Into the Lions Mouth (commercial diving accident book)

[mdax]

Just finished reading this over the holiday.
This book details an incredibly well researched investigation into a diving accident in the north sea aboard the wildrake. Two guys were in a sat bell which was separated from the support boat.
Commercial diving in the late seventies was a much less regulated environment and those guys sure paid for it with their lives.

This book is well referenced and the author put considerable time researching not only what occurred but also the reasons driving those decisions. The first half of the book tells the story while the last chapters detail the courtroom battles.

While some cave books have horrible and sad stories there is something more terrifying for me present in the commercial accident stories as the divers don't seem to cause their own deaths near as often as the surface folks.


http://www.lionsmouthpublishing.com/

[Superlyte27]

While some cave books have horrible and sad stories there is something more terrifying for me present in the commercial accident stories as the divers don't seem to cause their own deaths near as often as the surface folks.


http://www.lionsmouthpublishing.com/

Boy could I tell you a dozen examples of that.

[gasdiver]

I knew two guys who died while I was working as a diver in the Gulf of Mexico. One was a "live boating" accident, the other happened at a dock in 15' of water.
First a little background. "Live boating" is a method of inspecting a pipeline that has been laid across the bottom of the ocean. After a lay barge has laid the pipeline, inspection divers must "walk" it to make sure there are no loops in the pipe or damage to the cement coating that sinks the pipe. A loop you ask? Yes, even if the pipe is schedule 80 steel, 24” in diameter with 3” of concrete around it, when the pipe comes off the lay barge it is flexible like a garden hose. In the Gulf, any pipe laid in less than 200 fsw must also be buried. This requires a “jet” barge to come back over the pipe to bury it. (http://community.cdiver.net/photo/mc...ontext=popular) So the pipeline has to be walked twice. Today the depth limits for live boating is 170 fsw, but that was not the case in the early 80’s when I worked as a diver.

The surface supplied diver jumps off the bow of a workboat (typically about 125' long with twin engines) descends down a buoy and begins walking/crawling on top of the pipeline. (Here is a video of a diver starting a live boating dive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs9EPPL7vRY ) The dive crew watches his bubbles and gives directions to the boat captain who maneuvers the boat in order to follow the diver. The props are "live" during this operation, thus the term "live boating". It is imperative to keep the diver's umbilical going down and forward of the bow. The boat captain has to keep the wind, current and direction of the pipeline/diver travel in mind while maneuvering. The tenders must keep the umbilical tight enough to avoid excess slack, yet loose enough for the diver to walk along the pipe. If the diver does not have enough slack, he'll get pulled off the pipe. If there is too much slack, the umbilical can get caught in the props.

This is what happened to my co-worker. He was a veteran commercial diver who had worked for one of the largest underwater contractors in the world, Brown & Root. B&R was primarily involved in construction. My company was much smaller and specialized in inspection. What this diver lacked was experience with live boating. He was the diving supervisor and that day there was a pretty strong surface current. He kept asking for slack over the radio and the tender gave it to him.

Commercial diving is like other trades in that you must be an apprentice for some period of time before your company decides that you have enough experience to do the job. These apprentices are called tenders. After some period of time a tender can work up to a diver-tender and finally “break out” as a diver. This usually takes several years. Back to my story. The other divers should have been paying more attention, but this guy was head strong and had many years of experience so I guess they assumed he knew what he was doing. He was also agitated due to having to work so hard to walk the pipe and this was why he kept asking for slack. Well, the umbilical got into the prop and he was snatched off bottom from 180’ (on air). The dive crew knew when this happened because the prop also started winding up the umbilical that was on deck. Everyone screamed and the boat captain stopped the engines. A safety diver was jumped and he found the diver dangling 10’ below the props. The safety diver cut him free and they pulled him back to the ladder. It took 3 people to get the injured diver onboard and into the decompression chamber. Unfortunately, it was too late. An autopsy found he had a broken neck and probably died instantly as opposed to the explosive decompression that would occur as a result of ascending from 180’ to 10’ in a few seconds. This makes sense because the helmet he was wearing was a cast bronze Miller diving helmet (http://www.millerdiving.com/products/helmets/miller-400) and weighed 27 lbs. The harness all divers wore had the umbilical clipped in at the waist, so you can imagine what happened when he was jerked off bottom.

The other accident happened to my roommate’s best friend from dive school. He was green, straight out of dive school less than a month. When you are green, you get to go on “swamp jobs” with the divers who had just broken out. (**** rolls downhill and payday is on Friday!) Any job that was in shallow black water (less than 30’) was called a swamp job regardless of whether you were actually in the swamp or not. The only thing worse than a swamp job was a wheel job. A wheel job was where a diver had to go extract rope, fishing nets, cable or anything else from a commercial boat propeller. You could spend hours with a hack saw trying to free the prop. There is usually very little to hold onto, zero visibility, the boat is surging so the hull keeps banging into your head, well you get the picture.

