Citation Needed - The Byford Dolphin Incident

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Byford Dolphin was a semi-submersible, column-stabilised drilling rig operated by Dolphin Drilling, a subsidiary of Fred Olsen Energy. Byford Dolphin was registered in Hamilton, Bermuda,[3] and drilled seasonally for various companies in the British, Danish, and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea. In 2019, Dolphin scrapped the rig.[5] The rig was the site of several serious incidents, most notably an explosive decompression in 1983 that killed four divers and one dive tender, as well as critically injuring another dive tender.[6]

Hello and welcome. Citation Needed. A podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick, and I'll be waving the fish for the flippers tonight. But I'll need a fittingly named pod. Because this is a podcast and a group of dolphins are called a pod. First up, two men who were deeply upset that SeaWorld wasn't all you can eat. Tom and Heath.

Okay. telling you a little bit of wasabi and an aquarium is just a touch away from being a very hip DIY sushi. Shamumi. And also joining us tonight, two guys who were around when the subject of today's essay was still evolving, Noah and Cecil. So you wrote this whole intro thinking that it was going to be about dolphins and just the title based on dolphins because I, you know, I write it in a word and I didn't come back.

I meant to come back, but it was because I was Biazzi. It's not about dogs. You tried. Thank you. Before I begin tonight, I'd like to take a moment to thank our patrons. Patrons, without you, we'd be adrift in the sea of internet aspiration. You are the buoy that leads us home. We'd like to learn how to join their ranks.

Be sure to stick around until the end of the show. If you do, I promise to tell you how Eli spelled Bowie. I know you're curious. I know everybody is curious. I spelled it my way. And with that out of the way, tell us, Tom, what person placed thing, concept phenomenon? And with that out of the way, tell us Tom, what person placed thing, concept phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today? Today we'll be discussing the Biford Dolphin Incident.

And what was the Biford Dolphin Incident? Well, Eli, let's start first with what is awesome and what isn't. money is awesome and everyone loves it unlike the ocean which is too big and too dark and it hates you well not you specifically or personally but also yes you specifically because your soft shitty body is not in any way made to do anything in the ocean other than try to get out or die you are a water he really hates it he hates it so much you are a land animal and the only way that you or anyone shaped like you can transcend the bio biological reality of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution is to spit in the face of God

and attempt to bypass thousands of iterations of natural selection with an air tank, a rubber suit, and a dive watch. And sometimes it works, but sometimes God wipes the spittle from his face and claps back at the hubris of this half-fast seafaring metamorphosis, and we end up with the bifur dolphin incident, which is widely regarded as one of the most horrific ocean and dive. accidents to have ever occurred. Oh, look at that, how cute that dolphin is. He's balancing a semi-automatic rifle on his nose.

It's an American dolphin. So comedy about something widely regarded as one of the most horrific acts again. Right in our wheelhouse, Tom. Thank you. I liked it when it was rich people and the whole planet just decided to be like, swooshim, squooshim, squoosh! We should do that with more big accidents. That should, that was a fun.

I felt united. It is worth noting then that the actual details of this incident and that word incident does not in any way convey the insane horror of the story that I'm going to tell you did not take place underwater or even on a dive and it was still a diving accident. Sort of. To understand what happened, we have to talk first about money, which is, as I mentioned earlier, awesome. Wait, what are you one of the fucking op-ed writers from last week? Yes, this is a follow-up. Follow-up. It's good.

If not for billionaires, how would we murder divers? And since the world runs on petrochemicals, oil is worth an absolute shit ton of money. And there is a shit ton of oil in Norway. But also sort of. You see, that shit ton of oil is actually centered offshore on the Norwegian continental shelf, which means that to get to that oil, to drill baby drill, we need first to dive, baby dive. And in order to get it all that sweet juicy oil in 1974, a semi-submersible oil rig called the Bifur Dolphin was launched. The Bifur Dolphin was this crazy combo meal thing that was part massive ship, part oil and gas platform.

