Date | 8 August 1979 |
---|---|
Location | Thistle oil field, East Shetland Basin, North Sea, Scotland |
Coordinates | 61°21′47″N1°34′47″E / 61.36306°N 1.57972°E |
Cause | Lift wire separated from diving bell |
Participants | Richard Arthur Walker, Victor Francis "Skip" Guiel Jr. |
Outcome | Recovery of bodies of Walker and Guiel |
Inquiries | Fatal accident inquiry, 11-21 May 1981 |
Trial | Crown v. Infabco Diving Services, Ltd. |
Litigation | Wrongful-death lawsuits, Scotland and United States |
The Wildrake diving accident was an incident in Scotland in August 1979 that killed two American commercial divers. During a routine dive in the East Shetland Basin of the North Sea, the diving bell of the diving support vessel MS Wildrake became separated from its main lift wire at a depth of over 160 metres (520 ft). Although the bell was eventually recovered by Wildrake, its two occupants, 32-year-old Richard Arthur Walker and 28-year-old Victor Francis "Skip" Guiel Jr., died of hypothermia. The accident resulted in extensive subsequent litigation and led to important safety changes in the diving industry. [1] [2] [3]
In March 1977, a Single Anchor Leg Mooring (SALM) system was installed in the Thistle oil field as a loading facility for oil tankers. It consisted of a buoy and riser connected to a gravity base on the seafloor. By January 1979, the buoy had become partially disconnected from the riser. British National Oil Corporation (BNOC) had the buoy blown free of the riser with explosives and taken to Amsterdam for repairs, but the explosive charges damaged the riser. In April 1979 the riser was removed from the base by divers and taken to Bergen, Norway to be repaired. [4]
In early 1978, Brian Masterson, an English businessman and engineer, co-founded Infabco Diving Services Ltd., a commercial diving company. BNOC awarded Infabco a contract for diving services from the drill rig Gulnare alongside the Thistle Alpha platform. [5] Investigative reporter Bryan Gould would later discover that BNOC's Offshore Construction Manager, Joe Singletary, facilitated Infabco's bid by allowing Masterson to examine his competitors' bids. [6] After the Wildrake accident, BNOC's security division and Grampian Police investigated the possibility that Masterson had bribed BNOC officials for contracts. [7] On 18 June 1979, BNOC contracted with Infabco to reinstall the SALM on its base in the Thistle field. [8]
The MS Wildrake was a diving support vessel constructed for and owned by Anders Wilhelmsen AS, a Norwegian shipping company. It had a built-in saturation diving system designed and built by another Norwegian company, Møllerodden AS. [9] In May 1979, Infabco began negotiations for exclusive rights to the Wildrake. [10] In June and early July, with the Wildrake moored near Ulsteinvik, Infabco personnel prepared its diving system for use. The system was certified by Det Norske Veritas (DNV) on 3 July 1979. [11] In mid-July, 17 bell runs were conducted from the Wildrake to prepare the SALM base for the reattachment. [12]
During this period, several significant alterations were made to the diving system. The swivel connecting the lift wire to the bell was replaced with a pair of shackles. The clump weight below the bell, which served as a backup recovery system, was removed to enable the bell to be launched over the side of the Wildrake rather than through the ship's moon pool. [13] The bell's drop weights, another secondary means of bell recovery, were lashed to the bell frame with nylon rope to prevent their accidental release. [14] [15] The accidental release of drop weights had caused fatal diving bell accidents in the North Sea in 1974 and 1976. [16] [17] [18] The Wildrake bell also had no bell stage to keep the bottom hatch out of the mud if the bell became stranded on the sea bottom. [19] [20]
In late July and early August 1979, Wildrake divers reattached the SALM buoy to the riser and prepared the SALM for transport from Bjørnafjorden to Thistle field. [21] On the night of 7 August 1979, Richard Walker and Victor Guiel, who had been in saturation since 29 July, [22] were lowered to a depth of 485 feet (148 m) in the Wildrake diving bell to work on the reattachment of the SALM to its base. [23] This was Bell Dive No. 30 from the Wildrake. [24] As the bell was lowered into the ocean, its transponder came loose, and the Wildrake deck foreman was ordered to cut it off. [25]
