In Their Own Words: Chris Lemons – Deep Sea Diving Crisis | 1

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0:12From Audible Originals, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. In their own words.

0:25On September 18th, 2012, saturation diver Chris Lemons went to work nearly 300 feet beneath the North Sea. A ship winched him down in a dive bell until he was near the sea floor. Chris and a fellow diver jumped out and went to fix a pipe on an oil production site. They breathed, communicated, and stayed warm through a network of hoses called umbilicals. The umbilicals were connected to both the diving bell and to the ship. All systems were normal on the seafloor, but they didn't stay that way on the surface. Suddenly, though, I hear the alarms. These are alarms that I can hear in my helmet. They are going off in dive control on the vessel, 300 feet above me.

1:11Chris needed to get back to the dive bell quickly. But on his way, his umbilical cord got caught, and then it snapped. And he found himself on the seafloor, alone in the darkness, with just a few minutes of emergency oxygen in two tanks on his back. My name is Chris Lemons, and this is the story of how I was left 300 feet below the surface of the North Sea with nothing to breathe for nearly 35 minutes. Here's Chris's story in his own words. This is Deep Sea Diving Crisis.

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2:55Chris Lemons got into saturation diving from a summer job when he was about 20 years old and drifting a little. I was a little bit lost in life, to be truthful. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. A friend's father helped Chris out. He just found me a little summer job, really, working on the back deck of one of these dive support vessels, just servicing the divers and cleaning their tools and doing all the donkey work, I suppose, for a bit of pocket money over the summer. But that exposed me to this world of saturation diving that, like I think, like many people, I didn't know existed. And it looked very romantic and interesting, and there were slight enigmas, these divers.

3:30Whilst you're on the boat with them, you don't really see them because they're locked away in these chambers for a month at a time, so you can maybe see them occasionally through a little porthole. Saturation divers support the oil and gas industry. They install, inspect, and fix pipelines and infrastructure at depths of up to 1 ,000 feet. Because of this, saturation divers face lengthy decompression times, maybe four, five, even six days.

3:57To get around decompressing after every dive, they live aboard the ship in the cigar-shaped compression chambers that looked kind of cool to 20-year-old Chris. They've got a touch of the space station about them. They're sort of long, thin cylinders, maybe 10 feet sort of in circumference, not quite enough to have much room in. And they're linked together. And basically at the start of any project, four teams of three divers would go into these chambers. And a mixture of helium and oxygen is pumped into the chamber, pressurizing it to the depth the divers would be working at for 28 days. What it is in essence is just one dive.

4:32It's just a dive that takes a very long time. So basically living under that pressure for nearly a month. And for safety, there's visual communication via cameras mounted on ROVs that have eyes on the divers when they're in the water. So you're watching them on camera and everything they did looked interesting and at that age it also looked a bit dangerous, I suppose. And absolutely, they turned up on the quayside in nicer cars than I had, that's for sure. So yeah, I decided there and then that that's what I wanted to do in my life and that gave me direction, which is often hard to find in life, isn't it?

5:03To become a saturation diver, Chris first had to work as a surface supply diver. This meant he dove with an umbilical cable connected to the surface, but he didn't live under pressure for weeks or dive as deep as saturation divers. Chris adapted well to the subaquatic world. It's like an ethereal environment. It can be very beautiful and quiet. Because we don't breathe gas out into the open water because it's sucked away, we're almost silent when we're down there. If there is marine life in the area, it's often not shy of you and comes to say hello and things like that. So it can be really magical.

5:37There are days when it can feel like a very, very beautiful, quiet place to work. There are days when it can be absolutely horrible. You're wading around waist-deep in mud and hauling heavy things around. By September of 2012, Chris was 32 years old. He'd been diving for eight or nine years at that point, but he'd only been doing saturation diving for about a year. I was probably on about my sixth entire month down there, so it certainly wasn't my first day at the office, but I was still a learner to some degree, very much under the tutelage of Duncan Alcock, who was in the water with us that day as well.

6:10I'd done most of my saturation career with him to that point as a bit of a mentor. But away from work, I was getting married the following year. I was in the process of physically building my own house over on the west coast of Scotland. I had the hopes and dreams, I guess, that we all do at that age of a life to be lived and kids and all that kind of thing. Chris was in kind of a sweet spot in life. He was young, engaged and in good physical shape from cycling and swimming. And now he was doing the cool job that had fascinated him during that summer gig all those years ago. So that September, Chris left his family and went to his job at an offshore oil field in the North Sea.