And all, man, it was massive. I like the two cheeseburger meal. Exceedingly massive. It weighed over 3,000 tons. And this son of a bitch could drill down to 20,000 feet in its relentless. Pursuit of drinking your milkshake. And at the time, this thing was cutting edge. I read that a few times, and I want you guys to keep that in mind as we go because,

yikes, this is what passes for cutting edge. Anyway, this fucker was huge and it was complex, and it was going balls deep into Mother Earth. But to do it, they of course needed a rag-tag team of misfits and roughnecks. Yeah, from Norway. Ben Affleck is Horgan Florgon. Matt Damon is a hard pass. That sounds like a show. Right now, these rigs in order to be positioned and maintained,

they need divers to pop down to the bottom of the ocean and do crazy shit, like underwater welding and, I don't know, hitting things with wrenches and technical, dangerous underwatery stuff. I think so. I'm not underwater. Nobody on this podcast knows what you do with wrenches. If you know, Tom thinks underwater would change the use of a room.

I just, Tom has hit many things with wrenches. Everything often in frustration. He has. Hitting above water things with wrenches. Listen, you can't just send any old diver in a dry suit with some scuba gear on to do this kind of work. This work is performed by saturation divers,

which is a job so unimaginative. dangerous that when I describe it to you, you will think that I am lying about this. All right, but before you do, let's be clear that podcasting is also very harrowing, right? Especially if you don't have great posture, right?

Very sore by the end of the day. Depression is also pretty crushing. Yeah, it can be bad. Oh, hey, it's a lot of pressure. So here's the deal. I will take my own life. Okay, so here's the deal. If a regular, boring old scuba diver wanted to swim down to the bottom of the sea to help do some oil rig set up,

there would be just no way to make the numbers work. Like financially. You see, under normal circumstances, when you dive down underwater and you go down deep as all fuck, you can only work at that depth for so long before you have to spend an insane amount of time, slowly coming up from the bottom, in order to avoid getting the bends. The deeper you go, the longer it takes to safely decompress. and it can take a fucking long time to decompress from the depths these rigs require. So if you're a Norwegian oil company, you don't want to have teams of divers working

productively on your rig for a short period of time and then pay them their enormous salaries just to decompress lazily doing nothing. The company just isn't able to make the numbers work if they're paying for downtime on the way up rather than for your uptime while you're down. The worst part is having to install all those OSHA eye wash stations every 30 feet all the way down. It's ridiculous. It's been zero feet since the last, the bends. I like the Tom started talking like Pete Hegseth for a second there with that little reversal.

Not to spoil anything, podcast listener, but you know a citation needed essay is going to be good when it starts with, but that would be expensive. So here's what they did instead. Right, right. All right. So the powers that be figured out a solution, and that is called saturation diving. And here's how it works.

When you go underwater, that water has weight. It's about eight and quarter pounds per gallon, actually. So the deeper you go, the more water is above you, which means there's more weight, and therefore there is more pressure. And that pressure, it just does stuff to the human body. And a particular note for our story is that it dissolves the gases that we breathe into our bloodstream and tissues. Now, by volume, most of what we breathe, about 70% is actually nitrogen.

So there's just a lot of gas dissolving under pressure into the bodies of divers. Boo, you named a number and an element. So this is boring and we hate it now. Boo! Boom. Now, here's the crazy thing. That's fine. It doesn't actually mean shit.

It just dissolves into your bloodstreaming tissues and nobody notices because it's not the dissolving part. That's the problem. Air will be blood. Nice. Because the oil thing and you said the milkshake really. All right. Tom, go ahead. Now I want everybody here to just imagine a clear plastic bottle of Coke.

Now we shake the shit out of that bottle and let it settle for a minute. It's going to look perfectly normal. But if you open that bottle, it's just going to spray everywhere. That's because shaking the bottle causes the previously dissolved CO2 to, well, undissolve. But it can't get anywhere or do anything as long as the pressure in the bottle is high. When we open the bottle and the pressure difference, that's what allows the CO2 to forcefully eject itself from the bottle. That's basically how the bends works. The nitrogen, the divers breathe in while diving dissolves under pressure.

And when the diver ascends, the pressure reduces. And all that dissolved nitrogen. swiftly and dangerously stops being dissolved. Ice-ice baby? Nicely does. She so was singing Ice Ice Baby just out. That's what I heard. Amazing.