On this particular day, a crew of one diver and one tender was sent to a boat dock in Houma LA to retrieve an expensive piece of equipment that had fallen off a supply barge while it was being loaded. I don’t remember what exactly they were looking for but it was probably a drill bit used for drilling an oil well. (http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/oila...drill_bit.html ) These things are not real big, but they are extremely heavy, roll and very expensive. The diver had been searching around the edge of the barge in 15’ of water for hours. The bottom was deep mud and trying to walk in the stuff, with a 50 lb weight belt would wear anyone out. He decided to take a break and let his tender give it a try. In this depth of water, we did not carry bail-out bottles. After the tender entered the water, a chain buckle on the barge broke and a 100 pieces of drill string rolled across the barge and into the water. Drill string is basically steel pipe 6” to 12” in diameter with a hole in the middle of it and it comes in 40 foot lengths. Fortunately, the drill string did not land on the diver in the water, but it did land on his umbilical. This effectively pinned him to the bottom but did not pinch off his air supply. While he could not surface, he could talk to the diver (who was tending him). So here is a rookie diver stuck on bottom in 15’ of pitch black water beneath a barge that is 50’ wide and 250’ long. I never got the details on whose idea it was for him to bail-out, but this is what he did. He unclipped from his umbilical, dropped his weight belt, ditched the helmet and swam for the surface. The problem was that he did not know where the surface was, he was in an overhead environment. Wearing a wetsuit gave him buoyancy and he swam until he could no long hold his breath and drowned. They later found him floating under the hull half way down the length of the barge 20’ from the edge.

The sad part of this story is that he could have stayed in the water for many hours waiting for rescue. The small one cylinder diesel engine compressor could have run for days.

[Superlyte27]

Good times, good times...
My last job in the GoM was burying pipeline. I ran my two weeks, went home, 3 days later my buddy was buried alive in the trench we were digging for the pipeline.

[gasdiver]

Were you guys working from a jet barge? Did the sled fall on him or something?

When burying pipe at T intersections or valves, using a hand jet, it was not uncommon to have caveins. It was a wierd feeling to get buried in sugar sand. The water density changed and your exhaust bubbles would blurp much slower than normal. As long as you didn't lose the jet nozzle blasting your way out was not hard. I can recall one incident where we had to jump a safety diver to go dig the first guy out. It was on a swamp job up on the Pearl river. The pipe had to be 14 feet below natural bottom. The river bottom was clay so you could cut a trench with vertical walls, but if you undercut the wall, it would collapse. Yeah, that was one real glamorous job to work on. I think I had 14 hours of bottom in a single day on that job. All of it in zero viz...

[AB8CD]

I was on a job in an inland lake created by sand mining. The setup is basically a huge pontoon boat about 100 foot long with a pilot house on one end and a crane boom that hinged from the pilot house and supported from an A frame forward with just under 1 inch cable on a 4 to 1 block. If you ever saw a ditch witch you get the image of how a sand miner functions. The boom was at it's lowest point, with its cutting head at about 70 feet and the cable was unwound and cut up everywhere. Absolute zero visibility. I wrapped up a days work at the bottom feeling one side of the trench with a foot ( no fins ) and the other side with a hand. The next day when I went down it had collapsed to 37 feet, and we started sucking again. When you are in the dark you have a lot of time to think about possible scenerios.

Sent from my DROIDX using Tapatalk

[Superlyte27]

He was hand jetting at a union. He was relieving another diver who was supposed to be digging 18' wide by 9' deep. Twice as wide as deep keeps you non-dead. He climbed into the trench that was 9' x 9' and started to jet it out when the wall collapsed. The crew topside was unable to reach him on the coms and didn't see any bubbles. They waited a few minutes and then decided the best course of action was to hook the crane to his umbilical and pull him out.

He was on the deck getting cpr for 10 or 15 minutes. They revived him on the helicopter. He suffered some broken bones and mild brain damage (which you'd probably never notice with him).

[cloudboy55]

One hell of a thread, thanks guys.

[mdax]

this thread is much like the book, story after story about how charming commercial diving can be

[Jay]

Scary friggin stories!
Over the years I have had many people ask me if I ever thought about commerical divng. I just laugh. I have a friend who did North Sea gigs for years in the late 70's early 80's or so and I see the crap we hire commercial divers to do.
I have done a lot of unfouling or changing props and bearings or bottom cleaning, but that is as close as I ever want to come to the type of crazy stuff the commercial guys do.