6:51We were working aboard a vessel called the Bibi Topaz, which is a ship that's maybe about 300 feet long with a crew of about 110 people, weighs about 10 ,000 tons. We were working about 90 miles east of Aberdeen in Scotland, so that's pretty much in the middle of the North Sea. Chris was on a team with two other guys, his mentor, Duncan Alcock, and another diver, David Uassa. Dave and Duncan are very different people. Dave is a very quiet, intelligent guy very capable of turning his emotions off and just getting on with the job somebody I personally got on very, very well with we're good friends, we're quite similar in many ways he was really good company for me I like spending time with Dave Duncan was, I think father figure probably was the best way to describe it we'd become very close friends we'd spend a lot of time in the preceding year working and living together because living in the confines of those chambers there is no privacy You know, we are literally living cheek by jowl, sleeping within touching distance.

7:52There are no secrets. You hear every phone call home and you see the whites of people's eyes all day, every day. So that sort of facade that we all carry as human beings, particularly as men, of course, that ego is unsustainable. It drops away and you get to know people really intimately, which is a really nice thing. It becomes a little family. So Duncan and I were very close. I think he's just the loveliest of human beings, quite frankly. An extremely professional diver, very, very experienced. He's been doing it his whole life. So yeah, they're very different characters, but what they had in common is they were both very good divers and both incredible human beings.

8:26Aboard the Bibi Topaz, Chris Duncan and David climbed into a compression chamber to get ready for their 28-day shift. 24 days of work, four days of decompression. And those days of decompression at the end? They have to be done. If your mother dies, if your appendix bursts, if you break a leg or, you know, if the ship is sinking, it doesn't matter. you still have to go through those days of decompression. Or you can die from the bends, also known as decompression sickness. This can happen when a diver surfaces too quickly and a buildup of nitrogen bubbles is released into their bloodstream or tissues, causing severe pain and even death.

9:05Chris found his bunk and the chamber hatch closed. Then the chamber was pressurized, sort of like what happens in an airplane. But in this case, over the course of a couple hours, the pressure was gradually increased to match the depth where Chris and the men on his team would be working, about 300 feet beneath the North Sea. So instead of breathing air, we breathe a mixture of helium and oxygen. So the helium is very light, very easy to breathe. It unfortunately gives you this very ridiculous, squeaky sort of helium voice, which you have to live with for a month at a time. And trust me, the novelty of that quickly wears off.

9:39It's funny for the first five minutes, but beyond that, it's a bit of a pain, to be honest. Beyond the helium-oxygen mixture, Chris and his teammates will dive in special suits to keep them warm, in water that can be very cold. In the North Sea, around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. These are loose-fitting wetsuits with warm water piped in from the ship. We heat seawater up, basically, and it's pumped down to us and floods our suit with this hot water to keep us warm in these cold conditions. And, yeah, it's very pleasant. It's a bit like being in a jacuzzi for your six hours of work. and we put on a sort of big old diving helmet, which hasn't really changed very much in the last hundred years, to be honest.

10:14It's sort of bright yellow these days and made of Kevlar, but principles are the same. You've probably seen sort of old brass things, you know, but not much has changed. The wetsuits are connected to a twisted set of cables called the umbilical, or literally a giver of life. It's strung down from the ship to the diving bell and then split three ways to the divers. This is how Chris's suit stayed warm. It's also what powered the camera and light on his helmet, and the comms inside his helmet, so he could talk to the ship. It also piped in and sucked out the helium-oxygen mixture he breathed. All this made it possible for Chris and his colleagues to work six-hour shifts on the ocean floor.

10:55There are days when you're doing fairly intricate electronic and hydraulic work, or you might be welding. But there are also days when you're just hauling sandbags around the seabed for six hours and wishing you'd worked a little bit harder at school. On that particular day, we were going down to remove a section of pipework within a manifold. Now, a manifold is just a big structure really on the bottom of the sea, maybe 90 feet long and 30 feet high. A big yellow house, basically, if you want to look at it that way. On the night of September 18th, 2012, the weather was rough, with winds around 40 miles an hour and swells of about 20 feet.

11:32But it's not bad enough to stop the diving operation. Once it was over the worksite, the Bibby Topaz turned on its computerized positioning system. To avoid using anchors, the system uses technology like GPS and beacons on the seafloor to help it stay in place over the divers. The ship's crew trolleys the round diving bell over the compression chamber. The bell locks onto what Chris, Duncan and David have called home for the past five days. The men get in and the diving bell is locked off. It then undocks and is trollied over to a hole in the bottom of the ship called a moon pool. It's about 10 o 'clock at night and we are lowered down through the water column, the 275 or so feet to the bottom of the North Sea.

12:20That's a process that takes about 30 minutes or so. We can hear the noise of the winches. We can see the water rushing up the sides of the diving bales through our portholes as we descend. We can see a little bit of light as we go through the first few feet of our journey downwards. Lights on the vessel, the bottom of the hull and things like that. But quite quickly we're plunged into the ethereal darkness, I guess, of the abyss of the oceans. And for us it's very much a normal day at the office. The diving bell is full of equipment and very cramped for three adults. It's lowered to about 30 feet above the seafloor to avoid damaging any pipes on the bottom.