Shortly after 02:20 on 8 August, Walker, who had been working outside the bell on the SALM base, saw that the bell had become separated from its lift wire and was hanging at an angle by its life support umbilical. He reported the emergency and rejoined Guiel in the bell, where the two divers closed and sealed the inside door. [26] [27] The bottom door, which opened outward, was left open and secured back to the bell frame. [28]
Wildrake dive superintendent Peter Holmes and dive supervisor Brian Reid believed that the umbilical was the correct secondary means of bell recovery in the system Møllerodden AS had designed. Møllerodden later denied this, [29] and DNV had not certified the umbilical winch for bell recovery. [30] Reid attempted to raise the bell with the umbilical, which was already damaged. The umbilical wheel on the ship's davit consisted of a rubber tire between two circular metal plates. The umbilical became jammed between the tire and one of the side plates. A further attempt to raise the bell on the umbilical using the ship's crane damaged the umbilical even more severely, and power and hot water to the bell were cut off. In response to a faint radio transmission from Walker and Guiel, the Wildrake crew lowered the bell to the seabed at a depth of 522 feet (159 m). [31] [32] [33]
The diving vessel Stena Welder came alongside the Wildrake to render assistance in the rescue, but its diving system was undergoing repairs and had to be hastily readied for diving. [34] Rather than having the Stena Welder recover the bell with its own crane, Holmes and Brian Masterson elected to raise the bell with the Wildrake's crane. This necessitated that the Stena Welder rescue divers attach a guide wire to the bell, which would then be used to send the Wildrake crane hook to the bell, allowing the rescue diver to attach it to the bell with a wire sling. [35]
At 06:09, the Stena Welder diving bell entered the water carrying rescue divers Phil Kasey-Smith and Eddy Frank. [36] Due to communication problems, failure of the lights on the Stena Welder bell, the absence of the Wildrake bell's transponder, and the fact that the Wildrake crew had forgotten they had moved the bell away from the SALM base a few hours earlier, it took Kasey-Smith nearly an hour to find the Wildrake bell on the seafloor. At 07:55, he saw Walker and Guiel giving him thumbs up through the porthole. [37] Kasey-Smith spent another hour directing the recovery of the slack guide wire around the SALM base. Because the Stena Welder was not a dynamic positioning (DP) vessel, it could not be held in a constant position, causing the Stena Welder bell to drag Kasey-Smith around the seabed on his umbilical. [38] At 09:02, Kasey-Smith attached the guide wire to the bell. The Wildrake began lowering its crane hook, but Kasey-Smith now saw that Walker and Guiel's movements had become "very very frantic". [39] The crane hook came down too far from the bell for Kasey-Smith to reach it with the wire slings attached to the hook. The hook was raised, had further slings attached, and was sent down again to Kasey-Smith, who attached the slings to the Wildrake bell at 10:10. [40]
The Wildrake attempted to lift the bell from the bottom at a 45-degree angle rather than vertically, and without a visual confirmation that the bell was clear to be lifted. [41] During the lift, the bell wedged against the side of the SALM base, causing the wire sling to break. [42] The end of the crane wire emerged from the sea at 12:20 without the Wildrake bell, which was again lost. [26] [43] When rescue diver Frank relocated the bell, he saw that Walker or Guiel had attempted to cut the ropes on the drop weights to allow the bell to surface, but that only one of the two weights was cut free. [14] [44] He also saw that the stranded divers were near death. [45]
With Kasey-Smith and Frank at the point of exhaustion, they were brought to the surface in the Stena Welder bell and relieved by divers Michael Mangan and Tony Slayman. At 18:16, Mangan reconnected the crane wire to the bell. [46] At 19:37, the bell was lifted out of the ocean. It was docked to the Wildrake saturation system, where Morven White, who had been placed into saturation, examined Walker and Guiel and determined that they were dead. The official pronouncement of death was made by George Shirrifs, who had arrived aboard the Wildrake with White earlier that day. [47] The divers' postmortems in Aberdeen determined that they died of hypothermia. [19] [48]
