With the constant demand for gas and oil companies, numerous corporations carry out offshore drilling for gas and oil.In essence, this involves the setting up of drilling rigs for oil and gas located in central locations of oceans, and the edges of the rigs themselves reaching to the depths of extreme depths so that they are in contact with seafloors as well as beyond.Most of these tasks can be performed by machines due to recent advancements in robotics and, indeed the majority of modern offshore operations depend on different robots to perform most of the deep diving.But there are still some tasks that only human divers could complete, including periodic maintenance checks, spots or any other tasks that require the use of fine motor abilities.For divers with these skills, diving deep into the blue sea usually requires that they descend and climb in a precise and controlled manner.In the absence of this is a risk to the divers’ the loss of limbs and lives at risk of decompression sickness.In 1957 in the year 1957, U.S. Navy devised a method that offshore oil drilling rigs could use to reduce the chance of suffering from decompression sickness among deep-sea divers. And this was to keep them submerged for prolonged period of duration.The technique was dubbed “Saturation Diving”, and for a long period it was able to significantly decrease the amount of accidents involving offshore diving.This was until 2002 when the Byford Dolphin is the offshore semi-submersible drilling vessel operated through Dolphin Drilling, became the scene of a saturation dive disaster.
But First, Why is Decompression Sickness So Bad?
A feared and terrifying conditions for diver in deep waters (more than the chance of encounter with Kraken). Kraken) decompression sickness can occur when divers ascend from the depths of the ocean overly fast, causing your bloodstream to explode as if it were boiling.Also known as ‘the bends’ amongst divers, it’s among the most difficult aspects of diving due to the fact that no quantity of fancy or modern equipment will be able to save divers from suffering.When diving divers are exposed to more nitrogen and oxygen from their air tanks that are compressed.Most oxygen is consumed in your bloodstream, whereas nitrogen is absorbed by different tissues.When divers dive deeper and further, they feel the mass of the sea begins to weigh down on the divers, causing a tremendous pressure that compresses nitrogen and oxygen molecules that are in your tissues. This causes the nitrogen molecules to disintegrate more quickly and at higher concentrations.When the diver is ascending too quickly and then descends too fast, the rapid drop in pressure can cause the nitrogen molecules that are dissolved to explode in a flash as if they were boiling, which can trigger a variety of gruesome and terrifying situations: extreme pain, paralysis, anxiety, and, in some instances even death.If a diver can be able to survive the surprise of the twists they’ll require treatment in a recompression chamber in which they’ll be placed under extreme pressure and will be removed slowly over a lengthy time time.This is due to simple physics: typically the less pressure the gas that surrounds an liquid and the lower its temperature, the lower at which it will be boiling.In simple terms, liquids be boiling when the pressure of vapor is at the same level as the atmospheric pressure at the temperature of room.If there is a serious case of decompression sickness, nitrogen molecules within our tissues begin to expand due to the abrupt decrease in pressure at the atmospheric level.
Explanation of Saturation Diving
In one of the first attempts to research long-term deep-sea dives, researchers Edgar End and Max Nohl endured 27 hours of breathing compressed air inside a specially-designed location in Milwaukee’s County Emergency Hospital of Milwaukee in 1938.The experiment was successful, researchers were able to determine different physical changes to blood chemistry due to the research, but the researchers needed to undergo a 5 hour decompression, which caused Max Nohl with a mild condition known as the bends (although the problem was cured through a quick recompression session).Then, in 1942, USN Physician Albert Behnke suggested that people be saturated with inert gas using higher pressures in the air to prevent decompression sickness. This was a field of research that was analyzed in further detail through another USN Physician the Captain George F. Bond.Captain Bond started his Genesis Project in 1957 to demonstrate that the human body is capable to withstand extreme pressures from the environment and various breathing gases as well as other gases in which U.S. Navy was keen to explore in order to improve their submarine technology, and ultimately giving an ancestor to the Man-in-the-Sea program.In 1965 The Genesis Project had given birth to a variety of research findingsthat allowed Westinghouse to conduct the very first saturation dive commercially to replace Smith Mountain Dams’ trash racks that were over sixty meters beneath the water surface.
Quick Look at the Byford Dolphin
Byford Dolphin Byford Dolphin is a semi-submersible column-stabilized drilling rig owned through Dolphin Energy.It was launched around 1974, and it was drilling on behalf of several companies operating in the North Sea.It was originally called Deep Sea Driller The Byford Dolphin was the first of its kind in the Aker A-3 series of drilling rigs.The Byford Dolphin measured at the overall length of 355 feet (or 108.2 meters, and the breadth of 221 feet, or 67.4 meters and the depth was 120 feet, or 36.6 meters.The rig was designed for operation with a water deep of 1500 feet, or approximately 460 meters, and the drilling maximum being approximately 20,000 feet (or 6,100 meters).When it was construction it was Byford Dolphin was equipped with the most modern drilling equipment that was available in its era.However even though the equipment used by the Byford Dolphin passed the stringent standards of certification that were required to be certified under Norwegian law (it operated within Norwegian sovereign waters in the period) however, the equipment used by the Byford Dolphin in the event of its destruction had been declared obsolete and required replacement (a issue that will be discussed during the investigation).To prevent the effects of ocean currents and drift, Byford Dolphin was Byford Dolphin was equipped with its own engines that could reach speeds of 4.5kn however, long-distance moves required the use of specially-designed tugboats.The Byford Dolphin Incident wasn’t the first , nor the last fatal accident the rig was to experience: in the year 1976, three years after its debut in 1976, The Byford Dolphin ran aground during its journey through to the Frigg Oil fields of the North Sea to the port of Bergen.The entire crew was evacuated to lifeboats. However, due to the rough seas of the time, 6 persons drowned after falling off lifeboats.
