And then after that, you can go wild with it. So check that out. Check out Control.
Their link will be in the description as well. Thank you so much for sponsoring the video and for being such a really cool product that I really enjoy. It means a lot. And above all else, thank you all for watching. It means the world.
So yeah, I'm going to get to work on this. Hopefully you enjoyed. and I believe that should do it for now, but I just want to say thank you for watching, I hope that you enjoyed, and I will see you in the next one. Bye!