Welcome to another edition of Diving Gone Wrong.
In this video, we're gonna over three stories involving deep ocean diving,
with each one progressively more horrifying than the last.
I have to warn you, the final story is particularly gruesome,
even if it is true to the events as they occurred.
As always, viewer discretion is advised.
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In April of 2003, somewhere in the Yellow Sea between North Korea and the Shandong province of China,
a Chinese fishing boat noticed something odd sticking up out of the water.
Initially, it looked almost like an antenna sticking out of the water.
But as they got closer, they realized it was attached to a massive metal object.
Eventually, they got close enough to realize that it was actually the periscope of a submarine,
except it wasn't really doing anything.
The entire time they watched it, it just kind of floated aimlessly.
The fishing boat then contacted the Navy who sent two boats to come to investigate the situation.
Upon arriving, the two Navy vessels worried that it might be a submarine
from one of the neighboring countries.
This would've been a very serious intrusion in the controlled waters.
But when they got closer to take a look, they were able to identify it as a Chinese submarine.
In other words, it was one of their own ship.
Then, they tried to radio the ship or establish some communication with it,
but all they got back was radio silence.
The following day, the sub was finally boarded to figure out what was going on,
and what they discovered was as terrifying as it was confusing.
Upon opening the hatch, they immediately noticed how dark it was inside the sub.
There was clearly no power, so no lights were on anywhere inside.
Then, they started walking through the sub and they began to find the bodies of crew all over the place.
And the weirdest part was that all of the crew were still at their stations
and looked as though they were working and then just suddenly died,
like they didn't even know they were in any danger.
In total, 71 bodies were discovered on the ship with no survivors.
Months after this discovery and following a lengthy investigation,
one commander and the commissar of the North Sea Fleet were dismissed from the Navy.
In addition to those high-ranking officials, another eight officers were all dismissed
or demoted on the grounds of improper command and control.
Because of the secrecy surrounding military operations, it took a long time
before the truth was finally learned about what happened to the sub and the crew.
Even now, it hasn't been 100% confirmed.
This is the leading theory that is most widely accepted about the incident.
This particular sub holds around 55 crew members.
When it was discovered, there were a total of 71 people on board,
so it's been speculated that there were some sort of special procedure or test being run.
One of these additional crew was a high-ranking official, and the rest seemed to be trainees.
Now, this particular sub was something known as a diesel-electric sub.
On the surface, the diesel engine is used to power all the functions and propulsion
and also charge large batteries.
These batteries are used to power the propulsion system when the sub is submerged.
When on the surface, the diesel engine pulls in air for ventilation.
This can also be done when the sub is partially submerged to remain undetected.
When the sub is in this submerged state,
a snorkel sticks out of the water to keep pulling in air for the engine.
If the water gets too high or the sub submerges,
there's a valve that closes the snorkel to prevent water from getting in.
At the same time, the diesel engine shuts off and the power is diverted to the batteries.
Sometime before the discovery of the sub by the fishing vessel,
the submarine either surfaced and the valve didn't open,
or it was already surfaced and water was detected and the valve was closed.
In either case, what should have happened was that the engine should not have been running.
For some reason, it was running and with no ventilation,
it completely consumed all of the air inside of the sub in just two minutes.
One minute after the air were sucked out of the sub, the men inside would've started to get lightheaded.
Two minutes after the air was sucked out, all of them would've been unconscious,
and then by three minutes, they would've all died due to asphyxia.
This also would've created a suction inside of the sub
that would've made it difficult to open any of the hatches.
But it's likely This all happened so quickly anyway that no one even realized it.
That's why all of the crew members were found at their stations seemingly unaware of any danger.
Another possibility is that without ventilation,
the diesel engine vented all of the exhaust into the sub, which would've been equally fatal.
In any case, the sub was on some sort of drill to maintain stealth
and therefore, maintain radio silence.
It's for this reason that it wasn't noticed by anyone in command.
It's also for this reason that it was trying to ventilate partially submerged instead of fully on the surface.
