Latest news with #Lemons
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Yahoo
Military statue in Paramount vandalized days before Memorial Day
LOS ANGELES - Just days before Memorial Day, a military statue in Paramount was vandalized. What we know Paramount Mayor Peggy Lemons said items were stolen from the 'Battlefield Cross and Soldier' display at the Paramount Armed Forces Memorial in the Civic Center. She told FOX 11 that she and her granddaughter were walking in the area when she noticed the vandalized statue. The life-size memorial shows a soldier kneeling, paying tribute to a fallen soldier. A gun and the fallen soldier's hat make up the cross. Lemons said the suspect(s) took the gun and hat. She also said an old vacuum was left behind. With Memorial Day around the corner, this act of crime hits specifically hard for the military community. "This was a very thoughtless, cruel, disrespectful thing to do to the military families in this community," Lemons said. "If you realized what you've done and how many people you've hurt, how many families are taking this personally that you would be so disrespectful of the men and women who literally laid down their lives for your freedom, then bring it back, leave it here. Call us and let us know it's here." Lemons said the city plans to repair the statue, but unfortunately, it won't be ready in time for the planned Memorial Day service. "They are a little bit broken-hearted. I have made pleas, always in these situations, someone knows something. And so I have asked the community, if you know anything, you can reach out on our social media, call the sheriff's department and leave an anonymous tip," Lemons added. The statue was recently installed in November 2024. What we don't know No description of the suspect(s) was given. Lemons believes whoever stole the items might sell or melt the metal for money. What you can do Anyone with information is encouraged to contact the LASD Lakewood Station at (562) 623-3500.
CBC
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
This deepsea diver was cut off from his air supply for half an hour. He survived
Chris Lemons says the day of the accident that would nearly claim his life started like any other. "It was very much a normal day at the office," Lemons told The Current 's Matt Galloway. For him, "the office" was the ocean floor, where he spent six hours each day working as a saturation diver servicing offshore oil rigs. Saturation divers live for days to weeks at a time in pressurized chambers in order to stay at the same, very extreme pressure that exists at the bottom of the ocean. This particular job found him in the middle of the North Sea, working on a large structure called an oil manifold to remove a section of pipeline some 100 metres below the surface. Lemons was inside the manifold when alarms started blaring over his communication line to the main ship. The supervisor in command of the three-person dive team told Lemons and his colleagues to get back immediately to the diving bell — a piece of equipment attached to the ship that transports the crew between the boat and the ocean floor. "You could just tell from the tone of his voice that this was something fairly … serious," Lemons said. "I don't remember really calculating what was going on, but you could tell something was afoot." Topside, a malfunction in the ship's computer system had caused the captains to lose control of the vessel. Massive waves and winds blew the vessel off course, effectively dragging the dive bell and the divers, who are attached to the bell by a 45-metre "umbilical cord" that supplies them life-giving heat and breathable air. In the chaotic moments that came next, Lemons' umbilical cord snapped, leaving him stranded without air. He eventually lost consciousness and was without oxygen for about half an hour — yet by a confluence of lucky breaks, good training and science, he walked away unscathed. The dramatic tale has since been turned into a documentary and, most recently, a feature film called Last Breath, starring Woody Harrelson, Simu Liu, Finn Cole and Cliff Curtis. Running out of air on the ocean floor Lemons was working underwater with his colleague, David Yuasa, at the time the alarms sounded. Both men were able to swim out of the manifold, but Lemons quickly realized his cord had snagged on a section of the manifold and he was unable to get free. The stuck diver felt the tension on his cable grow and grow as the ship continued to drift in the rough swell above him. "All of a sudden … I'd become an anchor, basically, to an 8,000 tonne vessel," Lemons said. "And obviously there's only going to be