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The 1983 diving accident that killed five through explosive decompression

Ellsworth Toohey
Dec 22, 2025
∙ Paid

By Josef Pavlik - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16198312

On November 5, 1983, at 4 a.m., a mechanical failure on an oil rig in the North Sea killed five men so quickly and violently that the physics involved still gets cited in diving safety courses four decades later.

The Byford Dolphin was a semi-submersible dri…

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