The worst death in the workplace – Russia today Posting in CHAT: Russia If you think that your working conditions leave much to be desired, then you should definitely look into a job like saturation diving. This is not only the highest paid physical job in the world, but also the most dangerous. Submarines of this specialty operate on oil and gas platforms in the open sea. For this type of work, they usually receive $1,400 per day. But believe me, they don’t just get this money. After all, these people risk dying a terrible death every minute. Imagine that you are in a tight metal pipe under water, at a depth of more than 100 meters, and around you there is darkness and cold of about zero degrees. . You breathe a mixture of gases and are constantly freezing, and food is passed to you through a small window. Between trips to the abyss you have only a few hours of rest, and there, deep under water, you have to turn nuts and work with welding. And this is not a description of one day. This is how you have to live and work for months, because rising to the surface is deadly. Saturation diving is a way of working at great depths. It was developed by the US Army in the 1960s as part of the US Navy's Sealab program. The main task of the specialists was to overcome the danger of decompression sickness. And this has always been and remains one of the main causes of death for divers: when a person deeply inhales compressed air, the nitrogen contained in it dissolves in the body. But with a rapid rise to the surface, a sharp decrease in pressure can lead to the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the blood. They cause unbearable joint pain, apoplexy, paralysis and often cause death. To avoid this danger, submarines slowly rise to the surface. They perform decompression stops to allow nitrogen to leave the body without causing harm. This method is good for short-term dives. But if the diver has to work at depth, this is impractical. In this case, a highly paid specialist will spend more time gradually ascending to the surface than performing his duties. A dive to a depth of 100 meters requires 50 hours of decompression. Currently, it is carried out in special box chambers with gradually decreasing pressure. In saturation diving, divers stay underwater for several weeks. They carry out the tasks assigned to them and rest in special underwater chambers with increased pressure. It does not matter how long a person is at depth. Decompression always takes the same amount of time. Therefore, at the end of a long watch, divers rise to the surface in a sealed enclosure. After this, they undergo decompression only once in a special chamber. Thus, the risk of decompression sickness and other dangerous conditions facing divers is minimized. Divers working at depth and submariners face many dangers. These include nitrogen poisoning, or the disorienting euphoria that occurs when deeply inhaling nitrogen. This state is very similar to alcohol intoxication. This can cause the diver to behave inappropriately and even lose consciousness. Add that at depths of more than 80 meters, oxygen becomes toxic to humans. Therefore, divers use the so-called trimix for breathing. This is a mixture of gases that uses helium instead of oxygen. This gas cannot be called an ideal substitute. This is because it causes heat loss, which causes divers to constantly freeze. In addition, helium changes a person’s voice beyond recognition, making it very thin. Special decoders are used to understand divers' speech. At a depth of more than 300 meters, helium becomes potentially dangerous. This causes a neurological effect known as high pressure syndrome. This is what a modern decompression chamber looks like. But these are not all the risks that divers face when diving to great depths. The greatest danger when diving is a high pressure environment. In 1983, a tragedy occurred on the Byford Dolphin semi-submersible drilling rig. As a result, safety regulations for divers around the world have changed. The Byford Dolphin platform was built by Aker Engineering in Oslo in 1974. It was a real giant weighing 3,000 tons, which was serviced by a team of 100 people. Unique equipment made it possible to install a drilling rig to drill the ocean floor at a depth of 460 meters. But for the smooth operation of the system, professional maintenance and repairs were necessary in the underwater part. For the divers who worked on the Byford Dolphin, the French company COMEX created a saturation diving system. This was considered revolutionary for the 80s of the last century. The equipment worked perfectly until November 5, 1983. But it was on this day that the human factor caused a terrible incident with human casualties. The drilling rig was drilling at the Frigg gas field in the Norwegian part of the North Sea. At 4 a.m., two British divers, Edwin Coward and Roy Lucas, were relaxing in a decompression chamber on deck. At this time, two Norwegian divers, Björn Bergersen and Truls Hellevik, were returning to the surface in a transport capsule. Operators William Crammond and Martin Saunders removed the capsule containing the Norwegians from the water and docked them in the room with the British so that they could join them and begin the long decompression procedure. Bergersen and Hellevik crossed a short distance to Coward and Lucas. After this, the divers needed to close the airlock and seal the chamber before the operators released the pressure and disconnected it from the capsule, but Hellevik hesitated and did not have time to close the chamber hatch. Meanwhile, operator Crammond disconnected the capsule from the airlock. The pressure in the capsule dropped from nine atmospheres to one in a split second. Flying out of the chamber, he rushed along the deck of the drilling platform like a torpedo, Crammond died on the spot, and his partner Saunders was seriously wounded. Hellevik, who was in the compartment, was simply torn to pieces, and his remains scattered far across the deck. The remaining divers in the chamber died immediately. Autopsies on the bodies of Coward, Lucas and Bergersen revealed that their veins and arteries were blocked by white matter clots. These are proteins that have coagulated due to the difference in pressure causing the blood to boil. Inside the Byford Dolphin decompression chamber Experts believe that the divers died before they even had time to understand what happened and did not experience suffering before death. An investigation into the Byford Dolphin incident found that Crammond was responsible for the death. It was he who released the clamp before the divers got into the chamber hatch. Since the operator died, there was no one to make a claim. All that remained was to draw the appropriate conclusions. The remains of one of those killed on the Byford Dolphin The COMAX saturation diving system used on the drilling platform did not have any safety devices to prevent an accident in the event of an emergency. Investigators suggested that Crammond made a mistake not due to negligence, but due to overwork and exposure to external factors such as noise on the platform. One of the main culprits in the crisis were technical managers at Byford Dolphin, who, contrary to instructions from the Norwegian oil and gas regulator DNV, did not equipped the premises and capsule with safety devices and pressure gauges. But, as often happens, the dead workers were blamed for everything. Because of this, their families did not receive any compensation; relatives and friends of the victims did not accept this. They created the North Sea Divers' Alliance, which for many years sought a fair solution in court. It was possible to achieve a confession of guilt and compensation from the owners of Byford Dolphin only in 2008, a quarter of a century after the tragedy. The Byford Dolphin drilling platform operated until 2019 and, as before, saturation diving was practiced on it. . . But an incident that occurred almost 40 years ago forced the leaders of the company that owns the platform to review the rules for using cameras and equip them with security systems. This is now the new standard around the world, slightly reducing the risk of divers' already dangerous work. Source link Source link