one winner in that situation." Yuasa saw Lemons struggling and tried to swim back toward him. But Yuasa reached the end of his cable just short of Lemons. The two divers shared one final look before the still out-of-control boat yanked Yuasa away from his colleague and into the darkness of the deep sea water. Alone, Lemons says his ever-stretching umbilical cord started giving out. He opened the valve to a spare air tank carried on his back. The reserve would help Lemons breathe for an additional eight or nine minutes, he says, though he knew he'd be in trouble after that. Lemons' umbilical cord finally snapped under the pressure like "a shotgun going off," he recalls. The force sent him tumbling off the top of the manifold, a few metres down to the very bottom of the ocean floor. He says he knew his life was "on a clock" at that point. Consumed by panic, the lone diver climbed back up on top of the oil structure in the pitch dark and scoured the surface for <> the boat. It was nowhere to be seen. In that seminal moment, Lemons says he realized nobody was around to save him — and saving himself wasn't an option. "That had a strangely calming effect, I think, knowing that I couldn't do much to help myself," Lemons said. "I resigned myself quite quickly to the fact that this was probably going to be … the place that I die." Lemons lay down in the fetal position on top of the structure, where he knew he had the best odds of being found by Yuasa should they circle back for him. In what he thought would be his final moments, he reflected on his short 32 years of life and all of the things he'd never do — like travel, own a house, or have children. He imagined his parents being informed of his death, and how strange it would be to die in such an alien environment. "I grew up in a sort of middle class family in Cambridge, you know; how've I ended up dying in this dark, lonely place?" Lemons remembers thinking. His breathing became difficult and shortly after, Lemons lost consciousness. By the time the crew was able to regain control of the vessel, circle back to the dive site, send a driverless submarine with a camera called a ROV down to locate Lemons and then have Yuasa perform the rescue, the diver had been severed from his umbilical for about half an hour. That's more than enough time to cause lasting brain damage, if not death — both of which can happen in a matter of minutes. Lemons isn't much of a believer in luck or miracles, he says, but this case might fit the bill. "I use the word [luck] quite casually, I think, but yeah, it's hard to deny that," Lemons said. "I certainly feel lucky." Science and precision, not luck Jochen Schipke, a now-retired professor of physiology in Germany who co-authored a case report on how Lemons survived the ordeal, doesn't use the word luck. He says it was a matter of "perfection." Lemons would have used more of his available air right after his cable was severed, when he was feeling panicked and had to climb back on top of the manifold, according to Schipke. But once Lemons resigned himself to dying, Schipke says his breathing would have been very calm, allowing the trapped diver to extend his supply. The divers were also breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen called heliox, which allows them to maintain proper pressure on the ocean floor. Schipke says helium cools the body, and its use is why Lemons' body temperature had dropped to about 27 degrees Celsius by the time he was back in the bell. The body uses less oxygen at colder temperatures, according to Schipke, so this factor would have helped stretch Lemons' limited reserves even further. The crew's training was important, too, according to the researcher. Lemons was in fantastic physical shape and had 10 years of experience under his belt, while Yuasa, the ROV operator and other crew members all acted quickly and with precision to rescue Lemons. "This was close to perfection. Not so much luck," Schipke said. "This was training. This was knowledge. This was experience." Be it by luck, science, perfection or any other factor, Lemons says he is simply glad to be alive. No great epiphanies or life changes came from the incident, he says — aside from maybe a "more acute awareness" of death. "I've found that life takes over, really," Lemons said. "Things are quickly forgotten and you move on and the … banalities of existence suddenly take over." Within three weeks of the accident, he was back to work as a diver — a job he went on to do for 10 more years. These days, Lemons gives talks about his story at conferences. He also still works in the industry, but as a dive supervisor instead.
