The arrival of saturation diving in the offshore oil industry led to the requirement for a new category of employee, the diving technician. Charlie Duff, the first and certainly one of the best qualified, arrived at Dick Evans Divers (then the diving division of J. Ray McDermott) in the spring of 1968 having just retired from the Navy. Duff had a background in medicine and nuclear submarines, he had learned helium diving in first-class diving school and he had ended up at the US Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU): just the sort of person McDermott needed. Dick Evans put him on the payroll, but with the company's saturation system not yet complete he had nothing to do.
After eight months of twiddling his thumbs, and needing something to occupy him, Duff accepted an offer from his former navy colleagues at Taylor Diving & Salvage. Almost immediately, he began going offshore, overseeing the divers in saturation from the control van and providing medical attention when needed. As he had done at NEDU, he made up his own medical kits, which contained everything he might need to treat a diving accident, including solutions for intravenous drips.
The most alarming accident Duff dealt with occurred on one of Taylor’s early hyperbaric welding contracts. Daniel Boone, an experienced diver in his mid-thirties, was reading on the toilet in one of the chambers. The procedure for flushing the toilet was to open a valve, then knock on the chamber wall to signal for the opening of a second valve on the outside. Opening the second valve sucked the contents of the bowl into the holding tank, which was at atmospheric pressure. Except when flushing the toilet, the inside valve was to be kept closed, and instructions were posted in the chamber to that effect. Boone, however, failed to check the valve was closed. Either he called for a flush when he was still on the toilet, or more plausibly a diver in an adjoining chamber called for a flush and the tender flushed the wrong toilet. The toilets did not have seats, and although Boone was by no means overweight his bottom made a seal with the toilet, with the result that the violent pressure drop sucked out his small and large intestines.
Duff was on the barge but away from the complex. When he heard what had happened he locked into the chamber, which was pressurised to the working depth of 240'/73M.
The divers had laid Boone down on his side, his intestines hanging out. He did not appear to be in extreme pain; mainly he seemed to be suffering from shock. Duff administered a sedative and called ashore for a surgeon. While he waited, he kept the intestines moist with a clean towel and saline solution.
Mark Banjavich, the president of Taylor, who was in his office, telephoned the company doctor, Dr Lynwood Carter, and told him to get hold of an ex-Vietnam War field surgeon experienced in operating under battlefield conditions. Carter lined up Dr Victor Tedesco, and together they flew out by helicopter from the hospital where Tedesco worked.
When Carter and Tedesco locked into the chamber, they told Boone that unless Tedesco operated at once he was going to die. Decompression from saturation at 240'/73M would take approximately 60 hours; he would not last that long. There would be no general anesthesia. With a piece of plywood across the bunks on either side of the inner lock for an operating table, they gave Boone an intravenous anesthetic to deaden the pain, then cut him open from his breastbone to the top of his pelvis.
Thus was performed, by hand-held diving light, the world’s first and only hyperbaric colostomy. (A partial colostomy in fact, since the colon was not removed. After decompression the colostomy was completed at a New Orleans hospital.) According to Banjavich, the operation was videotaped and subsequently reported in
The American Journal of Medicine. Surprisingly, Duff reported that as far as he knew Boone was never in any great pain during the ordeal. On the other hand, Dr Carter is said to have commented that it was the worst experience of his life.After the accident, Taylor installed a seat on every chamber toilet, arranged so that it automatically closed the flush valve when it was put down.