On 9 August 1979, Department of Energy (DoE) inspectors and police boarded the Wildrake to investigate the accident. DoE inspector Roy Giles found multiple safety violations and evidence of negligence. [49] Richard Walker's widow and Victor Guiel's family retained US attorney Gerald Sterns, who filed a wrongful death complaint in the United States on 30 July 1980 against ten defendants, including Infabco Diving Services and Møllerodden AS. [50]
On 28 November 1980, Infabco Diving Services Ltd. was indicted on criminal charges in Aberdeen Sheriff Court as the employer of Walker and Guiel. At the criminal trial, which began on 15 December 1980, the diving company used what later became known as the "Infabco defence", claiming that the divers were actually employed by a company called Offshore Co-ordinators Ltd., which was located in a bank on Jersey and registered in the Isle of Man. On 19 December 1980, Sheriff Alastair Stewart ruled that the Crown had failed to prove that Infabco was Walker and Guiel's employer. He therefore directed the jury to find Infabco not guilty. [51] [52]
In May 1981, the United States District Court in Los Angeles awarded compensatory damages of $475,000 to Walker's widow and daughter and $75,000 to Guiel's family. [53] This judgement, however, would never be enforced by the British court system. [54] A fatal accident inquiry on Walker and Guiel's deaths was held from 11 to 22 May 1981 in Aberdeen. [55] At the inquiry, Walker's widow, Jeanne Walker, read aloud the final entry from her husband's diary, written on 7 August 1979, in which he commented, "I don't even know if I'm gonna get out of here alive." [56] [57] Sheriff Douglas James Risk issued his Determinations on 13 November 1981. He found that the removal of the clump weight contributed to the divers' deaths and that the absence of a bell stage indicated "that the diving contractors were more concerned with speed than with safety". [58] He also concluded that Walker and Guiel "could probably have been saved" if Masterson had not ordered the crane lift to continue without investigating the obstruction impeding the lift, which proved to be the SALM base. [59]
On 17 December 1981, the Thames Television current affairs series TV Eye broadcast The Last Dive, a documentary featuring investigative reporter and former Member of Parliament Bryan Gould, which alleged that an improper relationship existed between Brian Masterson and Joe Singletary, BNOC's Offshore Construction Manager at the time of the accident. [60] On 23 July 1982, the Edinburgh law firm of Simpson and Marwick filed suit in the United Kingdom against twelve defendants on behalf of the Walker and Guiel families. [61] In October 1986, the remaining defendants settled, agreeing to pay £293,000 to the Walkers and a much smaller amount (possibly around $8000) [62] to the Guiels. No admission of wrongdoing was made by the defendants. [63]
The Wildrake, renamed Felinto Perry, later became a submarine rescue ship in the Brazilian Navy. [64] In May 2000, the Wildrake accident records in London were found to be missing. [65]
Dynamic positioning (DP) is a computer-controlled system to automatically maintain a vessel's position and heading by using its own propellers and thrusters. Position reference sensors, combined with wind sensors, motion sensors and gyrocompasses, provide information to the computer pertaining to the vessel's position and the magnitude and direction of environmental forces affecting its position. Examples of vessel types that employ DP include ships and semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling units (MODU), oceanographic research vessels, cable layer ships and cruise ships.
Surface-supplied diving is a mode of underwater diving using equipment supplied with breathing gas through a diver's umbilical from the surface, either from the shore or from a diving support vessel, sometimes indirectly via a diving bell. This is different from scuba diving, where the diver's breathing equipment is completely self-contained and there is no essential link to the surface. The primary advantages of conventional surface supplied diving are lower risk of drowning and considerably larger breathing gas supply than scuba, allowing longer working periods and safer decompression. Disadvantages are the absolute limitation on diver mobility imposed by the length of the umbilical, encumbrance by the umbilical, and high logistical and equipment costs compared with scuba. The disadvantages restrict use of this mode of diving to applications where the diver operates within a small area, which is common in commercial diving work.