Telegraph
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘I was left for dead 90m below the North Sea'
'There wasn't a speck of light,' says diver Chris Lemons of the time he faced death 90m below the surface of the North Sea. 'I knew I didn't have much air left. I curled up into the foetal position. The fear pretty much drained out of me and was overtaken by grief. I was getting married, I was building a house. You have the hopes and the dreams of a life well lived, and that was about to be ripped away. I always think we're ten years old inside, just masquerading as adults, and I almost felt like I regressed back to that. I couldn't put my thumb in my mouth because there was a helmet there, but I wasn't far away.' His extraordinary story is now a movie, Last Breath. We speak the morning after he's been to the New York premiere, partying till the small hours with the film's star Woody Harrelson ('lovely, easy-going, just as you imagine he'll be.') Harrelson plays Duncan Allcock, one of Lemons's dive partners on that fateful day: Lemons himself, tall and bald, is played by Peaky Blinders' Finn Cole. 'He's a good-looking guy with curly hair, so an obvious fit.' Lemons was a saturation ('sat') diver, part of a little-known elite who repair and maintain oil and gas apparatus deep below the ocean surface. To avoid repeated decompression procedures ascending from depth, as would be necessary with scuba equipment, sat divers spend 28 days in a pressurised chamber attached to a support vessel, and from there go up and down in teams of three to work on the seabed. This means they have to decompress only once, for five days, at the end of their stay. Where normal air divers are limited to depths of 50 metres, sat divers can go to more than 10 times that: the name refers to their tissues being saturated with the inert components of their breathing gas. Commercial saturation diving dates back to 1965, when divers went 60m below the surface of the Smith Mountain Dam in Virginia to repair debris screens. The same year, legendary French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau conducted the Conshelf III experiment, with six divers living 100m below the Mediterranean Sea for three weeks. The growth of maritime oil extraction in the 1970s brought with it commensurate demand for sat divers, particularly in the North Sea and Gulf of Mexico. Living conditions are spartan and intensely claustrophobic. On some jobs, divers can spend more than a month underwater with up to five other men, taking it in turns to work six hour shifts, 24 hours a day. Most diving chambers consist of an entranceway (which also doubles as a toilet and shower area), a small living quarters and a sleeping area stacked with double bunk beds. The total floor size isn't much bigger than a London bus. Divers spend their days working, sleeping and eating the 6,000 calories they need a day to fuel their labour. (Tastebuds, though, are dulled by gases in the chamber – hot sauce is a typical luxury.) The early years of saturation diving were marked by repeated accidents: in the North Sea alone, 15 divers were killed in seven separate incidents between 1974 and 1983. In the US, the Center for Disease Prevention and Control estimates that occupational fatality rate for sat divers is more than 40 times the national average for other professions. As safety procedures improved, however, accidents have became much scarcer. An entire infrastructure grew up around the divers – more than 100 people crew a dive support vessel, though there may only be half a dozen actual divers. Lemons himself had started out as a crew member on such vessels, and had instantly been drawn to the divers. 'They seemed a bit of an enigma, a bit heroic and a bit special. What they did seemed very romantic and interesting. Also, they used to turn up on the quayside with nicer cars than I did' – divers can earn nearly £1000 a day. He'd been a sat diver for two years when his own accident happened. 18 th September 2012: 'a normal day at the office, as much as any day can be in that slightly alien environment.' Lemons, then 32, was working a routine six-hour seabed shift in the Huntington oilfield, 115 miles east of Aberdeen. A diving bell took him, Allcock and Dave Yuasa (played by Simu Liu in the film) down from the Bibby Topaz support vessel. Up top, the wind was around 35 knots and the swell five metres, still just about within diving limits: down below, visibility was good (with no natural light that deep, 'visibility' refers to mud and silt in the water). Lemons and Yuasa were conducting pressure tests before removing a section of pipework from within a house-sized structure known as a manifold. Allcock was bellman, staying in the bell to manage the others' umbilicals – candy canes of cords wound together which supplied heliox (a helium/oxygen mix), hot water to keep their suits warm, light for their head torches, and radio communications with the surface. 'Umbilicals are exactly what they sound like,' Lemons says. 'Givers of life.' He and Yuasa heard an alarm, which was itself no cause for concern: safety systems are regularly tested 'so you hear them quite often, along with people slagging off divers, saying how much better they were in their day'. Only when Craig Frederick, dive supervisor on the Bibby Topaz, ordered them back to the bell did they realise something had gone wrong. 'The tone of his voice told us this wasn't a drill. But there was still no real panic at that stage.' The alarm had come from the Bibby Topaz' dynamic positioning (DP) system, designed to keep the boat on station even in heavy weather. A system malfunction meant that the Bibby Topaz had begun to drift, dragging the divers with it. As Lemons started to work his way back towards the bell, his 50m umbilical caught on one of the manifold's metallic outcrops. 