I was reading about the Byford Dolphin accident and I don’t understand why the pressure change caused so much damage
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They didn’t quickly go from 1 to 9, they went the other way. This was like opening a recently shaken soda bottle, except the soda was the blood of the unfortunate divers. When your blood explodes, so do you.
They went the other way. The pressure chamber were pressurised at 9 atm when the hatch to the outside were opened releasing all that pressure. So the chamber went from 9 atm to 1 atm within a couple of seconds. The first issue they had was that all that air from inside the chamber were rushing out of the chamber. The air have a lot of energy, speed and momentum which caused quite a lot of damages on the way out. This alone killed at least one of the workers but caused damages to others both on the inside and outside. But even those inside who were far away from the air flow died almost instantly from the pressure drop itself.
We do not fully understand exactly all of the mechanisms. The autopsies were major breakthrough case studies into explosive decompression since such an event had not happened before and have not happened since so we do not fully know everything. But when you live under those high pressures like these saturation divers were doing the nitrogen in the air dissolves into the blood. This is similar to how you have carbon dioxide dissolved into soda at high pressures except there is no chemical interaction. And just like a soda bottle once you release the pressure all the dissolved gasses in the liquid turns back into a gas. This did happen to the men at Byford Dolphin and their tiny capillary blood vessels were clogged with air bubbles the moment the pressure dropped.
This in itself is not uncommon to find in diving accidents and is a common cause of death. But in the case of Byford Dolphin there were such a big and rapid pressure drop that the autopsy found things we have never seen before. So it is not sure the men died from the air bubbles in their blood and might have died sooner from other causes. They found large clumps of fat in all the blood vessels including the heart. The blood does carry around fat but not in its pure form. So there must have been a complete breakdown of their blood system similar to if it was boiled on a hot plate.
At 1 ATM you have almost 15 lbs per square inch of pressure pushing in on you. You have equal pressure inside pushing out. At 9 ATM that amounts to almost a 120 lbs per square inch difference. It is enough to make you explode. Or, if you go the other way you’ll implode.
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