Harrison Okene's Sunken Air Pocket
In 2013 off the coast of Nigeria, a ship cook named Harrison Okene survived in an air pocket about 100 feet below the surface after the tugboat Jascon 4 capsized and sank, while divers assumed they were only going down to recover bodies. For nearly 60 hours, he clung to a tiny pocket of trapped air in the engineer’s bathroom, chest-deep in cold seawater and total darkness, listening to his colleagues’ shouts fade while his throat burned from salt water, his tongue peeled, crayfish bit his skin, and he rationed a single tin of sardines and one can of cola.
He tore down wooden panels to build a small raft and knotted coveralls into a guide rope so he could safely move between his air pocket and a watertight door without getting lost. When a recovery diver’s helmet camera finally caught his outstretched hand in the gloom, the team realized he was alive, brought him up through a diving bell and then a decompression chamber, and he emerged with normal vital signs after three days on the ocean floor.