'I dived back down to try and free it, but I knew right away I was in serious trouble. I'd basically become anchor to an 8,000-ton vessel, and there was only going to be one winner.' As he struggled, he realised that he was going to get pulled through a small gap in the manifold 'like being in a cheese grater' unless he managed to free the umbilical from the outcrop or detach himself from it: but the latter was impossible, unless the umbilical itself broke. Which is exactly what happened. Back in the bell, Allcock saw Lemons's entire umbilical rack being pulled from the wall, but was helpless to stop it. The cables snapped one by one – light gone, comms gone, heat gone, air gone – and suddenly Lemons was alone in the pitch black, untethered in every way. He turned on his emergency supply of air, which would last about five minutes, and tried to find his way back to the bell, doing his best to quash rising panic and fear. 'I had a gauge on, but I couldn't see it. That was probably a good thing. It would have been a countdown clock, which would have increased my breathing rate. I remember talking, pleading [that someone would] appear out of the darkness to rescue me. I remember getting upset and thinking, 'Why me? Why am I here in this horrible darkness?' It seemed ridiculous. For all you know life is finite, you still want to get as much as possible of it. I was overwhelmed with desperation, sadness, loneliness and disbelief that I was going to end my days in this strange and alien place and not in my bed aged 90. There was an incredibly small window of time to process everything.' Once he realised hope was lost, however, he became calm, accepting of his fate: and at some stage, probably around nine or ten minutes after the umbilical was broken, he lost consciousness. Meanwhile, the crew on the Bibby Topaz were frantically trying to reset the DP system and find their way back to their original position above the manifold, away from which they'd drifted almost 250m. In the bell with Yuasa, who'd made it back safely, Allcock was 'praying as hard as I could, and I'm not a religious person at all'. It was almost half an hour before the Bibby Topaz, system now reset, got back in position: long enough for Yuasa to be convinced this was now a recovery rather than a rescue mission. 'I didn't expect him to be alive.' He found Lemons motionless on the manifold and got him back to the bell, where Allcock took his helmet off, saw that he'd 'gone as blue as a pair of denim jeans,' and administered artificial respiration. Incredibly, Lemons regained consciousness in short order: a bark of a first breath which Allcock described as 'like New Year, crackers, fireworks, you name it'. The coldness of the water, the amount of inert gas already in Lemons's system – his blood effectively working like an emergency reservoir – and the shallowness of his breathing while unconscious had between them created a perfect storm of survival. (Similarly, some people have survived immersion in freezing water for more than an hour.) Nonetheless, Lemons's recovery was greeted with incredulous relief by the 110 people on the Bibby Topaz who'd seen monitor footage of his motionless body on the manifold and feared the worst. He was back diving within three weeks. He rationalised that the incident had been a freak accident 'and the chances of it happening again [were] infinitesimally small.' For a long time he considered it just 'a bit of a scrape', and admits that 'it took years to recognise the enormity of it.' Indeed, it was only when a documentary (also called Last Breath) was made in 2019, seven years after the accident, that he realised how many people present that day had been affected by it, and how badly: some have never worked with divers since. But the lure of being in such a unique and unusual environment is clearly enticing. 'There are days when you feel slightly weightless, you get to see the beautiful sea life when it's lovely and peaceful, and it feels magical, ethereal, special, and romantic,' he says. 'There are also days when you're dragging sandbags through mud for six hours thinking, 'I should have worked harder at school.'' The demands of decompression mean that it takes longer to ascend 90m from the seabed than it does to traverse the 380,000 kilometres back from the moon. If the comparison with astronauts is not entirely accurate – 'unlike us, they have to be smart enough to tie their own shoelaces' – the psychological demands of being cooped up in a confined space for a prolonged period are very similar. 'You need to be easy to get on with,' says Lemons, who, affable and self-deprecatingly funny, clearly is just that. 'There's no exit mechanism, even if your appendix bursts, your mother dies or you just don't want to be in there anymore.' He gets many emails every week, divided into three main categories: divers who've heard of his story, 'religious people telling me why I survived,' and those who've lost loved ones. To the last group, he says, 'I feel like a complete charlatan, because I didn't die. All I can say is: this is my experience, take from it what you can. I didn't do anything special or heroic. If there were heroes, they were Dave and Duncan. It certainly wasn't me. I was very much the damsel in distress.' Now with daughters aged eight and four, he still works in the industry, but as a supervisor on deck rather than a diver below the waves. It's clear how much he values the camaraderie of sat diving, and how thrilled he is that the movie shows this. 'I hope people take away the warmth that everyone has for each other, the family environment, the fact that people really care. It's a story of hope.'