Ultimately, it was a combination of crew error and technical malfunction
that led to the deaths of everyone on board.
In September of 1975, two divers were working in the North Sea
doing a special type of diving known as saturation diving.
Their job was to make a relatively short dive to 390 feet or 120 meters,
and untangle rope that had gotten wrapped around the guidepost
of a piece of machinery called a blowout preventer.
This is a specialized piece of equipment used in oil and gas drilling
that's crucial to keeping the pipeline operational.
Now, in case you missed the last Diving Gone Wrong video,
when commercial divers need to spend long periods of time underwater
or do exceptionally deep dives, it's impractical to just scuba dive down regularly.
Even for dives that are only moderately deep,
the decompression time makes it entirely impractical.
Instead, divers will descend in these metal chambers known as dive bells.
They'll actually live in these chambers and then exit either through a hatch
or drop down out through the bottom when they need to work.
These bells are equipped with beds, food, washrooms,
and all the equipment they need to live for sometimes up to a month at a time.
Then, once the job is done, they only need to do one long decompression
when the dive bell is brought up instead of one after ever dive.
This work to decompression ratio is just way more practical.
After the two men were finished their job for the day, they were hoisted back up to about 310 feet
or 94 meters of depth where they would then enter a small underwater complex.
This was their living quarters for the job,
which offered them just a little bit more space than a traditional bell.
This complex was actually composed of three separate chambers.
First was the bell, then on the other end was their living space,
and then in the middle of those two chambers was a small chamber
just used to transfer between the bell and the living space.
At about 9:50 PM, the bell made contact with the transfer chamber,
which the divers then sealed together.
These two metal rings look almost like the openings
of a front-facing washing machine connected together.
Once these two rings were connected, an attempt was made to pressurize the chamber
to equalize it with the transfer chamber,
but as gas started getting pumped in, a small leak was detected somewhere along the rings.
The divers then disconnected the two chambers,
cleaned the surfaces of rings, and then reconnected them.
This isn't uncommon. Any dust or debris that gets in between
can create an imperfect seal, which can then cause a leak.
After the two chambers were reconnected, they tried to equalize the pressure once again,
which seemed to work at first, so they started moving into the transfer chamber.
As the two divers moved inside the transfer chamber,
the chamber actually started to leak once again.
But rather than go through the whole process of disconnecting and cleaning the rings again,
the supervisor told the men to just go into their living space.
This would protect them from further pressure loss
and because the transfer chamber and living space were dry,
there generally weren't any issues sealing that set of hatches.
This is also all monitored by a supervisor who's above surface, either on a boat or the rig itself.
Once they were inside, he had them lean on the door
and then he pumped in a little bit of helium gas to seal the door.
On the surface, the supervisor has an array of gauges and valves
to adjust and monitor their conditions inside the chamber.
The way these are set up is that each chamber has its own separate gauge,
but they can also be reconfigured to monitor the other chambers as well.
This gives them a series of backups in case of some malfunction with any single gauge.
But more often than not, just a single gauge was used out of convenience.
So as the men move through the chambers, the supervisor will just switch the gauge
to the section they're in at the time to monitor the pressure.
After he injected the helium into the room, the door was sealed correctly,
but he hadn't changed the gauge from the middle chamber to the living space.
This meant that to him, it seemed as though the chamber was still losing pressure.
And thinking that it was still losing pressure,
he started pumping tons of pure helium into the space.
But instead of sealing the door, the room was now being pressurized like crazy.
This went on for several minutes before he finally realized the mistake he had made,
and when he finally realized, the living space had been pressurized
to almost double what it was supposed to be.
This rapid compression, combined with the high thermal transfer of helium gas
and the high humidity in the chamber caused the temperature inside
to go from 32 Celsius to 49 Celsius, or 90 Fahrenheit to 120 Fahrenheit
with almost a hundred percent humidity.
This would've been like being inside an oven. And because the humidity was so high,
the men's ability to sweat to cool themselves off was severely reduced.