12:58The men rotate who stays inside and who steps down onto the platform under the bell. For this shift, Duncan stays behind to monitor the umbilicals while Dave and Chris go to work. Duncan opens the door. That's his job as the bellman. We don our diving helmets at that point, so I pop on a diving helmet which weighs about 50 pounds. And also I'm wearing a pair of scuba tanks basically on my back which provide an emergency supply. just enough to last maybe eight or nine minutes down at that depth. I then plumb in my umbilical and once Duncan has performed all his final checks he just makes sure that nothing's leaking and checks I've got enough gas in my emergency supply and then once he's clipped my helmet in and once that's all closed off and sealed I can't really hear him anyway so it's all sort of hand gestures so he gives me a thumbs up, I give him one back and he gives me a couple of taps on my helmet just to indicate that he's happy and I drop the last 30 feet or so to the bottom down into darkness, into blackness, into the unknown, really.

13:57And away I go.

14:15On the night of September 18, 2012, 32-year-old saturation diver Chris Lemons steps out of a diving bell in the North Sea. He drops about 25 feet to the ocean floor. His job? To remove a section of pipe from an undersea oil production site. Where Chris is, nearly 300 feet down, it's pitch black, and there are no reference points. So the first thing he needs to do is orient himself. When I hit the bottom, when I can feel it under my wellies, I ask for them to turn my light on. We have a light on our helmet to help us see. I can see the diving bell above me lit up. It has a series of lights around it so we can see it clearly.

14:54A little beacon of light above us in the darkness. Chris is carrying a compass. He waits for direction from the ship to tell him how to get to the manifold, the building with the pipe he's supposed to work on. The manifold, which is probably only 10 feet or so from me, I can't actually make that out. But our dive supervisor, who is a Canadian called Craig Frederick, It gives me a compass bearing so that I can set my compass and walk in that direction. And within a few steps, I bump into this enormous structure that we're going to be working inside. It's painted bright yellow. And I wait for Dave.

15:30Dave comes into the water after me. It takes him a few minutes to drop down himself and come over and meet me. And then the pair of us make our way inside this manifold. Where Chris is working might as well be on the moon. It's cold, dark, and inhospitable, and there's not much sound. Because of the re-breathing system, there are no air bubbles like a scuba diver. Because sound travels well in water, Chris can sometimes hear the hum of a boat, or the distant sound of drilling. Through the microphone and earpiece inside his helmet, he can talk to the other diver, Dave, and to Craig, the dive supervisor, up on the boat.

16:09He can also hear the sound of his own breathing as he heads to find the pipe inside the metal building. Finding our way in is quite easy, actually. Our dive supervisor is telling us where to go. He has an engineer sat with him as well with the plans for the manifold. So he talks us into where we need to be working. We are very much just his hands really just to do the job. So we are given our instructions stage by stage. We start working through that process. Chris works with equipment dropped down from the boat. We bring a two-inch hose down from the ship and drag it into the structure and start going through a pressure testing procedure to isolate pressure either side of this piece of pipeline that we're going to be removing.

16:51It's a safety test. If the pressure is lower inside the pipe than the external water pressure, the men could get sucked in. They receive instructions from Craig, repeat them back, and then get to work. Really does just feel like a normal day at the office. The diving bell is sat above us, maybe 30 feet above us. I mean, we can basically see it from where we're working. Our umbilicals are running pretty straight back to it. That's always something that's very, very important to us. We need to be very careful with them at all times, make sure they don't catch on anything and they're not looped around anything.

17:23Chris and Dave are working about 30 feet inside the manifold structure. They've been in the water for about an hour. Dave is working maybe six feet away from where I am. He's doing a slightly different job to me. He's starting to remove some bolts from a flange in preparation for removing the pipework. I'm going through the pressure testing work scope with Craig, so he's telling me to turn this valve and turn that valve. And suddenly, though, I hear the alarms. Through his helmet, Chris is hearing alarms going off in dive control on the ship above him. But that's not unusual. We have this open line of communication up to the dive supervisor on the vessel 300 feet above us, but that also means we can hear everything going on in the background.

18:07So that's carbon dioxide alarms, oxygen alarms. There are alarms for the vessel's positioning system. The kind of thing that we hear every day that don't necessarily mean there's an emergency of any kind. They're usually just being tested or they're a trigger for the dive supervisor to do something. However, these were a little bit louder than normal. So my ears prick up a little, as do Dave's, I think. But I'm not panicking. Craig, however, very quickly lets us know that we need to put our tools down. We need to get ourselves out of the structure we're working inside and that we need to get ourselves back to the diving bell.

