[Music] imagine you're a deep sea welder it's 4:00 a.m. you're sleeping peacefully on your bunk when you're suddenly woken up by a ringing telephone you answer it in a days and it's your boss screaming at you to come to the deck immediately and bring a blowtorch some kind of problem with the decompression chamber so you rush out of the room grab your acene torch and head to the deck where you find crew members rushing around panicked everywhere you look off to one side and you see a a crew member named Billy laid out on the deck motionless he's flanked by two Personnel doing SE PR and in the other direction you see another crew member named Martin he's writhing on the ground in agony as a medic Titans a tourniquet on his leg but before you can figure out what happened to them you hear the sound of your boss screaming at you from the side of the decompression chamber a hatch needs to be cut open immediately so you run over there your heart pounding in your chest and you realize as you get closer that there's a giant smudge around the hatch in fact it's blood lots of blood your foot slips as you're running and you look back to see that you stepped on something kind of looks like a slab of bacon in fact you have to slow down because your feet are sliding everywhere the whole surface seems to be covered in some kind of grease and other stuff finally you reach the stuck hatch and you light the torch to cut it open but as you turn to the hatch you see that it's stuck but just slightly open maybe a 5-in crack in the door and you glance inside the crack as you start to cut and you lay eyes on one of the most horrific workplace accidents of all time in event so disturbing people will still be talking about it 40 years later that oil rig was the biford dolphin they say when you go in the ocean you re-enter the food chain it's a foreign environment one we're not adapted to or designed for and that's more true the further down you go as the the weight of the water puts crushing pressure on the body but sometimes we got to go down there our modern world is a surprisingly extensive undersea infrastructure from offshore gas drilling to windmills to oil pipelines undersea cables there's a lot of stuff at the bottom of the sea that we all rely on and all of that needs to be maintained in fact it's especially vulnerable to the elements because it's in the ocean but that maintenance has to be done by people people who take on a special Risk by going down there think about how hard this job is you're doing construction work like welding bolting cutting the kind of stuff that would be a tough job on land but you're doing it in the water and basically a space at depths too low for the sun to reach so you're in total darkness you're dragging massive cables along behind you the entire time and the seaf Flor is constantly swirling dirt and mud around you so visibility is less than zero sometimes but on top of all of that maybe the craziest thing about this job is that you have to live in a tiny chamber for 28 days while you're doing all that it's a process known as saturation diving so you've all heard of the bends right it's that condition that divers can get if they ascend too quickly well imagine if instead of going down 20 or 30 fet you're going down 600 ft or even 2,000 ft like how long would it take to decompress every time you came to the surface actually you don't you don't have to guess I can tell you it's a day for every 100t of depth so yeah it's 600 feet you need six days to compress and decompress according to the internet anyway so you can think of it like a bottle of soda right so CO2 is added at high pressure and it causes that to saturate into the water just like being underwater at high pressure causes gases to saturate into your blood it's the same idea but if you just release the pressure then all those gases would come out of your Blood Bubbles would just form in your blood vessel it it would not be good the trick is to turn the cap slowly like really slowly slow enough that bubbles just kind of don't form the gas just sort of easily comes out of the solution so if you're working down at the bottom of the ocean under those extreme pressures and you've got to go through a long decompression process every single time you come to the surface along in dangerous decompression uh process for that matter that's a lot of waste of time and a lot of extra risk you're taking on unless you just stay pressurized that's why saturation divers have to live in these tiny decompression Chambers for weeks at a time often up to 28 days the way it's usually done is there's a pressure chamber on the surface vessel that the crew lives in for again up to about 28 days they take turns working 8 hour shifts down at the sea floor which they ride down to in a diving bell kind of like an underwater elevator after their shift is over they go back up in the diving bell knock the diving belt to the pressurized living quarters and then do what they call a a tup or a transfer Under Pressure into the living quarters once that's sealed the crew can then detach the diving bell for servicing although in some cases they do just kind of stay at the bottom of the ocean in a deep sea habitat okay so just to put this pressure in in perspective um think about how your ears pop when you're ascending or descending on a plane so they pressurize planes to be at about the same as 8,000 ft of elevation that's about 74 atmospheres so that difference that you're feeling is between one atmosphere atere and 74 atmosphere it's literally a quarter of an atmosphere difference saturation divers go from one atmosphere up to 19 atmospheres some even higher than that the deepest saturation dive was done in 1992 by a company that was kind of researching the limits of this they sent a diver to 2300 ft of depth that equaled 71.1 atmospheres of pressure this is still the deepest saturation dive of all time and the most pressure any human being has ever experienced oh by the way the air that they breathe in those tanks um it's not just oxygen it's actually what they call triix it's a mixture of oxygen nitrogen and helium helium because it's inert so it doesn't react to anything and it's also very low density which makes it easier to breathe under pressure but being that it's helium it does have the expected side effects of breathing helium that combined with the fact that sound just kind of works differently under higher