How I survived when five of us were sucked into a 30-inch pipeline deep under the sea, with air running out: The untold story that powerful people don’t want you to know

As Christopher Boodram blinked his eyes open, stinging crude oil seeped through his lashes.

He was lying flat on his back, straining to lift his head out of the viscous sludge to sip breaths from a tiny pocket of dirty air.

It was so completely dark, he thought he might have gone blind.

‘I wasn’t sure if I was alive – or if this was hell,’ he tells the Daily Mail’s Pipeline podcast, his soft voice edged with fear, ‘I’m in pitch black, in pain, hearing screaming and bawling.’

Christopher, 39, reached out with his hands and feet, trying to determine where he was, and felt a ring of harsh metal all around him, barely wider than his shoulders.

When he tried to sit up, his head hit metal. Realization dawned on him: he was inside the pipe – deep underwater.

Three years have passed since that day, but it still brings a look of anguish to Christopher’s eyes as he sits for his first-ever interview with international press, to recount his story – the one at the heart of the Daily Mail’s new six-part investigative podcast, Pipeline.

It’s a story of human survival, betrayal and even lies. And for the last six months, Daily Mail journalists have been back and forth to the Caribbean Island of Trinidad and Tobago to uncover the truth of this horrifying scandal that began on Friday, February 25, 2022.

On Friday 25th February 2022, Christopher Boodram and four of his friends were sucked into an underwater oil pipe and pulled hundreds of feet under the sea. Christopher’s story is at the heart of a new Daily Mail podcast, Pipeline. Listen now on all good podcast platforms

Christopher woke early in his home in San Fernando, Trinidad, stretched, grabbed his packed lunch and left for work, leaving his wife and five children – two of whom he adopted from his wife’s late sister.

He and four friends, Fyzal Kurban, 57, Rishi Nagassar, 48, Kazim Ali Jr, 37, and Yusuf Henry, 31, all had jobs with a construction contractor called LMCS, which was repairing an underwater oil pipe a few thousand feet off the island’s coast, for the state-owned oil company, Paria.

The five were experienced divers who had worked together for years. Their wives and children were close and they’d all gather for holidays and parties. They were more of a family, than colleagues.

The men met at the dock by Paria’s office in San Fernando. Pipes run from a refinery on shore there to platforms at sea where ships can unload crude oil or receive the refined product.

It was just a short 20-minute boat ride from land to one of the small platforms called Berth 6, where a section of the underwater pipe needed repair.

‘Six o’clock in the morning we headed out,’ Christopher said, ‘the place was overcast, rain was falling.’

In fact, it was miserable weather, but it was one of the last days of the job and it was Carnival weekend in Trinidad, so the men were excited to finish up and then celebrate.

When they arrived at Berth 6, they put on their scuba gear, did their final checks and posed for a photo before diving 15 feet to their worksite – an 8ft-by-8ft air-filled chamber, called a habitat.

The men were all experienced divers and close friends. This photo was taken the day of the tragedy just before they went into the water to start their work, repairing an underwater oil pipe for the state-owned oil company, Paria. (pictured left to right: Christopher Boodram, Kazim Ali Jr, Yusuf Henry, Rishi Nagassar and Fyzal Kurban)

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A habitat is a five-sided box, open to the sea at the bottom, that allows workers to swim in and out. Inside there is a platform for them to work on and fresh air is continually pumped in so they have oxygen to breathe.

Paria’s 30-inch-wide oil pipe ran vertically through the habitat: it entered through the bottom and exited through the top. The damaged section of pipeline, a few feet long, had already been removed, leaving a gap where the men had to install a replacement segment.

But first, they had to remove a plug that prevented oil and gas from escaping from the lower portion of the pipe.

All was going according to plan until around 2.45pm, when they loosened the valve keeping the plug in place… then everything went wrong.

‘I saw the water just start to rise,’ Christopher told the Daily Mail’s Pipeline podcast. ‘I say, “Yo, this thing filling up. Let we get out of here. Stop all you’re doing. Let we get out of here.”‘

Within seconds the seawater had reached his feet on the platform. He had no time to think, leaping off the platform, hoping to swim out the bottom of the habitat to safety.

‘As I jumped, instead of feeling gravity pulling me down, I actually felt like the water just come up and meet me,’ he said. And in the blink of an eye, Christopher was sucked inside the pipe, straight down towards the sea floor.

‘I was passing through the pipe at unbelievable speeds,’ he remembered.

The pipe is a U-shape. It runs 60-feet down from the surface of the water to the seabed, and then 1,200-feet along the seafloor and back up to another berth.