They frantically tried to open the hatch door, but because of how pressurized
the chamber was, it was impossible.
And for some other unknown reason, the supervisor couldn't relieve
the pressure inside the room either, once he realized his mistake.
In an attempt to find some relief from the heat, the divers pulled their mattresses
from their beds and laid down against the cool aluminum.
Finally, another diver was sent down to manually relieve the pressure and open the chamber.
But by the time he got inside the transfer chamber and looked through the porthole,
the men were unresponsive.
In the few hours it took to reach them, tragically, the men had died of hypothermia or heat stroke.
This was the first recorded case of saturation diving death due to overheating.
Typically, sat divers deal with extreme cold at the ocean floor
and are often at risk of becoming hypothermic.
It's for this reason that chambers are kept as warm as they are in the first place.
So between the already warm chamber and the series of mistakes,
the men were cooked alive inside their living quarters.
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St. Croix is a small island that is part of the US Virgin Islands and is just east of Puerto Rico.
As with most tropical islands, the water is perfect for supporting all sorts of sea life
and rich coral reefs, making it ideal for diving.
And although the entire island is surrounded by rich diving spots,
there is one spot in particular that is famous because of a unique feature.
This is a spot known as the Cane Bay Wall.
What makes the spot unique is that just a couple of hundred feet from the shore,
the water goes from 40 feet deep to 13,000 feet (12 to 3,962 m) deep in a single, almost vertical drop.
This means that you can stand on the edge of this wall and look out into a bottomless abyss
that would swallow up most of all but the tallest mountains in the continental United States.
This is one of the largest vertical drop-offs anywhere in the ocean.
In November of 1996, three commercial divers were diving that area of St. Croix
conducting research on the sea life of the Cane Bay Wall.
They had set up some traps a week earlier, and now, they were gonna collect the samples
as well as take some other measurements.
All three of these individuals were highly experienced divers,
each having hundreds of dives under their belt.
So between the three of them, they had over a thousand dives' worth of experience.
Once they were at the depth of the traps,which is around 220 feet or 67 meters,
two of the men, Bret and Robbie, got to work taking samples.
The third man, Rod, was keeping track of their depth and timing
and noticed two Oceanic whitetip sharks swimming along the wall in the distance.
As experienced divers, the men were entirely unfazed by this.
Shark sightings are just a normal part of diving in the ocean.
It was a bit rare to see these open-water species so close to land,
and they were also unusually large at around 14 feet (4 m) long.
So the three men stopped briefly to take some pictures before continuing on with their work.
After spending their planned 15 minutes or so working at depth,
they reached about the halfway point in their dive.
This meant that it was now time to head back up to the surface.
Their planned ascent would have Robbie go first, then Bret, then Rod would come up last.
When they started to ascend, Robbie's air reading was a bit lower than expected
because he had just been breathing a little bit heavier throughout the dive.
So Bret told him to head on up to a shallower depth.
Then, Bret started to swim as well and noticed that Robbie was pointing back down to where Rod was,
who was still down on the wall.
Bret looked down and saw that Rod was covered in silt, like a dust cloud, covering him completely.
To Bret, it looked like Rod might have had a hose failure,
causing air to spray around and kick up the silt on the wall.
This also meant that he might be leaking air and might need some extra air,
so Bret swam back down to see if he needed any help.
It was only once he got into the cloud of silt and got a better look
that he could see that it wasn't a hose at all.
Bret grabbed him and started pulling him and realized that Rod had a huge bite mark on his thigh.
And as he was processing what he was seeing, the shark came in for another attack.
The two of them tried desperately to hit its gills and keep it away,
and as they were fighting it off, a second one swam in and grabbed a hold of his calf,
causing the silt to become blood red.
Then, the first one came back and grabbed his thigh again and started pulling him violently.
Even though Bret was pulling hard in the opposite direction,
the shark was too strong and pulled the two of them right over the edge of the drop-off.
Now in essentially a free-fall down the wall, the two of them tried desperately to fight off the sharks,
while also rapidly consuming the air they had left.