pressures means that these people some of the most badass construction workers on the planet people doing construction work on the bottom of the ocean are talking back and forth to each other sounding like this hello hello well it's the 19 anyway I hope that gave you a smile because the rest of this video is horrifying the biford dolphin was Drilling in a gas field in the North Sea on November 5th 1983 there were four divers total including two British divers Edwin Arthur coward and Roy P Lucas and two Norwegian divers Bjorn bergus and trills helic the debt that they were diving required that they be pressurized to nine atmospheres and they worked in shifts with the British crew going down together while the Norwegians rested and then vice versa in the early morning hours of November 5th coward and Lucas were resting in their sleeping chamber which in diagrams is chamber 2 burkon and helic had just come back up to the decompression chamber after finishing their 8h hour shift which actually ran a few hours over once at the surface they docked the diving bell to the decompression chamber with the help of two dive tenders William cramond and Martin Saunders the way it works is that they dock to a trunk that kind of sticks out from the pressure chamber it's kind of like an air loock in space terms but once that connection is sealed the trunk is then pressurized to atmospheres then the crew can crawl across the tunnel this is that transfer Under Pressure that I was talking about they open the hatch to get into the pressure chamber climb in reseal the hatch and then the dive tenders depressurize the trunk and detach the diving bell now this was something that they did all the time day after day but on this particular day something went wrong what exactly happened has never been fully understood though one of the crew did get the brunt of the blame possibly unfairly I'll get to that in a minute some say it may have been a communication issue because of the stormy conditions that day day but basically what happened is this fergerson had entered the chamber first and stood on the opposite side of the chamber while hilic was in the process of closing the hatch but just before the hatch was fully closed one of the dive tenders opened the clamp to free the tunnel from the diving bell again we don't know if it was a communication issue or a mistake brought about by tiredness and fatigue but when that clamp was loosened the pressure shot out of that chamber just in case you're wondering how powerful nine atmospheres of pressure can be the diving bell weighed 80,000 lb this sent it flying across the platform that diving BT smashed into kman and Saunders with the force of a semi-truck at full speed cran held on long enough for the helicopter to rescue him and pick him up but he died on the way to the hospital Saunders managed to survive but suffered multiple extensive injuries including a broken back and a broken neck he was actually the only survivor of the biford dolphin incident because the four guys inside the chambers well this is where things get really Grizzly I would give you a Content warning and ask you to skip ahead but let's be honest if you clicked on this video this is the part that you came here for freaks coward Lucas and bergerson just dropped dead actually bergerson dropped dead because he was standing when it happened coward and Lucas were actually in their beds probably asleep so they just died that's what it looked like from the outside anyway they just stopped breathing and maybe got a little puffy because instantaneously nitrogen and other gases just surged out of their Blood and Tissue ISU like Mentos and Diet Coke their blood literally boiled inside of them in less than a second there were bubbles filling every inch of their bodies blood circulation obviously was impossible and their bodies just stopped functioning like if you want to try to imagine what that would be like you might think it would be like suffocating because no blood can get to your brain like you might have a brief moment of panic as you become conscious of what's happening but here's the thing their brains were boiling too so they weren't aware of anything it was just over the autopsy report talked about how this D gassing of their blood also kind of solidified lipids and fats in their bodies and they explain it like this quote in the cardiac Chambers in the great vessels around the heart both arteries and veins large amounts of free fats were found this fat was mixed with gas bubbles and looked like sizzling butter in a frying pan that's horrible but as horrible as that sounds it's What happened to the fourth diver that's made the biper dolphin incident so memorable yeah as I was saying before hilic was in the process of closing the hatch when this decompression happened the hatch itself is 60 cm or about 2 ft in diameter but it was most of the way closed when it happened leaving about a 5 in gap a 5in gap that helic was standing right in front of so remember how I was saying that the the force was strong enough to throw an 880,000 lb steel diving bow like it's a rag doll well there was that much force then there was helic and then there was a 5- in gap it literally fired him out of the decompression chamber like a cannon and he didn't go through smoothly either to get much more grotesque his body basically was pushed up against that Gap in the door which was right in front of his abdomen and the pressure then pushed through his body sending his abdominal organs flying through the hole and then the rest of his body folded in half backwards and just got shredded through there only everything that I just said happened in a span of micros seconds from an outside perspective there was just an explosion of body parts that covered the deck of the platform one body part that they couldn't even figure out what it was was found 10 ft above the decompression chamber it took four body bags to collect all of his remains and the investigator still didn't think they got all of it now you might be noticing that I'm not using any actual pictures of the event in this video and no I'm not for all the obvious reasons but I did use the autopsy report as a source it is linked below it's just as brutal as you think so it is not for the squeamish no it literally just like it literally Fayed him apart and because of the way his body folded it kind of defleshed him so yeah there were like large