MIRACLE OF THE DEEP
It’s a mystery that’s confounded experts: How did a British diver stranded 300ft under the North Sea survive with NO oxygen... for 38 minutes?
On a stormy night in the north Sea in September 2012, Chris Lemons was staring death in the face.
Stranded on an underwater platform positioned over an oil well in the freezing, pitch-black deep below the surface, he had just minutes of air left in the emergency tanks strapped to his bright yellow diving suit.
He thought mostly of Morag, his schoolteacher fiancee, waiting in Scotland for his latest shift as a deep sea diver in the oil industry to end so they could get on with building their first home together. They’d planned to wed in April.
Each breath was becoming harder and harder . . . and eventually he blacked out.
Chris, then 33, had always described his work as like ‘ going into space, but underwater’. That night, he had been cut loose from the mother ship and connecting lifeline on which he was dependent, and left drifting away into no-man’s land.
His hellish north Sea nightmare is now the subject of a gripping BBC documentary Last Breath, which tells his miraculous tale that still puzzles experts. Most people can barely last, on average, three minutes without oxygen. Astonishingly, Chris survived for a full 38 minutes. So how did he do it?
September 18 had started as just another day, at sea 127 miles east of Aberdeen, for Lemons, and Dave Youasa and Duncan Allcock, two more experienced ‘saturation’ divers — specialists who work at great depths for long periods.
Their task was to descend 300 ft from the diving support vessel, Bibby Topaz, to the seabed to repair a damaged pipe.
Routine for them — members of a small band of highly paid fearless experts in the ‘Premier League’ of diving — but terrifying in anybody else’s terms.
They would be working, as ever, in extreme conditions, where the pressure on their bodies was such that they had to prepare for a dive by spending days on board the ship in a special decompression ‘saturation unit’ — akin to a mini-submarine — before climbing into an even more cramped diving bell, attached to the Bibby Topaz, that took them towards the bottom.
WHILE You as a and Lemons donned their diving suits and helmets before descending, Allcock stayed in the diving bell, feeding out the ‘umbilical cords’ — lifelines that provided the two divers with air, warmth, light and a way of communicating for what was planned as a six-hour job.
All was going well until an alarm came down from the Bibby Topaz to Youasa and Lemons. They were to return to the bell at once, to be hauled back up to the ship. its computer- operated navigation system, which was locking the vessel in place over the oil well, despite an 18 ft swell and 40mph winds, had failed. now the Bibby Topaz was drifting away from the oil well with the crew unable to control it.
The bell was attached to the ship, and as it drifted, so did the bell. But for Youasa and Lemons, all that connected them to safety were their umbilical cords, now vulnerable to the pull of a drifting vessel.
As they frantically scrambled up, following the cords back to the bell, Chris Lemons’ got snagged on the well’s structure.
With the ship dragging the bell in the opposite direction, the cord was pulled tight. Youasa tried to help, but knew it was hopeless. As Lemons desperately tugged to free it, it snapped with a bang.
inside his diving suit, everything went silent. no light, no air, no communication with his colleagues — and no more hot water circulating to keep his suit warm. He was flung back to the seabed.
Youasa was ordered back to the bell. There was not enough play in his cord to look for Lemons, and the crew on the Bibby Topaz didn’t want to lose both divers.
inside the bell, Allcock tried to imagine e how he was going to explain what had happened to Chris’s fiancee Morag.
On the e surface, the crew was battling to repair the ship’s navigation navisystem. system. They knew every minute counted if they were to return to their original position and launch a search for Lemons. At the best, they calculated, he might have eight minutes of air in his emergency tanks.
As the clock ticked, and the technicians tried everything to regain control, the decision was taken to send down an unmanned probe with a camera to look for the missing diver, starting in the immediate vicinity of the well.
Alone on the seabed, Lemons knew his chances of survival were diminishing by the second. His best option, he judged, was to use what little air he had to find the well structure and climb up to where he knew there was a shelf.
But, disorientated by the intense darkness, he had no idea which way to head. if he went the wrong way, he would be lost for ever.
For the first time that fateful day his luck was in. After a few stumbling steps with his arms held out in front of him in the black waters, he touched the metal structure. it was a minor miracle, but he had no time to waste reflecting. Soon he reached the shelf, but could see nothing in the hundreds of feet of water above that suggested a rescue was under way. And as he lay there, hope ebbed, and he felt the life steadily draining out of him. But he refused to panic and he made his peace with death.
By the time the underwater probe reached the well structure and spotted Lemons’ body, the crew above glued to the monitors showing footage could see he was still twitching.
BUT by the time the navigation system was rebooted, 25 minutes after it crashed, the images being relayed to the Bibby Topaz showed Lemons was still.
The crew concluded with regret that it was now a question of recovering a dead body.
it took them several more minutes to get the Topaz back to its original position above the well. From the bell, attached to its underside, Youasa was instructed to dive down to the platform and bring back Lemons’ body.
it was a deadweight, as if confirming
all their worst fears, but Youasa hauled it into the bell where Allcock tore off Lemons’ helmet and, more in hope than expectation, started to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
After just two breaths, Lemons shuddered into life. Yet, still, Allcock knew the chances of Lemons being left severely brain-damaged by lack of oxygen were overwhelming. But within minutes Lemons started talking coherently. He really had cheated death.
How he survived alone with almost no air for 38 minutes in one of the most inhospitable places on the Planet still puzzles experts.
The best explanation they can offer is that the extreme cold caused his body to ‘shutdown’, allowing its vital organs to function in twilight mode on the tiny bit of oxygen left in his system.
‘i don’t think i will ever know,’ Chris Lemons, now 40, says with a smile at the end of Last Breath. His life with Morag, which he thought had been so cruelly snatched from him, was fulfilled and they married as planned.
And, remarkably, after all he went through that night when the north Sea did its best to claim him as its own, he continues to work there as a saturation diver. Just three weeks after his neardeath experience, he, Youasa and Allcock were back on the sea bed.
Last Breath is on BBC iPlayer, and at selected cinemas (lastbreathdoc.co.uk/screenings#watch)