18:41The tone of Craig's voice tells Chris and Dave this isn't a drill. They drop their tools and move to get out of the structure. Dave is just a few feet ahead of me. I can see his back and I can see his light shining ahead. I can also see my umbilical, which is running alongside him and out of the structure. As I'm walking out, I'm making sure that I carry that umbilical in my left hand, just to make sure that it doesn't catch on any of the myriad of pipework and valves and bolts. And so within just a few seconds, really, maybe 10 seconds or so, we find ourselves on open seabed, basically. But that's when confusion sets in.

19:22I look up and I am fully expecting to see the diving bell in the sea above me, lit up sort of beacon of home, but it's not there. Chris and Dave don't know it, but the ship's computerized positioning system has failed. It's drifting away from them and pulling the diving bell with it. Chris knows he must find the diving bell. Even though the diving bell isn't where it's supposed to be, I do always know where it is. It is easy to find because it is always, even in the worst of visibility, at the end of your umbilical. so you follow your umbilical. Chris can't see the diving bell at all, not even a faint hint of lights.

20:04All I can see is my umbilical which should have been out in front of me going to the diving bell but instead it is wrapped back over the top of my head and over the top of the structure that we've been working inside, this thing that's about 30 feet high. So without really thinking too much I and so does Dave, we turn to start climbing our umbilicals. Chris and Dave start pulling themselves up, hand over hand, to the top of the structure, towards the diving bell, wherever it is. Inside the bell, Duncan takes up the slack on the umbilicals, but he can only do one at a time. He does Dave's first.

20:40But that means as I'm climbing my umbilical, I'm leaving a loop of it behind me. And when I get to the top of this structure, this 30-foot-high structure, I turn immediately to check that that loop hasn't caught on anything. And that's the moment that I realise very quickly, to be honest, that I'm in very, very serious trouble. As I've climbed, I've gone to one side of what turns out to be a transponder bucket, which is just a metal outcrop on the side of the structure, just on the roof. And my umbilical, unfortunately, is on the other side of that. I turn to free it, to try and stop it catching, but it happens incredibly fast.

21:17Chris's umbilical cable is snagged, and it's pulling him down towards the top of the structure he'd been working inside. There's a moment when Chris worries that he'll be pulled into a gap in the structure, like being pulled through a cheese grater. Thankfully though, and with some degree of irony, the umbilical stops slipping and it catches tight around this gap. But what that effectively means is that I've become an anchor to a vessel which is continuing to move away from my position. And because the umbilical is now caught fast, it begins to stretch. Chris starts panicking and begs for some slack in his umbilical.

21:53I'm speaking to Craig and I am asking him to give me some slack. I'm just asking for that, screaming for it really. I know I'm in serious, serious trouble. But neither Duncan nor Craig can do anything to help Chris. The ship and the diving bell are still drifting and they're powerless to stop it. And as the umbilical continues to stretch, the communications cable is suddenly ripped out like a jack being pulled out of a speaker. I'm in the midst of beseeching them for more slack. And then very suddenly, I can't hear them and they can't hear me. And to suddenly have no one to speak to and no one speaking to you, it's a very lonely feeling.

22:30Chris also loses power. Then his breathing gas hose stretches and probably kinks because suddenly he has nothing to breathe. This is something he's trained for, though. There's a valve on the side of his helmet to switch over to the emergency gas tanks on his back. Another valve allows the used air to escape. It's a very abrupt sensation when you suddenly lose gas, almost like you're trying to suck something down and it's just not there. So that's a panicky moment, definitely. My hand goes straight to my temple and I open that supply very, very quickly. But that means I'm then on a clock. I've gone from this world where you have this infinite supply to one where you have this very finite one.

23:09But that really does mean that suddenly I probably only have eight or nine minutes at best of gas in the tanks on my back before I run out and I need to get myself back to a breathable environment, which has to be the diving bell. There is no other option. As all of this is happening, Dave is also climbing his umbilical. Dave realises there's a problem. He's in the water alongside me and he turns to try and help me. His umbilical, though, is only 150 feet long. Both of our umbilicals are only 150 feet long. At this point, the vessel is already just over 150 feet away from us. so his umbilical is not long enough for him to be able to get back to me.

23:47But he does get to within a couple of feet. We can't actually speak to each other at that point. My communication cable has been severed, but we definitely have an eyeball-to-eyeball moment where I can see the whites of his eyes. I am entreating him to help me, to get me out of this situation, and he is basically looking back at me saying, I'm sorry, you're on your own, my friend, and he is then pulled away into the darkness. I lose sight of him as the vessel continues to pull him away, but I can still see the light on his helmet. And then after a few seconds, I lose sight of his light as well, and he is pulled away off the top of the structure in no small amount of danger himself.

24:25The boat keeps drifting. Chris and his snagged umbilical act like an anchor, and the tension increases. Finally, Chris's umbilical creaks, and then it snaps.