Dangerously stops being dissolved, rapidly expanding and seeking to move from high pressure to low pressure. The results are potentially catastrophic for the diver. The solution then is to slowly, slowly ascend and allow the pressure to change slowly rather than suddenly. So all that dissolved nitrogen doesn't turn your blood. into a Coke and Mentos film. Yeah.

Or, or we could have solar power. Stop being unrealistic, you fucking hippie. So enter here, saturation diving. There is no way to skip or speed up the decompression process, which is slow and therefore expensive. But after a certain amount of time, under enough depth, the time that it takes to decompress safely, that just becomes a static,

It doesn't matter if you're 300 feet down for 10 minutes or two days. Once your blood is saturated with nitrogen, it's saturated. And it takes the same amount of time to decompress no matter how long a diver has been under the water. The solution then to the decompression problem is simple. They never come back up. Kind of. Yeah. But in this instance, the solution.

The solution is simple, but it also turns the blood of the divers into a kind of time bomb. divers would descend to their working depths inside a pressurized diving bell. The diving bell is pressurized to the same pressure as the depth the divers will be working at. When the divers are done working at that depth, they reenter the diving bell, which takes them to the surface, but kind of. The living chambers at the surface are also pressurized. The divers are now saturated with nitrogen. They are living time bombs. But as long as they don't experience a pressure change,

the Mentos stay out of the Coke bottle and everything's fine. Everything's fine. Yeah. As long as the O-ring doesn't get too cold, the pressure is fine. And Norwegian Big Bird never explodes. Got it. It's going to be great. To be clear, so I thought the solution was going to be, they just live 300 feet underwater for days at a time. And I'm shocked by how careless this is. This is crazy. Sorry, Ben, did you say, what if a pier was filled with deadly pressure?

What did that help? Who is that the solution? These saturation divers at the time work 28-day shifts, diving and living all the time under nine atmospheres of pressure. That's nine times the pressure that the surface experiences. And then after the 28-day shift is over, the pressurized living quarters act as a decompression chamber, and the lengthy decompression process can begin.

And that sort of solves the process. but it is still crazily dangerous. Like the suits these guys have to wear to work at those depths are made to protect them from the intense cold so their dexterity is low. It's basically pitch black down there. And very importantly, humans just aren't supposed to fucking be there. So if like literally anything at all goes wrong, anything goes wrong, you just die. It's a very high stress job.

And because of the decompression problem, it's also terribly lonely and cramped. at the same time. Saturation divers are living in highly pressurized tuna cans away from friends and family, working long hours under harsh and stressful conditions. The job sucks, which is probably why it's one of the best paid jobs

in the world. Okay, I think I'd enjoy that. Like the money, but like that little pod sounds cozy, right? Honestly, hand to God, I think we could pressurize Heath's apartment and he wouldn't notice, right? Did you already do it? I don't know.

Open the door for the pizza guy. Oh, and also, they all sound like Mickey Mouse. Okay, now I'm in. Okay. This is great. I love this little detail. The air in the living chamber slash decompression chamber and the diving bell, it's a controlled mix of different non-reactive gases, including helium.

So everyone sounds like a tired party trick for a whole month. So you've got these like rough and tough, danger diving, badass, dudes like hanging out, chatting, and then sounding like a dog squeak toy the whole time. And like, by all reports from saturation divers, it's pretty funny at first. But then they all remember that the fatality rate for their job is almost 15%. And everybody stops laughing. All right. Well, I have a feeling some adorable little flesh balloons are about to explode everywhere.

So will we get ready our best. Ah, oh. We'll take a quick break for some apropos of nothing. I can't believe we're the first to send a man all the way to the bottom of the ocean. It's incredible, Johnson. The way you thought of putting oxygen in a tube. What can I say? So, when did they say Smith would be up?

Any minute now. Incredible. What a hero, the first man. Hey, here he comes. All right. I'm going to get the door for him. Welcome home, Brave underwater. Ow!

What the fuck was that? Ah, he, uh, he exploded. Why? Why did he explode like that? Why? I don't know. Was he exploded when he was in the tank? No, no, he was fine. He waved at us in there. I saw. Fuck. Fuck. Jesus. Okay. Okay. Think. Um, we put the air in there. Yeah. And he was fine.