Saturation diving is diving for periods long enough to bring all tissues into equilibrium with the partial pressures of the inert components of the breathing gas used. It is a diving mode that reduces the number of decompressions divers working at great depths must undergo by only decompressing divers once at the end of the diving operation, which may last days to weeks, having them remain under pressure for the whole period. A diver breathing pressurized gas accumulates dissolved inert gas used in the breathing mixture to dilute the oxygen to a non-toxic level in the tissues, which can cause potentially fatal decompression sickness if permitted to come out of solution within the body tissues; hence, returning to the surface safely requires lengthy decompression so that the inert gases can be eliminated via the lungs. Once the dissolved gases in a diver's tissues reach the saturation point, however, decompression time does not increase with further exposure, as no more inert gas is accumulated.
A diving bell is a rigid chamber used to transport divers from the surface to depth and back in open water, usually for the purpose of performing underwater work. The most common types are the open-bottomed wet bell and the closed bell, which can maintain an internal pressure greater than the external ambient. Diving bells are usually suspended by a cable, and lifted and lowered by a winch from a surface support platform. Unlike a submersible, the diving bell is not designed to move under the control of its occupants, or to operate independently of its launch and recovery system.
A diving support vessel is a ship that is used as a floating base for professional diving projects. Basic requirements are the ability to keep station accurately and reliably throughout a diving operation, often in close proximity to drilling or production platforms, for positioning to degrade slowly enough in deteriorating conditions to recover divers without excessive risk, and to carry the necessary support equipment for the mode of diving to be used.
Byford Dolphin was a semi-submersible, column-stabilised drilling rig operated by Dolphin Drilling, a subsidiarity of Fred Olsen Energy. Byford Dolphin was registered in Hamilton, Bermuda, and drilled seasonally for various companies in the British, Danish, and Norwegian sectors of the North Sea. In 2019, Dolphin scrapped the rig.
A diving chamber is a vessel for human occupation, which may have an entrance that can be sealed to hold an internal pressure significantly higher than ambient pressure, a pressurised gas system to control the internal pressure, and a supply of breathing gas for the occupants.
Diver rescue, usually following an accident, is the process of avoiding or limiting further exposure to diving hazards and bringing a diver to a place of safety. A safe place generally means a place where the diver cannot drown, such as a boat or dry land, where first aid can be administered and from which professional medical treatment can be sought. In the context of surface supplied diving, the place of safety for a diver with a decompression obligation is often the diving bell.
Commercial offshore diving, sometimes shortened to just offshore diving, generally refers to the branch of commercial diving, with divers working in support of the exploration and production sector of the oil and gas industry in places such as the Gulf of Mexico in the United States, the North Sea in the United Kingdom and Norway, and along the coast of Brazil. The work in this area of the industry includes maintenance of oil platforms and the building of underwater structures. In this context "offshore" implies that the diving work is done outside of national boundaries. Technically it also refers to any diving done in the international offshore waters outside of the territorial waters of a state, where national legislation does not apply. Most commercial offshore diving is in the Exclusive Economic Zone of a state, and much of it is outside the territorial waters. Offshore diving beyond the EEZ does also occur, and is often for scientific purposes.
An emergency ascent is an ascent to the surface by a diver in an emergency. More specifically, it refers to any of several procedures for reaching the surface in the event of an out-of-gas emergency, generally while scuba diving.
There are several categories of decompression equipment used to help divers decompress, which is the process required to allow divers to return to the surface safely after spending time underwater at higher ambient pressures.
The Thistle SALM was a tanker loading facility that allowed oil from the Thistle oilfield to be transported to land where a submarine export pipeline did not yet exist. It was also the site of the 8 August 1979 Wildrake diving accident that killed two divers. and the 21 January 1981 Stena Seaspread diving accident (non-fatal).
