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Chapter 1: What happened to saturation diver Richard Bradley on March 30, 2011?
It'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.
Out 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.
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Chapter 2: How did Richard's water blaster malfunction and what were the consequences?
And 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. When 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. The 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.
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Chapter 3: What immediate actions did Richard take after his injury?
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.
Ever 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. In this episode, we meet saturation diver Richard Bradley.
On March 30, 2011, Richard is 130 feet underwater in the Northwest 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 off from the nozzle at point blank into my forearm. The whole forearm just had this massive voluminous injection of everything in its path.
But Richard can't simply swim to the surface.
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Chapter 4: How did Richard navigate the risks of decompression sickness?
If he panics and makes a break for it, he'll be hit with agonizing 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. It'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. Privacy is not an option.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Richard face while trying to return to the diving bell?
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.
These three guys have been living together for 10 days already, sealed off in a pressurized metal tube. There's no need for small talk. They have their routines, they have their rhythms, and they all know the risks.
With 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. It 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.
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Chapter 6: How did Richard's colleagues assist him during the emergency?
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.
The 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.
Richard moves around the huge, sunken buoy, 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.
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Chapter 7: What medical procedures did Richard undergo after the accident?
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. In 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 learned to love the rush of fear and danger. I learned to swim in a little place called Ivanhoe Crossing on the Ord River with saltwater crocodiles.
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Chapter 8: What lessons did Richard learn from his near-death experience?
My 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.
Life 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. Adapting to this double life in two opposite environments was a struggle for the boy from the outback.
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 bullyings 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.
Whether 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.
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