He was. He was fine. He was waving. And then when we opened the door, he just exploded. Literally exploded. Okay. So maybe. We put too much air in there. Oh, right, like a balloon. Yeah, that must have been it. We put too much air in there. So when we put Larry in, we'll put in, like, way less air.

Yeah, way less. You hear that, Larry? You're going to be fine. Hey, what if we climbed trees instead? Damn it, Larry, we already let you go second. I want to go third. When people hear that MIMP mobile plans are only $15 per month, a lot of people wonder what's the catch?

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It is. And with plans starting at just $3.49.49 a month, that's only 12 cents a day. Plus, it's easy to use. Just fire the app up and click one button to get protected. That's amazing. I use ExpressVPN for security when I'm online shopping. That's why I know illusions personally endorse ExpressVPN. Now, how important is it for you to know about viscosity? Not important at all? Well, write this down anyways. All right, Noah, I'm sold. Where do I sign up? secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash citation. That's EXPR-E-S-V-P-N dot com slash citation to find out how you can get up to four extra months.

ExpressVPN.com slash citation. All right. No, thanks. Okay, so I'll see you for my appointment on Monday at, uh, sorry, one second. You guys mind giving me a little privacy? Oh, you want privacy for your appointment time? You're violating hippos. Okay.

And we're back. When we left off, we kept a bunch of dudes inside a shaking up coke can. Whatever could have gone wrong, Tom. All right. So I think we've set the scene. So let's jump to November 5, 1983. The bifur dolphin was doing its unspeakably dangerous thing, including a crew of four saturation divers and two diving assistants referred to as tenders.

The tenders job was to dock the diving bell to the diving bell, the living chambers with a sort of pressurized umbilicus called a trunk. Now the trunk hooks up to the diving bell into the living quarters. The diving bell is operated at nine atmospheres, as are the living quarters. But the trunk, that's just the normal one atmosphere until it gets locked into place and pressurized. And then the divers crawl through the trunk into the living quarters from the diving bell. Once the divers are safely inside the living quarters, they close the door and the trunk

gets depressurized. Everything about this has a very designed by somebody who knew they'd never have to use it for you. Sorry, boss.

Did you say you're gonna wanna hustle? The order of operations here is not just important. It is existential. That pressure difference from nine atmospheres

to one is essentially a bomb, balanced on a grenade, It perched on a night. Balanced on an evil dolphin's nose. If everything doesn't happen exactly in the right order, the living chambers or the diving bell or both could instantly depressurize. And that differential from nine atmospheres to one represents a just unimaginable amount of potential force.

As a point of reference, when you're in an airplane and your ear gets kind of sore and you got to pop your ears, that happens because of a pressure differential of one quarter of one atmosphere. Okay. So like 32 ear pops, whatever. I like those. 302 things I like. Oh, yeah. It's like how sneezes are a tenth of an orgasm.

I'm having a bunch of orgasms. When you get a really big one and then you can hear better all of a sudden, it's the best. Yeah, I don't know what they're complaining about. Oh, 32 of those. Your ear wax just dissolves with the gas out of your ear. It's amazing. Blow us right up. out. After a long

day of doing diving stuff, around 4 a.m., two of the divers, trolls and Bjorn, began to move through the guy's name is trolls? His name is trolls. Would he be kidding you with a name like that? Jesus Christ. I just want you to know

that if we die today, I'm actually pretty okay with it because I'm a Swedish guy named trolls. Literally whatever, man. All right, so trolls and trolls Began to move through the trunk From the diving bell and into the living chain And trolls begins to shut the door

Between the pressurized living chambers And the trunk When it happened Crammond, one of the tenders Disconnected the collar That connected the diving bell to the trunk The guy who's about to fuck up the pressure thing Is named Cramming

Crammed Now, since they were at the surface, the native atmosphere of the everything was one atmosphere versus the nine atmospheres in the living quarters trunk bell system. That is not good math. Well, you know, especially if you don't have

like some gum to chew on or something. Oh, yeah. You do the yon thing. Do the yon thing. I just did it. The diving bell became basically a missus. and it smashed into Crammond, killed him instantly. And then it smashed into Saunders, broke his back, and half of all the bones in his body.