chunks of skin laying around including his face it literally just ripped his face clean off so it's easy to see why this accident has sort of imprinted itself on our Collective psyches it's gory it's Sensational but for me I don't know man it's just it just hits that existential dread place for me you know like like the idea that one second you're there and then one second you're everywhere like we don't think of our bodies as something that can just like instantly disintegrate like that like like did he even have time to know that something had gone wrong or was it just lights out I don't know some people might say that's the best way to go just immediate nothingness but for me I don't like thinking about this somebody for this right well I mentioned earlier that one of the divers took most of the blame for it that diver was Billy crammond see yeah crond is one of the dive tenders that was helping to secure the diving belt of the chamber as the crew uh performed their tup and he was the one that pulled the clamp before the chamber hatch had fully closed which is a mistake he paid for with his life so when the families and the governments and the companies behind it were looking for answers for what happened it was it was pretty easy for them to just point the finger at him the company behind it by the way was omx they were the ones that were operating the biford dolphin and it was in the jurisdiction of the Norwegian uh government it was part of their C area yeah most of the blame landed on cramond and uh in fact so much hate was directed at cramond that his widow Ruth creman had to move away from her home in Edinburgh but of course it's not that cut and dried um obviously the company wanted to wash their hands of the whole thing and the easiest way to do that was just to to direct all the blame at camman because you know to take responsibility would cost them a lot of money I am never going to financially recover from this but the reality is the company did make decisions that contributed to this accident and those decisions were also all about the money because it turns out that this kind of accident was 100% preventable by a simple interlocking mechanism that keeps the clamp from releasing until the hatch is closed and this wasn't some like fancy new fangle technology in fact regulations had been passed in 1982 that made these mandatory on saturation dive rigs but it only applied to new construction projects the biford dolphin was kind of grandfathered in so they didn't have to install it but they could have and they chose not to at the same time they were pushing these divers on longer and longer shifts industry standard was about 8 hour shifts but comx actually lobbied the Norwegian government to allow for longer shifts this means the divers were working for as long as 14 to 18 hours at a time so yeah I mean of course they were exhausted and out of their minds at 4:00 a.m. in a roing sea it's almost like working people way past when it's safe is unsafe but perhaps the real victims on all of this were the families of the six men involved the Norwegian government did pay some compensation to the families of burgers and helic because they were Norwegian citizens Saunders was granted a disability benefits through the UK though I'm sure it didn't come close to replacing his income it was the coward Lucas and kemman families that suffered the most they were denied compensation from the company and the Norwegian government until 2009 when the north sea divers Alliance brought a lawsuit over the accident that means their widows raised their children alone for 25 years on just a fraction of what they were expecting to live on they finally did settle that 2009 lawsuit for an undisclosed amount the money won't bring back what they lost obviously but at least the organizations involved finally took some responsibility and yeah Ruth kemman was able to finally move back to Edinburgh with some measure of vindication and thankfully regulations are much tighter in the diving industry today partly because of the biper dolphin incident I guess if there's an upside to horrifying accidents is that they can actually lead to actual positive change because we're all just so horrified by it the North SE is now considered one of the safest places for divers but no place is completely safe like even with modern technology deaths of commercial deep sea divers are still reported every year one of the most horrifying recent events happened in 2022 when five underwater welders were sucked into an oil pipe off the coast of Trinidad yeah the last man that got sucked in the pipe did manage to survive but he was the only Survivor um the deaths of the other men have been blamed on criminal negligence by the fuel company all of which might make you wonder why somebody would ever sign up to do a job so dangerous but the answer is pretty simple Le saturation divers are some of the highest paid construction jobs in the world and rightfully so yet the British divers who were on the B for Dolphin were making 2,000 per month that's the equivalent of 14,000 pound today although they use Euros now so but you want to hear what's really crazy the number of commercial diving deaths is nowhere near the number of deaths from recreational diving so 2018 is the last year that we have solid numbers for and there were 55 recreational diving fatalities in the United States and Canada alone 189 world worldwide the number of commercial diving fatalities in 2018 six at least the commercial divers are getting paid well the recreational divers died just doing it for free and most of them were in submerged caves I will never understand why people go cave diving although to be fair there are a lot more recreational divers and Commercial saturation divers even if it does pay a lot of money it's still one of the most dangerous jobs in the world according to the north sea divers alliance between 1965 and 199 there were 350 to 400 working saturation divers in the entire world out of that count 56 of them died that's a 1 and seven ratio but that's a risk that saturation divers are willing to take because the pay is good sure yeah of course but it's also important challenging work and some people love that kind of challenge you know gives them a purpose it takes a certain type of person to do this I mean these guys give off big astronaut energy yeah Ruth kayman said that she would um complain to her husband about