Yahoo
06-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Chiefs parade shooting victim files lawsuit against KC Sports Commission
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – One of the victims from last February's Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory rally shooting is now suing the Kansas City Sports Commission. The lawsuit, which was filed in Jackson County Circuit Court on Wednesday afternoon, accuses the Kansas City Sports Commission of failing to provide a safe environment for the rally and parade. just three days after the Chiefs won Super Bowl LVIII. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of James Lemons, a 40-year-old man from Harrisonville, Missouri, says Lemons was shot in the leg as he and his family tried to escape the gunfire. Kansas City police found that two teenagers pulled their guns and opened fire inside a large crowd. Two men charged in connection to deaths of 3 Chiefs fans in Northland backyard The lawsuit contains this passage: 'The defendant owed the Plaintiff a legal duty to use ordinary care to make the property upon which the Victory Rally was held reasonably safe.' Kansas City radio personality when the gunfire rang out that day. The lawsuit compares the size of the crowd near the incident to the 2023 NFL Draft, when 300,000 people crowded around Union Station. Lemons' suit said fans in attendance were screened when they entered the area, and required to carry their belongings inside clear bags, unlike the Super Bowl rally. The lawsuit also accuses the sports commission of failing to provide a safe environment, adequate security, emergency medical personnel or security screenings. Jackson County court documents also mention the violent year Kansas City saw in 2023, and the 182 murders that happened in Kansas City, Missouri that year, with 170 of those incidents involved guns, according to KCPD data. See the latest headlines in Kansas City and across Kansas, Missouri On Tuesday afternoon, the Kansas City Sports Commission sent this statement to FOX4: 'We are aware of the recent lawsuit filed against the Sports Commission and disagree with its assertions. Our insurance company is handling everything in relationship to this matter. We will not have further comments as it relates to claims or lawsuits moving forward. For questions relating to security plans for the celebration, we recommend contacting the Kansas City Missouri Police Department.' FOX4 reached out to the police department's media unit late Wednesday afternoon, but there was no response as of 4 p.m. Scott Shachtman, Lemons' attorney, told FOX4 to his knowledge, his client is the only person who's filed a lawsuit related to the Super Bowl rally against the sports commission. Lemons said he won't rule out other plaintiffs stepping forward. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- General
- The Guardian
At the bottom of the North Sea, out of air and with no hope of rescue, I said goodbye to all my dreams
It was, says Chris Lemons, 'very much a normal day at the office'. Until things went wrong. But when they went wrong, they went wrong very badly, very quickly. The 'office' was actually the bottom of the North Sea, where Lemons was left without air for almost half an hour. Lemons was working as a saturation diver, living in a pressurised chamber onboard a specialised ship for stints of up to a month, and being lowered to the seabed in a diving bell to work on offshore structures. 'It is a serious business, but it is routine for us. That bell going down is like the taxi to work. I always felt comfortable down there.' On 18 September 2012, Lemons, along with colleagues Duncan Allcock and Dave Yuasa, took their diving-bell 'taxi' to work at a depth of 90 metres (295ft). Allcock, the most experienced of the three and something of a mentor to Lemons, was to stay in the bell while Lemons and Yuasa dropped out in their diving suits to repair a pipe on a manifold, a big yellow drilling structure used by the oil industry, about the size of a house. Saturation divers are attached to the bell with umbilicals, cables that provide them with communication, power and light, as well as a mixture of oxygen and helium to breathe, hot water to keep them warm, and a means to find their route back to the safety of the bell. 'Our umbilicals are exactly what they sound like: givers of life,' says Lemons, 45, on a video call from the south of France where he now lives. The bell in turn was connected to the ship, the dive support vessel Topaz, which had a crew of 120 and was positioned 103km (64 miles) north-east of Aberdeen. The ship held its place over the dive area without an anchor, guided by a 'dynamic positioning' computer system. On that day, the weather was bad – 35 knots of wind and a 5.5-metre (18ft) swell – but not unusual for the North Sea, nor prohibitive to diving. 'We don't really notice that on the bottom,' says Lemons. In fact, though it was dark, visibility wasn't too bad. 