It happened in literally less time than it takes for you to blink your eyes. It's weird that somebody counted the unbroken bones at this point. You know, they were just floating there in the water. What else was going to do? This would be the best outcome of the day. So remember that shaken Coke bottle. I do. Imagine you are the Coke bottle.

No. For three of the divers, they literally flashboiled in a millisecond. Jesus. All of those stored gases in all of their blood immediately and catastrophically bubbled and exploded from the inside. The force and speed of this reaction was so intense that although they looked mostly normalish from the outside, the autopsies for the men noted that the fat in their bodies had essentially rendered, quote, like sizzling butter on a frying pan. Hey guys, why did the corner give these dudes a Zagot rating?

What was behind that? Good marbling in the meat. Good service. Atmospheres was a... 30, 29, 6. Now, remember the guy trying to shut... Nine, yeah, it's nine. Now, remember that guy trying to shut the door when this happened?

So at the time of the decompression event, the door was almost closed. There was only about a five-inch crescent-shaped gap left, which means that the massive high-pressure wave equivalent to 25 tons of force essentially extruded that man like Plato in a moon-shaped fun factory through that gap in the door. He folded in on himself and was pulled into and through that five-inch gap, stomach first and then he was sprayed across the deck of the oil rig like a fire hose of gore. I debated quoting in detail from the autopsy because it's almost fascinating in its horrific detail.

But when I got to the part about his penis becoming invaginated, I realized that I knew things I did not want to know. Never ask how the sausage is made, Tom. Please don't do that. Or unmade, apparently. Like, the water was cold. It's a viral inversion. I came back from the dead to yell this. As gruesome as all of this was, and it very much was.

It was also instant. And I mean that the entire event was so explosive and so fast that it is unlikely, if not impossible, for nerve signals to even have time to travel to the brain. This killed them faster than the speed of human awareness. Except for the one guy who broke half. of his body shattered by the diving bell. He survived, which is insane, and he definitely felt it very much. Yeah, every time the AC was on in his house for the rest of his life, he was like, I said,

shut the door! What do you want to bet it was trolls who survived? I think it was trolls. The real question, though, should be how something like this was even possible. In situations much less dangerous than these, there are typically safeguards and redundancies and safety systems that you would have to work. work hard to overcome that make this kind of thing not happen. Okay.

So, Tom, you, you really said that, like, a person who has thought to himself, I'm going to make you extrude to a five-inch crescent in a way that embaginates your penis motherfucker only to later be dissuaded upon realizing the logistical hurdles in so doing. So I just want to point out that's kind of the implication. He said a shot a little bit. A lot of people in my way. Except it was 1980. So none of that existed.

The clamps that were removed that started this chain reaction had been replaced in many other rigs with new clamps that just can't be opened under pressure. The Bifur Dolphin didn't have these clamps. Well, no, that's not true. They did, but they hadn't installed them yet because the mandate for when to install the most obviously common sense device possible was basically when you get around to it. Yeah, yeah, no pressure. Well, some. You might also be forgiven for thinking that there would be visual cues, like, say, gauges that read the pressure in each part of the system visible from both sides of any given door.

That's something you'd put in if it were you, right? Yeah, those weren't installed. They did exist, by the way, but the Byford Dolphin didn't get around to putting them in. And nobody required it. Just like the pressure clamps, these were like honor system gauges. Okay, I know these guys all died, but this seems like it was a pretty awesome place to work. Am I right? They worked hard and they played hard and then they got extruded through the cracket door.

This is like such a perfect metaphor for like getting rid of Glass Stegle, you know, like getting sucked through this tiny little thing like a cartoon and your penis gets invaginated. The economy. Yeah. Or you guys, you might think that there'd be some kind of mechanism. Like, just like a green light, red light thing that just immediately, visually told the tenders what the pressure situation was. But there was. And again, I just need you to really take this on. Just fucking nothing.

There was nothing. They just yelled through the closed door as if they were trying to coax a teenager out of its layer. Jesus. yell again. You sound like a door mouse. It's hilarious. Well, Tom, to be fair, there is something red that tells you when the pressure is uneven, if that helps. Very true. It's just extruding everywhere, yeah.

