What the Mythbusters Actually Did
The Mythbusters episode covering the Byford Dolphin incident tested the central claim that two divers could be killed by explosive decompression after a caisson door was blown open on a North Sea oil platform in 1983. The incident itself is well documented. The question Mythbusters addressed was more specific: could the kind of catastrophic injuries described in some versions of the story actually happen, or were they exaggerated over the years?
The episode used a combination of computer modeling, water tank simulations, and full-scale tests with ballistics gel and cadaver samples to see what rapid depressurization actually does to a human body. Adam and Jamie set up a chamber, pressurized it, then blew the door and measured the effects. They didn't try to recreate the exact pressure or speed of the 1983 accident, but they came reasonably close given the constraints of their shop. One thing the show got right was showing that the force of decompression is real and severe. The burst of air that hits anyone inside a suddenly vented chamber is enough to cause serious trauma. But the more graphic claims — bodies splitting apart, organs being expelled — turned out to be less straightforward than legend suggests. Human tissue is tougher than most people assume, and the body doesn't just disintegrate under pressure changes the way a balloon does.
I've looked at a lot of decompression incident reports over the years, and what I notice is that most people skip over the actual timeline. The Byford Dolphin catastrophe happened in roughly three seconds from initial failure to impact. That's fast, but it's not instantaneous. There's a window where survival is technically possible if you're far enough from the breach. The Mythbusters test captured that gap, which is something a lot of summaries of the episode miss. Here's a detail that doesn't get mentioned much: the chamber was pressurized to about 4 atmospheres, which is roughly 58 PSI. That's not an extreme number in diving terms. A standard saturation dive can run higher. What made this particular event deadly wasn't just the pressure differential — it was the location of the two divers relative to the opening and the fact that the blast was unfiltered and direct. Mythbusters showed this by positioning their test subjects at different distances from the breach point. The closest one took the brunt of it. The one farther back was shaken but physically intact. If you're trying to reproduce or reference this for a project, the original episode is available on the Discovery Channel platform and YouTube through various channels that carry Mythbusters content. There isn't an official standalone download because the show is under copyright, but it's fairly easy to find through legitimate streaming services. Some clips are also uploaded to the History Vault app if you have a cable login.
The one area where the episode fell short was in representing the aftermath for the survivors and the families. The show is entertainment first, and while it handled the physics with reasonable care, it didn't dig into the human side of the real incident. That's worth keeping in mind if you're researching this for anything beyond a casual interest. For anyone working in industrial safety or marine engineering who wants to understand the mechanics behind what happened, I'd recommend pairing the episode with the UK Health and Safety Executive report on the Byford Dolphin accident. The HMIS report from 1985 goes into the engineering failures in detail, including how the caisson door seal degraded over time and why the pressure warning system didn't catch the problem before the door was opened. That document is publicly available and free to download from the UK government archives. The Mythbusters version is useful as a visualization tool. It makes the physics tangible. But it's not a substitute for the actual incident investigation if you're doing serious research.
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