'Generally in the North Sea you can't see much. That is half the battle, being able to orient yourself. But on that occasion, we could see the bell from where we were.' They had been working for about an hour when things went wrong. There was an open line of communication to the ship and they heard alarms going off. Not unusual, but then came a message from the ship directly to Lemons and Yuasa: 'Leave everything there – get out of the structure, boys.' They dropped off the manifold to the seabed. 'That's when the confusion started,' says Lemons. 'Going up to the surface is never an option – you would die from explosive decompression pretty quickly. There is only one safe place: the diving bell.' But the diving bell, which had been 10 metres (33ft) above them, wasn't there. The Topaz's dynamic positioning system had failed and the ship was drifting off in the gale, pulling the bell with it. But the bell was still attached to the other end of their umbilicals, so they began to climb the cables. 'I don't remember processing what was going on. You're just trying to get back to that safe place, climbing hand over hand, as did Dave next to me.' But, suddenly, Lemons couldn't climb any more. A loop of his umbilical had snagged on the manifold they'd been working on. The ship pulled on the bell, which pulled on the umbilical. 'I immediately knew it was caught. You've got this 8,000-tonne vessel pulling that umbilical tight – there was nothing I could do to release it.' In fact, because the cable was caught on part of the manifold, Lemons initially found himself being pulled back into it. 'I was thrashing around like a fish trying to get out of there, shouting for slack. My next thought was that if it continued to slip, there was a small gap in the structure I was going to get pulled through, like being pulled through a cheese grater. That's not going to be a nice way to go. The first real dose of luck I had was that it stopped slipping.' It's a testament to Lemons's talent for understatement, and the absolutely desperate situation, that he sees this as luck. Soon, Yuasa noticed that Lemons was in trouble: 'He realised there was a problem and turned to get back to me. We couldn't speak to each other, but I remember our eyes meeting. I'm imploring him to help me, but he's being dragged away. I lost sight of him, but I could still see his light. Then I lost sight of that.' Meanwhile, the ship continued to pull on Lemons's umbilical. He doesn't remember hearing the cable break; it happened in stages, comms first, 'like a jack being pulled from a speaker. I lost all communication, which puts you in a very lonely place. Then [I lost] the hose which provides an infinite amount of gas – suddenly I had nothing to breathe at all.' Yuasa made it back to the bell, exhausted. On the ship, they desperately tried to get the dynamic positioning system running again. Meanwhile, Lemons did what saturation divers are trained to do. 'We carry these emergency supplies. You never expect to have to use them, but when you've suddenly got nothing to breathe it's an instinctual thing to turn the knob on the side of the helmet to open the supply. That puts you in a very different world: the moment that you open that, you've moved from a place where you have this infinite supply to one where you very much have a finite one – about eight or nine minutes' worth.' When the umbilical broke, Lemons had fallen back on to the seabed. His first task was to find the manifold, which is where a rescue attempt, if there was one, would take place. But that wasn't easy without a light. 'It was the most infinite darkness. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. It's easy to get disoriented at the best of times, with a compass and a light and someone telling you where to go. I knew this enormous yellow structure was probably only a couple of metres away, but I had no idea which direction. Again, I was very lucky – I bumped straight into it.' He climbed up the manifold, fearful of letting go and losing it again, and got to the top. 'For some reason, I expected to see Dave on his way back to me, or the diving bell. But when I got there and looked up, there was nothing but the most absolute blackness in the sea above me.' It was cold, about 3C (37F), and Lemons had lost his hot water supply. 'I would have been hypothermically cold very quickly, but I don't have a memory of that. Maybe your body has an ability to shut out unnecessary information. Or perhaps my memory is not as good as I thought. I feel I've got this fairly lucid recollection of everything up to the point where I fall unconscious.' He reckons that of the eight or nine minutes of gas he had, he'd probably used four or five. 'I won't pretend I wasn't scared and breathing hard. I realised that even if Dave had been there, the chances of him getting me back to a breathable environment before I ran out of gas were minimal. With nobody there, I decided this was probably going to be it. In a strange way, that had a calming effect; the fear, the panic drained out of me – there was nothing I could do. I assumed a sort of foetal position and was overtaken by grief. A great sadness took over at that point.' What was he thinking of in that moment? 