Christopher was pulled down and around the ‘elbow’ where the pipe turns at the seabed.

He recalls feeling intense pain and pressure building in his lungs as he held his breath.

‘I was ready to just give up,’ he said. ‘Your muscles are contracting and trying to force you to open your mouth to breathe.’ And just as Christopher felt he couldn’t go on, he was slammed to a halt and the water fell away from his face.

He had miraculously stopped in a pocket of air – he could breathe.

The men were working in a small air-filled room, called a habitat, about 15ft below the surface at Berth 6 (pictured). The pipe they were working on was a U-shape, it ran 60ft down to the sea floor, then 1,200ft along and back up to another Berth. It was used to carry oil to and from storage tanks on land and ships at sea. 

The men’s day started off as planned until they came to one of their final tasks, removing an inflatable plug (pictured) from inside of the pipe. When they started to take the plug out, something went terribly wrong and they were sucked into the pipe. 

‘You’re trying to open your eyes, [its] burning,’ he said. ‘Your nose, your lungs, everything burning.’

He was covered in thick crude oil and his hand was pinned behind his back. He thought his shoulder was broken. He could hardly move.

The 30-inch-wide pipe was almost completely full of a mixture of oil and saltwater. But there was a bubble of air running along the top of the pipe that he could breathe if he held himself in a half sit-up position, continually, tensing his abdomen.

Christopher tried to compose himself. ‘If you ain’t dead you’re alive, and if you’re alive we have a chance to survive,’ he said he thought to himself.

He called out to his friends, hoping they were still in the habitat and able to hear him. But he only heard their screams of agony in response. They, too, had been sucked into the pipe.

In the blackness, they struggled to find each other.

Rishi, 48, was too injured to move, but the others managed to group together in one air bubble, forming a human chain, all lying on their backs, linking with their feet under the other’s shoulders.

Christopher was at one end of the chain, followed by Kaz Jr and Yusuf, who were both badly injured, and then Fyzal.

Fyzal, the eldest and most experienced of the group, had happened across one of their scuba tanks while making his way to the others, giving him clean air to breathe.

The rest of the men were inhaling the oil fumes.

Christopher tried to come up with a plan, for he knew that if they stayed where they were, they’d all die. But there was a problem, the men weren’t certain which direction led to the surface.

If they headed the wrong way, away from the damaged, open portion of the pipe, they’d be trapped by the sealed section on the other end.

There, lying on their backs, breathing poisoned air, they had a choice to make. Christopher was certain that they should move toward Fyzal’s end of the pipe, the other men believed it was the other way round.

It was a life-or-death decision – and eventually Christopher relented, deciding to trust his friends.

The pipe (pictured in the habitat) was only 30 inches wide. The men were sucked all the way down the vertical section and along the horizontal, until they finally came to a stop inside an air bubble. They were terrified and injured, but alive. Rishi was too injured to move, but the others managed to group together and form a human chain.

They knew if they stayed where they were, their air would run out and they’d die. So they started pulling themselves along the pipe. It was agonizingly slow progress, and they had to take breaks often so the injured men could rest (pictured, an unrelated man with a section of the pipe) 

‘Alright,’ he remembers, telling them. ‘The majority wins at the end of the day.’

They set off with Christopher in the lead. The pipe was too narrow for them to turn around or swim, so they used their arms to push themselves forward, their faces pressed to the top of the pipe, settling into a steady, agonising rhythm.

Christopher came across another scuba tank, so they now had two between them. And when they reached the end of their air pocket, Christopher took one of the tanks and pushed ahead into the oily water to see how far it was to another section with breathable air.

As he swam, his heart sank. The water went on, and on, and on. He continued for four minutes until he accepted the terrible truth. It would be too far for his friends to swim with only two oxygen tanks between them all.

Christopher returned to the others, braced to tell them the news: they couldn’t all go on.

‘Listen, I need to go and get help,’ he tells Daily Mail that he told them.

The two injured men, Kaz Jr and Yusuf, pleaded with him not to go but Fyzal knew he must – if he didn’t, a rescue might take too long and they might run out of air.

‘I told them: “Listen, I’m going to help. If I don’t go, nobody might come. I need to reach outside, [they’ll] come back in with a rope and some tanks”,’ Christopher claims he said.

Kaz Jr, one of Christopher’s oldest friends, was terrified and grabbed his foot, begging him not to leave.

‘I had to get out of here,’ he said. ‘The hardest, hardest thing I had to do was to kick off that man.’

