Water Gun Malfunction: Freak Accident

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0:56It's the night of March the 30th, 2011. 150 kilometers off the coast of Western Australia, the deep blue of the ocean stretches as far as the eye can see. It's a clear evening. The moon bounces off the water, reflecting ripples of light onto the steel hull of a 300-foot boat sitting serenely amid the waves. It's quiet on deck, nothing stirs. For this diving support vessel, the action isn't so much above as below. Beneath the hull, two parallel cables run directly down into the murky depths. At the end of them sits a pill-shaped diving bell about as wide as a double mattress, coated in a protective cage of thick metal pipes.

1:48Out and away from this wardrobe-sized submarine run two more cables made up of color-coded wires twisted like licorice. These umbilical cords snake off in different directions, suspended in the inky underworld. And at the other end of one of these cables, floating like an astronaut in deep space, is 36-year-old commercial diver Richard Bradley. Today, Richard is cleaning the anchoring system for an oil tanker The tanker itself is in Singapore, unloading its cargo Giving Richard and his team a window to perform routine maintenance on the turret mooring A semi-permanent, submerged metal buoy, large enough to hold a tanker in place A seasoned, saturation diver, with over 15 years' experience For Richard, this is just another day in the office.

2:45And the ocean is in good voice tonight. There's the crackle and pop of shrimp claws. The swish and scrape of fish. A natural soundscape amplified by the dense atmosphere. There are the man-made noises too. The hum of the support vessel's thrusters. The Darth Vader-like breathing of the divers. and the roaring of the high-pressure water blasters so powerful they can strip paint underwater. Richard's water gun is set to a pressure of 15 ,000 PSI. As he floats around the turret mooring, he uses it sparingly, as much to save his hands the pain of the prolonged vibrations as to protect the integrity of the power tool.

3:35when suddenly a single scream cuts across the diver's intercoms. I look down and a blossom of blood sprouted from the arm of my suit. Richard's gun has malfunctioned, sending a jet of water into his left forearm with extreme force. The blast has punched a hole through the layers of his hot water suit and into his limb. It's a neat wound and there isn't much blood, but this isn't good news. I was petrified because it seemed almost benign, but at the same time, with the training you have, I knew that what I had was an incredibly complex wound. The entry of contaminated water at high pressure means Richard's system has been flooded with foreign bodies.

4:21The fabric from his diving suit, the floating grit of the seawater, who knows what else. Any one of the tiny particles now in Richard's arm could enter his bloodstream and travel to his brain, his heart, his lungs. That was the full awakening of a fight or flight moment. I was absolutely pumped full of an immediate cataclysmic load of adrenaline. The pain was nothing compared to the survival instinct that just took over my body.

4:57Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives.

5:20In this episode, we meet saturation diver Richard Bradley. On March 30, 2011, Richard is 130 feet underwater in the North West Shelf, Australia's largest area of oceanic oil and gas extraction. He is performing some routine cleaning when he feels a sudden pain in his left forearm. It was what I imagined being shot would be like. I took the full blast from the nozzle at point blank into my forearm.

5:54of everything in its path. But Richard can't simply swim to the surface. If he panics and makes a break for it, he'll be hit with agonising and potentially deadly decompression sickness. What he does next will be crucial as he follows a complex, high-risk procedure. Every step must go perfectly if he is to have any hope of getting out of this alive. Sometimes you end up in these situations and you switch off and you just act and if fate is on your side, then you're coming back. If fate's not on your side, you're not. I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Real Survival Stories.

7:00It's evening, March the 30th, 2011. On board a support vessel floating 150 kilometers off the coast of Western Australia, Richard Bradley is getting ready for a night's diving. He is sat in the tiny wet room. It acts as a transfer lock between the pressurized saturation chamber where he and his fellow divers live, and the diving bell that lowers them into the deep. There isn't much space in the so-called wet pot, but then again there isn't much space anywhere when you're a diver operating at pressure. There is barely room to stand up in the hyperbaric living chamber where Richard and his colleagues sleep, stacked in tiny bunks, often five or six to a room, unable to leave.

7:47Privacy is not an option. There is a concentrated silence that always descends just before a dive, the calm before the storm. In the quiet, Richard looks up at two familiar faces. Tonight he'll be diving with colleague Richard Sanderson, or Sando. Marty, the third member of their team, will be the bellman, remaining in the diving bell to monitor the equipment and provide backup. It doesn't mean anything if you don't do it with good blokes. And I've had the great privilege of working with all sorts of people, the good, the bad, the ugly, the wild, the rangy. But I can say that amongst all of them, there is this really amazing streak of just bonding together and getting it done and getting hard things done in trying situations.

8:36These three guys have been living together for 10 days already, sealed off in a pressurised metal tube. There's no need for small talk. They have their routines, they have their rhythms, and they all know the risks.

8:52With the final checks done, the three men squeeze into the diving bell, a domed vessel not much bigger than a large fridge, and huddle amongst the helmets, fins, and racks of umbilical diving cable Marty seals the diving bell off from the wet pot, and it detaches, beginning its descent

9:15It doesn't take long for the bell to winch down to working depth Other divers are working 100 meters down at the seabed, but Richard's team are relatively shallow today, only 40 meters Not quite the length of an Olympic swimming pool Marty opens the bottom hatch, and Richard and Sando sink into the freezing water Richard switches on his torch and scans around He's looking for the high-pressure water gun he'll be using on the shift The previous diver left it down here for him with instructions on where to find it. When Richard finds the gun, he conducts a thorough inspection. Well, as thorough as he can be.

10:00The gun, which I'd checked in the dark and, you know, I had a good check, but still, you know, on hindsight I'd say maybe I was a bit too cursory. The light penetration at this depth at night is practically zero. Richard is totally reliant on his torch, but he's used these guns before. Pretty quickly he gets to work. Our particular part of the work scope is that there was a turret mooring buoy. We were clearing all the paint and stripping it all off, ready for some non-destructive testing. So essentially just checking for cracks in the welds and getting it all ready.

10:42Richard moves around the huge, sunken boy Navigating mooring chains as thick as his torso They drape down on all sides Disappearing into the blackness Running to the seabed Like the legs of a gigantic metal spider But his movement is being restricted And so he discards some of his gear I'd taken my fins off Because as somebody who Even when I'm working mid-water, I like to Spider-Man around. Without his fins, he can more easily grab on and push off from the turret mooring. It's a move not without risk. Without fins, his mobility could be seriously impaired in an emergency. But Richard is no stranger to Jeopardy.

11:27In fact, high-risk situations are kind of his happy place. Richard grew up in one of the planet's last true frontiers. The Kimberley is a vast, remote wilderness in Australia's northwest corner, covering over 420 ,000 square kilometers, with a population of under 40 ,000. That's over 10 square kilometers per person. Richard's parents worked on the sprawling cattle stations along the Ord River that bisects this ancient, rugged landscape. A very adventurous, outdoorsy childhood. As a kid, I was very curious and naughty, and I learnt to love the rush of fear and danger. I learnt to swim in a little place called Ivanhoe Crossing on the Ord River with saltwater crocodiles.

12:20My father was a bush pilot, a mustering pilot. He flew fixed-wing helicopters. The people I grew up with were cowboys. They were helicopter musterers. They were bull riders. My childhood is littered with plane crashes and chopper crashes. My father himself had had several aviation wrecks, fortunately none with me. But through the course of my childhood, whether it was Crocs or the bush or, you know, bush aviation, I was exposed to events where life often hung in the balance. And I think subliminally you get used to this sort of existence where there's a heightened sense of, we've got to make this work now because we don't know what's going on tomorrow.

12:58Life in the Kimberley, for Richard and his family, was one of living for the moment, attuned to nature, ready to adapt to whatever each day threw at them. But when Richard turned eight, his parents threw something at him he wasn't expecting. My father flew me up to Darwin and put me on a jet plane that took me down to Sydney, and I was basically inserted into a proprietary school for boys. and nothing prepares an eight-year-old boy for that. Richard's world of freedom and adventure in the bush was wrenched away, replaced by one of rules and hierarchies far from home in a boarding school in Australia's biggest city.

13:41Adapting to this double life in two opposite environments was a struggle for the boy from the outback. I had a real problem with authority. I ran away, I had problems, they nearly kicked me out. I worked out how to take a beating and get on with it. So, yeah, life was a bit of a dichotomy. You know, you had this sort of one life where you had to follow the rules and there was corporal punishment and there was beatings and bullies and all the hierarchy that comes with it. It was very Victorian. But then as soon as I got home, you know, I was back in the bush.

14:20Whether at home or in the city, one thing that remained constant was Richard's love of the water. He learned to dive at 15, taught by an old maverick in Sydney who literally threw him into the deep end first time. It was both irresponsible and incredibly dangerous, but Richard came up beaming. By contrast, he complained that getting his scuba certification was boring. It was too safe, too careful. All the risk had been mitigated out of it. Then he discovered pearl diving. The first time I jumped overboard on a purling boat, the water was black. The tide was ripping. Within five minutes, I had a sea snake wrapped around me, and I was sucking on the regulator and nearly breathing it down.

15:06Searching for pearls in deep-sea mollusks is dangerous work, and as such, it's relatively well paid. Richard took the winnings from his first season of pearling and went traveling When he returned, he began university with a plan He was going to become a commercial diver He'd heard about a specific type of diving that was incredibly dangerous and therefore lucrative Saturation diving

15:35It's a method that allows divers to work at extreme depths without constantly surfacing It involves being placed under the same pressure that exists underwater for prolonged periods, sometimes weeks at a time, in specialized habitats. Doing this acclimatizes divers and negates the need for constant decompression. When the human body is placed under extreme pressure, like when it's under a large amount of water, inert gases like helium or nitrogen dissolve into the blood and tissues. If it decompresses too quickly, these gases form bubbles inside the body, causing decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends, so-called because of the way the body contorts in agony.

16:21It can be fatal. To avoid it, decompression must be rigorously, painstakingly slow. If decompression happens really fast, as it did on the Biford Dolphin oil rig in 1983, three, the results can be tragic and grisly. When a mechanical failure caused the rapid decompression of two pressurized chambers, five of the six men inside met horrifyingly gruesome ends. Of course, safety protocols have improved since the 80s, but every saturation diver knows the stories. Bifoot Dolphin, Wild Rake, Piper Alpha. The industry is not for the faint-hearted. but in many ways that's what drew Richard to it in the first place.

17:06I was always that young bloke that said, yeah, I'll go and, you know, I just found myself running with a posse of people that felt the same way, about the same environment and, you know, after a while you start to amass dead friends. My risk parameters are greater than others, even within my industry. I still have a fear of death. I just don't feel like I'm actually operating at my optimal level unless I'm close to that sense of fear. Beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, Richard has been blasting paint of the turret mooring with his ultra-high-pressure water gun for a few hours now. His gun is firing a jet of water at a pressure of 15 ,000 pounds per square inch, or the equivalent of a large African elephant balanced on a single Lego brick.

17:56Needless to say, it makes short work at the paint job. For the gun to remain balanced, water must be propelled backwards at the same pressure as the water going out of the front. To do that safely, a large conical exhaust pipe, otherwise known as a retro shroud, protrudes backwards from the gun and fires the counter thrust safely behind the user. Without this nozzle, which is also spreading the ejected water over a larger volume, the destructive jet of water coming out the front of the gun would also be coming out of the back. midway through this cleaning job, I'm going left and right, and the vibrations of this gun, because it is so powerful, unbeknownst to me at the time, but the way that the shroud had been put on and the design of the shroud, there were three grub screws holding it on and one of the grub screws had come loose.

18:48A tiny, crucial screw wriggles and dances under the immense vibrations of the gun. Finally, it falls out. Richard continues to work, oblivious Until suddenly, there is a deep bang and a thudding pain Richard releases the trigger and drops the gun He looks down at his arm The shroud came away and I took the full blast off from the nozzle at point blank into my forearm

19:26It's March the 30th, 2011, late at night. Many miles off the coast of Western Australia, 40 meters underwater, bellman Marty is sat listening. He's been in roughly this position in the diving bell for the past three hours. Tonight, his role is one of safety, a backstop in case anything should go wrong. He is whiled away the hours, checking that both Richard and Sando's umbilicals aren't twisting, teasing them out if they need more, and reeling in any slack. Periodically he checks the gas panel, makes sure the diving bell is all in good order, but aside from that his job is to sit and wait. The only entertainment to punctuate the long hours in this black abyss is the chatter over the intercom.

20:14Right now, however, there is only quiet. A single scream has just silenced the airwaves. For what seems like an age, Marty doesn't speak. He just listens. Who screamed? And why? Finally, Richard Bradley's voice crackles on the line. He's got a problem. I told Topside to make it cold, which is essentially to turn the gun off, and I was coming back to the bell. This can only mean one thing. Something has gone very wrong. Frantically, Marty starts hauling in the umbilical. Meanwhile, at the other end of the long cable, Richard has a dilemma. He isn't wearing his fins. He could look for them in the dark and try to put them on with his one working arm.

21:07But time is ticking. He has an open wound, allowing who knows what to enter his bloodstream. He could be about to go into shock or pass out. Luckily, Richard has a ready-made escape rope. I knew that I had my umbilical there, and it's the umbilical that down which your gas and your hot water and your expired gas and your communications, and it's very strong. And I knew that I had that to haul myself along, Alongside, I just started hauling with my one good arm, and I just started hauling myself back. With his injured left arm dangling limply by his side, Richard uses his right to pull himself through the water and back towards the diving bell.