But like you, I really, the system in place to make sure that the most dangerous thing on a floating platform of dangerous shit didn't happen, that system was just yelling each other through the door. Jesus. Over the sounds of machinery. and waves and wind and the storm that happened to be raging. Jesus.

Again, through a door, this is their safety check. I'm not going to hang the no service thing on the doorknob. No, thank you. I'm not going to go to infancy load. We're fucking. Tell me if I'm going to get a vassel dog. You have to tell them.

Do the thing in like 20 minutes. That's not why I sound like this, by the way. I sounded like this before my penis was in. Five minutes is fine. And that's about it. Naturally, there was an investigation. Somebody's get it. I'm not going to.

Hi-five. Oh, no, we're open the door. Naturally, there was an investigation by the Norwegian government, which had a stake in the company that owned the oil rig. And the company, of course, blamed the tender for not properly sealing everything up. But in 2006, remember this happened in 1983, at long last families reached a settlement in their longs lawsuit. And although the company never fully accepted responsibility for operating an obvious death trap, very curiously, they did mandate that all of their oil rigs suddenly start making changes to avoid explosive decompression, which was, I'm quite sure, just a coincidence. And if you had to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be?

yeah I really I try to come up with something funny to say here but there's just too much pressure understandable and are you ready for the quiz I am Tom when that guy was extruded out that hole like a sausage what was the song on the radio oh my god hey brought summer B staying alive or worst C something by ballpark Frank Sinatra D

and do we belong to the nuts or E whatever it was, it was a banger. Oh, oh, Marsh was here. He'd appreciate

the banger. He would appreciate the banger. Staying alive or worse is the worst one I'm picking it. It is the worst one by a lot.

It's my answer. I love it. I like Brat Summers. Let's make this a Brat Summer. Okay. Okay. So what's the best

title for the book? about trolls, the diver, who died in the diving bell. A. For whom the bell trolls? He spent so long looking for number two. He spent so long time to do cramming. You're trying to do cramming or whatever. Or something and switch to the song.

Also, I read that it was trools, not trolls, but I was like, I'm not correcting this because I thought of a thing. Who cares? Who cares? It's genius. Not the company trolls work for, I'll tell you that. All right, Tom, obviously, this is a very sad story. But it does seem like a pretty sweet way to die.

Why is that? A, it's quick. B, nobody ever wheels you over to someone to say hi? C, chemo doesn't work. Jesus is my Christ. Oh, my God. A, it's quick. It is the quickest.

It's so fast. Which leads us to my question, Tom. In the nanosecond they had before he died, what inappropriate thought did the tender have when he realized what he'd done? A, well, I guess they needed more TLC. Because he's the tender. B.

No way. Or C. Dun, dun dun dun dun dun dun. That ice, ice, baby? Oh, God. Oh, my God. That is the queen answer C. That's terrific.

Oh, no, I'm sorry. The correct answer is the only thing that went through his head was the diving bell at that place. That's true. Tom, you got to stop, collaborate and listen. All right. Well, Tom, you got to talk about the most dead finish people this week. And you know, that's always our measurement of a winner. from Norway.

He can't remember Norway. They've been Swedish. It's the same. It's the same shit. Everybody relax. It's one of the herring countries. Oh, man. We just lost their only Norway-ish listener.

I have to feel bad. You look the same. All right. I'll pick Heath for the next essay. All right. Well, for chat. And also, Noah. He just got.

covered a cool thing last week and I thought I could do it but I have to be part of the acronym of the cast. On behalf of the cast I got it. I'm making it work. Don't worry. It's so smooth. They wouldn't have noticed if you've been saying. I'm thanking you for... I can hear your nose bleeding. We'll be back next week. And then Heath will be an expert

on something else. Between now and then you can listen to our podcast. We're on YouTube now. All of us are in you. Tom and Heath and Cecil. What? What's happening? Do you want to start over, buddy? No, I don't. Do you smell burnt toast?

Yeah. I'm being extruded through my office door. I don't want to burn it up. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make it per episode donation. Crush it. Patreon.com slash citation pod. Or leave us a five-star review everywhere you can. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out best episodes.

Connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pond. Dot com. Okay, how'd we do, Larry? Larry? All right, too little oxygen. Science is hard. It's very hard, yes.