how dangerous his job was and he would just kind of shrug it off and say that crossing the road is dangerous for the record he's not wrong looking at those 2018 numbers there were 189 diving deaths and 6,000 people who died crossing the road it would be kind of ironic if one of those deaths was a saturation diver on his day off I mean they're not used to having traffic on the bottom of the ocean and maybe someday we won't have to put people's lives on the line anymore um I did a video a while back about humanoid robots well there's underwater robots as well like we already have to tether people to the surface for air and Communications robots could do the same thing and be down there for as long as they need to be no decompression necessary a couple of early steps in that direction include the U1 from uwar robotics um it's designed to not just swim through the water but to hover in place which is actually kind of difficult and it's very necessary if you're going to do some work with it right now it's mostly used for scanning the sea floor and not so much for physical labor for that you might want to look at the aquanut from Nauticus robotics it actually has articulating arms and robotic claws that can be uh controlled or be pre-programmed for a number of tasks these have a very long way to go before they start taking any sat diving jobs but they are a step in that direction for Better or For Worse until that happens some of the bravest maybe craziest rough necks on the planet will continue to do the important work that they do Under [Music] Pressure I have held off on making that joke this entire video and those same men will be just a little bit safer because of the biford dolphin incident so I guess want to find a silver lining and a story about four guys spontaneously exploding there you go of course there might be a few of these jobs going around I just read the OPC has reported that Global oil demand has slowed from 2.11 million barrels a day to 2.03 million barrels a day I tend to think that's a good thing because we need to be getting off of oil but of course somebody else might think that's bad for the economy and because of that you know different news sources might report that differently so let's talk about ground news ground news if you haven't heard of it it is what I honestly think all news should be today like if if I could just do a Thanos snap and then every news organization in the world does one thing it would be for it to operate the way ground news does what ground news does is they aggregate news stories from all around the world from major news companies to small Regional newspapers and they have a little bias chart so you can see exactly Which Way each news source leans politically oh by the way they also show who owns the news agencies so you can see exactly what agenda they might have if you're a you know follow the money type so going back to the story that I was talking about earlier you can see how this works so there's 38 articles that list here and they little aggregator but when you go down not only do you see where the article came from you see how they lean politically here's one that leans left here's one that leans right you have a mixed factuality and high factuality so again these are based off of independent reporting and people who are Watch Dogs on this kind of thing and over here on the right you can see a bias distribution so you can kind of see where these articles kind of fall on the Spectrum and one of my favorite things is actually shows you who owns the source that you're looking at so right here it's by the Murdoch family Bloomberg obviously is owned by Michael Bloomberg but it's also by a private Equity Firm so if you ever wonder like who is putting this information out there this actually shows you that look our news landscape is fractured and it is polarized and if you don't make an effort to diversify your news intake which most people don't because they're just living their lives here you can wind up with a very skewed perspective on the world but ground news makes it easy because it's right there as you're browsing every single story that comes up it will tell you where the bias is or look if you if you only want to hear he one side of a particular issue then you can search the topic and they'll show you a list of articles with their biases and you can read the one that you want to read but at least you know you're reading something biased and every once in a while maybe you'll go check out the other side see what they're saying like I don't know if you notice this but um it's an election year and it's borderline funny to me how different the reporting is between say like NPR and Fox News it's just they're completely different realities which by the way if you do have a little bit of a blind spot they have an actual blind spot feature where you can see stories that are exclusively being covered by one side or the other anyway ground news has legitimately become the place that I go to when something happens and I want to be informed about it because I know what I'm getting and I know how much I can trust it it really is an amazing tool I recommend it for free in real life but for you finding viewers out there if you go to ground. newsj Scott you can get 40% off their vage subscription or as a saturation diver might say go to ground. news/ Jo Scott to get 40% off their Vantage plan anyway check out ground news and get more information about your information links down below all right thank you so much for watching if this is your first time here maybe check out this video cuz Google thinks that it'll be right up your alley or if you're watching on your browser there might be a bunch of videos over here on the side you can go click on those and uh yeah if you enjoy them I invite to subscribe come back with videos every Monday big extra thanks to the patreon supporters and channel members who are financially supporting this Channel and helping to keep the lights on also just forming an awesome Community uh if you would like to join them get early access to videos and all kinds of cool stuff ACC to Discord early release all that kind of cool stuff you can just go to patreon.com anwijo or click the join now button down below this video and as always there's extra content over on nebula if you want to go there uh you can also see it ad free but that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care