So, he took one of the oxygen tanks and plunged into the water once more, swimming as hard as he could, pushing on into the darkness.

He passed through an air pocket, where he could once again hear his friends screaming behind him, and then on through another submerged section of pipe, finally reaching the ‘elbow.’

Here he paused to pray that he had gone in the right direction.

‘I started to go up the pipe,’ he recalled. ‘Swimming, kicking and scraping the walls.’ The oil had made everything slippery, but he managed to heave himself up, until eventually he broke through the water surface, squinted through stinging oil to see that they had chosen wisely.

They only had two oxygen tanks between them, and as they went through the pipe, they reached the end of the air bubble. They couldn’t all swim through with only two tanks, so Christopher had to go on alone, promising to get help. He swam through the water and made it to the vertical section of the pipe. 

He made it to the habitat and was pulled from the pipe. But the other four men were never rescued – they were left to die in the pipe. Christopher only found out days later, when he came out of intensive care. (pictured: the families of the divers waiting for news at the gates of state-owned oil company, Paria)

He’d been in the pipe for nearly two hours. But while he could see the habitat above him, Christopher couldn’t get out of the pipe. The water level had fallen so far that the opening was unreachable.

‘I tried for maybe an hour, an hour and a half,’ he said, ‘I had no perception of time because I felt like I spent a whole day there.’

In desperation, he banged on the pipe, screaming, hoping anyone might hear him. ‘I started to bawl and cry,’ he said. ‘I ask the Lord “why he bring me so far, and I can’t come out of here”.’

Then, barely audibly, he heard a voice – and shortly after that saw a light. Two divers entered the habitat and together, they heaved him out of the pipe.

A crowd of people were waiting on the surface, and they looked on, stunned, as his oily, half-dead figure was heaved onto a waiting boat. His friend’s advice had saved his life, now he knew it was his turn to save theirs.

Christopher was shouting, telling anyone who would listen: ‘The men are down there… you only have to go and rescue them. Go and rescue them.’

He even attempted to go back inside the pipe himself to pull them out, recalled, his voice breaking with emotion: ‘I say “I gotta go back there for myself.” And I try to get up.’

But he was restrained and the crowd reassured him that they would do everything they could to save the other men. So, Christopher went to hospital… alone.

‘I was expecting that by the time I reached the hospital that I would be seeing the rest of the guys. Because, in my mind, there was no reason why not to do the rescue. It was a simple operation,’ he said.

It was three days later, when Christopher came out of intensive care, that he discovered the terrible truth.

The other men hadn’t joined him – in fact, they were exactly where he had left them – still inside the pipe.

Christopher would learn that shortly after he was rescued, armed men from the Trinidad coast guard arrived and, under orders from Paria – the state-owned oil company that owns and manages the site – they banned anyone from mounting a rescue mission inside the pipe.

Over the next week, the horrified families of the victims watched on as the bodies of the four men were flushed out of the pipe.

Autopsies showed they had not died quickly – one may have lived for up to 39 hours in the pipe.

Christopher was consumed by guilt and grief. ‘I made promises that I eventually couldn’t keep,’ he told the Daily Mail’s Pipeline podcast, ‘and that is something that I can’t let go of.’ Now he – and the whole of Trinidad – are left with one question: why were those four men left to die deep beneath the sea?(pictured: Christopher and his wife, Candy)

This week the Daily Mail launched our podcast, Pipeline, to dig into the question that has shattered families and scarred a nation – why were these men left to die? Listen wherever you get your podcasts now

Christopher was consumed by guilt and grief.

‘I made promises that I eventually couldn’t keep,’ he told the Daily Mail, ‘and that is something that I can’t let go of.’

Now he – and the whole of Trinidad – are left with one question: why were those four men left to die deep beneath the sea?

This week the Daily Mail launched our podcast, Pipeline, to dig into that very question, that has shattered families and scarred a nation.

Officials for Paria have said publicly they had legitimate safety reasons for admittedly stopping rescuers from entering the pipe. They insist the state-owned firm did all it could for the men. But neither Paria nor the coast guard responded to Daily Mail’s requests for comment.

Regardless of the truth, three years on, not a day goes by that Christopher doesn’t think about his four friends.

‘I just replay this in my mind, how, what could I have done different so these people could have their loved ones with them?’ he said. ‘For only me to live? What, gives me that right to live?’

To hear what the Daily Mail uncovered, listen to the first two episodes of Pipeline -wherever you get your podcasts now. New episodes released every Thursday.

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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk