That’s exactly what happened with Harrison Okene. In 2013, his tugboat, the Jascon-4, was capsized by a massive wave off the Nigerian coast, sinking 100 feet to the seafloor. Harrison, the 29-year-old ship’s cook, was in the bathroom in his boxers when the water came flooding in. He tried to escape, but the watertight exit hatch wouldn’t open. As rushing water flooded the vessel, it swept him deeper into the ship, where he found himself inside another bathroom.
But the room did not fully fill up, a small pocket of air formed near the ceiling, and that tiny bubble became his lifeline.
Harrison got stuck in pitch-black freezing water. He couldn’t see anything, but he managed to find a couple of lifejackets, two torches, a can of Coke, and a tin of sardines. That was all the food and drink he had for nearly three days. To make things worse, crayfish started biting his skin in the dark. Tragically, the other 11 crew members had already drowned.
The science of his survival in that bubble isn’t so straightforward. In a space that size, you don’t run out of oxygen first. The real killer is carbon dioxide buildup.
Once CO2 hits a certain level, it starts overwhelming the body. Scientists later calculated that Harrison had about 56 hours before the air began turning toxic, and he would have slipped unconscious around hour 79.
At hour 60, South African rescue divers finally reached the wreck. They were looking for bodies, not survivors. In the pitch black, a diver saw what he thought was a corpse, but when he went to touch it, Harrison’s hand reached out and grabbed him. The video of this rescue went viral, as it looked like a horror movie scene when that hand emerged from the darkness.
Even after they found him, they couldn’t just swim him to the surface. Because he had spent nearly 60 hours in a pressurized air pocket 100 feet underwater, nitrogen had dissolved into his body tissues. Bringing him up too quickly could have caused dangerous nitrogen bubbles to form throughout his body, a condition known as decompression sickness. That’s why rescuers transferred him to a diving bell and then kept him in a decompression chamber for another three days before he could finally return home.
Later, instead of letting the trauma ruin his life, Harrison went back to school, trained as a professional diver, and now works offshore installing oil and gas facilities. He says, “If I have the money, I am going to buy a house beside the ocean.”
I first posted it on [ScienceClock](https://scienceclock.com/harrison-okene-3-days-underwater-survival/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=redditarticle&utm_campaign=harrison-okene-post-body-link-rstoriess). If you liked this, you can join my [newsletter](https://scienceclock.com/newsletter/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=redditarticle&utm_campaign=harrison-okene-post-body-nspage-link-rstoriess), where I share stories like this every Sunday.
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