'I was at an exciting point in my life: early 30s, getting married the following year, we were in the process of building a house … I had all the hopes and dreams you have at that stage – of children, travel – and it felt as if all of that was about to be ripped away in this strange, lonely, ethereal place. I grew up in a middle-class family on the outskirts of Cambridge, and I remember thinking: 'How is this dark, lonely place where I end my days?'' He also tells me he was worried what they were going to find on his mobile phone, but then says he's joking. Lemons is very funny – that doesn't come across in the documentary that was made about his accident. In the 2019 documentary Last Breath, interviews with Lemons, Yuasa, Allcock and others are interwoven with footage from the day and some reconstructed scenes. The most powerful, haunting footage is taken from a remotely operated vehicle (ROV), like a mini, unmanned submarine, which was launched from the Topaz. Lemons is lying on top of the structure, in the foetal position, and his arm is moving, twitching. Some of the ship's crew take it to be a sign that he's waving at the ROV, letting them know he's still alive and they need to get a move on. Today, Lemons dismisses this. 'I'm definitely unconscious at the point where the ROV finds me. We've got a few theories as to what that was.' To put it another way: he was not waving but drowning. He doesn't remember the moment he lost consciousness. He thinks it was the carbon dioxide that put him under, and that's why the 'actual moment was peaceful. I feel like a bit of a charlatan. I still get contacted all the time by people who've lost loved ones, but I don't have the right to tell you what it's like – I didn't die.' Somehow, they got the dynamic positioning system going again and relocated the manifold. Allcock and Yuasa were still in the bell. Yuasa left the bell again to get Lemons, presumably expecting to bring back a body. It had been 35 minutes since his umbilical snapped, and Lemons had just eight or nine minutes of emergency gas. They dragged him back into the bell and took off his helmet. He was bright blue. Allcock gave him mouth-to-mouth, a couple of big puffs … and miraculously, he came round. Lemons doesn't remember it, but there's a lovely moment of footage where Yuasa reaches out and holds Lemons, who reaches out and grabs on to him and Allcock. 'They're the real heroes in this story,' Lemons says, 'and everyone on the boat. I'm just a damsel in distress.' How Lemons survived – and without brain damage – for more than 25 minutes is something of a mystery. He has been to medical conferences and spoken to many experts in his search for answers, but the professionals are as perplexed as he is. He thought it was the cold that had saved him, since there are stories of people falling through ice and surviving for a long time. 'But I've learned that if my body had been so cold that I'd gone into some kind of hibernation or stasis, there is no way Duncan would have been able to resuscitate me that quickly.' He still thinks the cold was a factor. And that, because of the pressure, his tissue was saturated with oxygen. He's also been told that a buildup of CO2 in the blood – hypercapnia – can be neurologically protective. If medical tests had been performed on him immediately after he was rescued, he might have the empirical data that could provide answers; but he had to remain locked away in a pressurised chamber after he arrived back in Aberdeen. Somehow, he was fine afterwards – physically and mentally. And three weeks, later he was saturation diving again, back on the seabed in exactly the same spot. Lemons and his fiancee got married and finished building their house. They're no longer together but he has a new partner, and two kids – the hopes and dreams he had weren't lost at the bottom of the North Sea. The enormity of what he had been through took a while to sink in. It has given him a more acute awareness of mortality, and of the preciousness and fragility of life. But it's also underlined the power of human resilience. 'We sometimes underestimate what we're capable of. It's given me courage and confidence, rather than knocked it out of me.' Lemons still works in the industry, but as a diving supervisor on the ship, not on the seabed. He is also dialling down the day job and doing more public speaking. It's funny that by knocking so loudly on death's door, he has ended up opening a load of others. And now his story's being told in a thriller, also called Last Breath, directed by Alex Parkinson. Allcock, from Chesterfield, is played by Woody Harrelson, from Texas. Simu Liu, who played one of the Kens in the Barbie movie, plays Yuasa. And Lemons? Finn Cole, from Peaky Blinders. 'Lush head of hair, good-looking lad – makes complete sense,' says Lemons, who is – and was at the time – bald. Right, the taxi's waiting. He's got to go to the airport. A proper taxi, on dry land. Lemons, Allcock and Yuasa are off to New York, for the premiere of Last Breath. Last Breath is in cinemas from 14 March