The Star Canopus diving accident was an incident in Scotland in November 1978 that killed two British commercial divers. During a routine dive beside the Beryl Alpha platform in the North Sea, the diving bell of the diving support vessel MS Star Canopus was lost when its main lift wire, life support umbilical, and guide wires were severed by an anchor chain of the semi-submersible Haakon Magnus. The bell dropped to the seabed at a depth of over 100 metres (330 ft). Its two occupants, 25-year-old Lothar Michael Ward and 28-year-old Gerard Anthony "Tony" Prangley, were unable to release the bell's drop weight in order to return to the surface because it was secured to the bell frame with secondary locking pins. Since there was not a bell stage to keep the bottom door of the bell off the seabed, the divers could not exit the bell to release the pins. Despite the efforts of three rescue vessels – Intersub 4, Tender Carrier, and Uncle John – the bell was not recovered for over thirteen hours, by which time Ward and Prangley had died of hypothermia and drowning.
The Drill Master diving accident was an incident in Norway in January 1974 that resulted in the death of two commercial divers. During a two-man dive from the North Sea rig Drill Master, the diving bell's drop weight was accidentally released, causing the bell to surface from a depth of 320 feet (98 m) with its bottom door open and drag the diver working outside through the water on his umbilical. The two divers, Per Skipnes and Robert John Smyth, both died from rapid decompression and drowning. The accident was caused by instructions aboard Drill Master which had not been updated when the bell system was modified and which stated that a valve should be closed during the dive which should have been open. Skipnes' body was never recovered.
The Stena Seaspread diving accident occurred on 21 January 1981, when a diving bell containing two divers had its umbilical cord severed. Both divers were rescued.
Bradley Westell was a British commercial diver who died in the North Sea off Bacton, Norfolk after his umbilical was dragged into one of the thrusters of the diving support vessel Stena Orelia. This indirectly led to the 1997 conviction of diving supervisor Kenneth Roberts for perverting the course of justice, and first prison sentence for a crime offshore working in the North Sea oil industry.
Surface supplied diving skills are the skills and procedures required for the safe operation and use of surface-supplied diving equipment. Besides these skills, which may be categorised as standard operating procedures, emergency procedures and rescue procedures, there are the actual working skills required to do the job, and the procedures for safe operation of the work equipment other than diving equipment that may be needed.
Diving procedures are standardised methods of doing things that are commonly useful while diving that are known to work effectively and acceptably safely. Due to the inherent risks of the environment and the necessity to operate the equipment correctly, both under normal conditions and during incidents where failure to respond appropriately and quickly can have fatal consequences, a set of standard procedures are used in preparation of the equipment, preparation to dive, during the dive if all goes according to plan, after the dive, and in the event of a reasonably foreseeable contingency. Standard procedures are not necessarily the only courses of action that produce a satisfactory outcome, but they are generally those procedures that experiment and experience show to work well and reliably in response to given circumstances. All formal diver training is based on the learning of standard skills and procedures, and in many cases the over-learning of the skills until the procedures can be performed without hesitation even when distracting circumstances exist. Where reasonably practicable, checklists may be used to ensure that preparatory and maintenance procedures are carried out in the correct sequence and that no steps are inadvertently omitted.
MS Wildrake/Holger Danske/NSS Felinto Perry was a motor diving vessel originally built and used by Norwegian Company. She was renamed Holger Dane after being sold to Denmark and finally NSS Felinto Perry (K-11) in the Brazilian Navy as a submarine relief ship from the Brazilian Navy. It was equipped to support diving, fire fighting and rescue of submarines.
Robert August Barth was a United States Navy Chief Quartermaster, pioneering aquanaut and professional diver. He was the only diver to participate in all U.S. Navy SEALAB missions led by George F. Bond. Barth is considered to be the father of the Rolex Sea Dweller. In 1967, he developed the idea for the helium release valve which was patented by Rolex on November 6, 1967.