21:48It should be straightforward. It's anything but. He's been diving at 40 metres, but the umbilical cable is 75 metres long. That means, inevitably, there is some slack. And any slack is a potential danger. It means the cable could be dragged into the thrusters of the support vessel. These are huge propellers that work constantly to make sure the surface vessel maintains its position while the diving bell is lowered. With tides and currents, the boat works hard just to stand still. This means that as Richard pulls himself inch by inch Meter by meter back along the length of the umbilical He should also be coiling it to take up the slack But with one arm incapacitated, of course he can't This is where his colleague Marty steps up Marty's in the bell, he's overheard it on the comms as well He knows something's not right and he's a big Tahitian boy and he's just hauling up on hoes and racking it.

22:54The umbilical cable is thick and heavy, but Marty works furiously to pull as much slack into the diving bell as quickly as possible. Richard continues to shimmy his way along the line, silked dancing in the light of his torch beam, blood rushing in his ears.

23:14Despite the dull throb of deep pain in his left arm and the rising panic of being so far from any sort of medical help, he makes decent progress. Until, halfway along the line, there is another obstacle, one that even Marty cannot help with. It's something called the Golden Gate. The Golden Gate is a device that we have when we are working shallow in saturation so that our umbilicals don't end up back in the thrusters. We go through a Golden Gate to extend our range. He approaches the Golden Gate, a sunken cage through which the umbilicals pass to help prevent slack floating up into the boat propellers.

23:54Richard can see that on the other side of the gate, his umbilical line is taut. Marty has racked in as much as he can. Now all Richard has to do is swim or haul himself through the gate and across the 20 meters or so between the gate and the diving bell. But his umbilical cable, this side of the gate, is floating behind him, slack, like a giant sea serpent drifting on the currents. Not only is there the danger of the propellers, but the cable could also become twisted or kinked. The umbilical provides all the divers' oxygen and hot water for their suit. A slight malfunction could have catastrophic consequences.

24:36Again, it's Richard's team who support him in this time of need As he looks back at the writhing underwater cable He suddenly sees Sando emerging from the gloom He is racking not only his own, but Richard's umbilical too Making it safe enough to continue There's no time for thank yous Richard turns and sets off again Navigating speedily past the Golden Gate Now there is just the final stretch back to the diving bell With Sando behind him and Marty ahead doing all they can to help So I start pulling myself along the line I'm hauling on my hose By the time I arrive at the standoff of the bell Marty's got most of my excess hose in And I'm back to the bell And now I'm just like, woof, alright, this is Okay, I've managed to achieve this As Richard wriggles himself one-handed up into the trunking of the diving bell, two large hands grab the gas canisters on his back.

25:37Marty just, because like I said, he's a big fella, he just gets me and just hauls me up on my bailout bottle. And I just come in and sit down and he's great. He unhooks my hat, gets it off me. And then, okay, so we're back in the bell.

25:58It's taken Richard about nine minutes to get back to the diving bell. It's already been a huge effort just to get him out of the water. And they are by no means home and hosed. First, they coil up and stow all of Sando's umbilical and get him into the bell too. Once that's done and all equipment is in and locked down, Marty closes the hatch on the diving bell, sealing them in, and they begin their ascent to the support vessel. It's not far to go. They've only been shallow diving, but the seconds pass like minutes. Richard looks at the faces of his colleagues. There is an obvious edge of fear. Then he looks down at his arm, at the hole that is so neat and bloodless it's uncanny, surreal, like an optical illusion.

26:50The diving bell rejoins the boat with a clunk, and the three men prepare themselves for transfer. The bell locks onto the system and we do a TUP, a transfer under pressure, and so that essentially involves the pressure in the bell equalising with the pressure in the system through a trunking that's got a hydraulic clamp on it. That is often considered the most dangerous time for saturation procedures. It's when you expose the pressure of the system and the bell to a possible breach through the hydraulic clamp. In this environment, nothing can be rushed. Richard waits as the pressure in the diving bell slowly equalises with that of the saturation chamber.

27:33Once that's done, he passes through various transfer hatches. Only then is he able to finally get some medical attention. Derek Finlay, the diver medic, was there to welcome me and cut my suit off and we got a look at what was there. I was really surprised when I saw it. It was about the size of my thumbnail and it was a really, really neat bullet hole, like a puncture. And because the pressure had been so high, there was no blood. It was cauterized, but it was a serious sort of cavity into my forearm. And it's like a broken wing. It's hanging beside me and I can't really feel my hand. I couldn't move my hand, but what I later learned was compartment syndrome was setting in because of the force that had come in.