At one point, Bret checked his depth gauge and saw that it was maxed out at 325 feet (99 m),
meaning they were some number of feet beyond what his depth gauge could even read
and still descending.
Finally, there was a brief break in the attack
and Bret pulled the two of them into a small sandy cove in the wall.
It was there that he finally had a chance to get a better look at Rod's condition.
And he was horrified to see that Rod's left leg was almost completely torn off.
Most of the tissue was gone, and he also had serious bites to his stomach and chest.
Upon seeing this, Bret basically went into full panic mode
and grabbed Rod and started swimming up as hard as he could.
But within just a few seconds, the sharks came back and grabbed Rod again,
pulling the both back down the wall.
And as if things couldn't get any worse, Bret went to take a breath
and it felt like he was pulling the air through a straw.
This meant that he had just a few breaths left before he was completely out of air.
Then another second later, the sharks ripped Rod right out of his hands,
and Bret watched helplessly as they pulled him deeper into the water.
Almost out of air now himself, there was just nothing he could do to help Rod anymore,
so he had to refocus on saving himself.
Unfortunately, he was still at close to 400 feet (122 m) of depth with almost no air.
He started frantically swimming up towards the surface,
and at one point, he checked his depth gauge and saw that it was still redlined at 325 feet.
Between the depth, the panic and nitrogen narcosis,
he just focused intensely on making strong rhythmic kicks towards the light up above.
He swam and swam and slowly, his visions started to close up on him like a tunnel.
As he swam, this tunnel got smaller and smaller until he had one final thought,
which was that he was so close and that he passed out about 30 feet from the surface.
Miraculously, his buoyancy device had just enough air in it to float him up to the surface
and bring his head out of the water.
Then, the pressure difference forced him to exhale and kickstarted his breathing,
and he woke up gasping for air.
He took a few moments to look around and get his bearings and take in everything that had happened.
Unfortunately, the third member of their team, Robbie, had already left to get help.
The last thing he saw was the two of them go over the wall covered in blood,
so the reasonable thing to do was assume they were dead and go get help.
Now, because of how deep Bret had been and how quickly he resurfaced,
he was already starting to suffer from decompression sickness.
He had to get to shore quickly, or he risked passing out or becoming paralyzed.
He got into shallow water, ripped off his scuba gear, and then ran to the nearest couple on the beach.
He quickly told them who he was and that he had decompression sickness.
Then, he told them which truck was his, where his keys were
and that there was a clipboard on the dashboard with emergency instructions.
And just as he finished giving them those instructions, he passed out again.
And although this was obviously a terrible situation, Bret was also incredibly lucky,
because the couple he had run into was a doctor and a nurse
who were also familiar with decompression sickness.
They quickly ran to his truck, grabbed the instructions, and then ran over to the phone at a nearby hotel.
They called the marine lab he was employed by
who quickly called a medevac plane to come get him,
and then from there, he was airlifted from St. Croix and flown to Puerto Rico
because there weren't any decompression chambers on the island.
Then, almost like something out of a movie, they ran out of oxygen on the plane he was in
and had to land it on a highway, which was also coordinated with a helicopter landing
to take him the remaining distance to the hospital.
Finally, he got into a hospital and made an almost full recovery
with some lasting effects from the decompression sickness.
Unfortunately, Rod's body has never been found.
Bret would later learn that there was a ship in the area
emitting a low frequency vibration that had attracted the sharks in the first place.
It just wasn't known at the time that this could occur,
ultimately resulting in the brutal attack.
Hello everyone. My name is Sean and welcome to Scary Interesting.
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As a reminder for anyone who hasn't seen the community post,
I'm in the process of remastering some of my oldest and lowest quality videos.
These videos are always released every Wednesday.
Brand-new ones are always released every Saturday.
And because they are so many new subscribers,
hopefully, many of these remasters are new to you as well.
If you want any more information about that, please see the post titled "new release schedule".
In any case, thank you all so much for watching and hopefully, I will see you in the next one.