Harrison Okene
60 Hours underwater
Time stranded: 60 hours
Distance traveled: 0 miles
Terrain types: Sea
Deaths: 11
Situation ended: Found by divers
Location: Indian Ocean
This is one story that really stands out above the rest, and not in terms of distance traveled or time stranded, but in how he managed to survive for the time he did.
Harrison Okene was a cook on board a tugboat called Jascon-4 which was bound to re-stabilise an oil tanker in the Atlantic ocean 20 miles off the Nigerian coast.
Everything was going well for Harrison Okene, he had a good home and family, and this was to be his last voyage before he got married, just one last, easy-going nothing to worry about voyage before he settled down.
Of course, this wasn’t the case though as on the night of 26th May in 2013 on the way to the tanker, a freak swell of the ocean managed to flip the ship onto its side, causing seawater to rush in and rapidly sink it.
There were 12 crew members on the ship including Okene, but the other 11 all died in the initial sinking or managed to escape the ship only to drown in the sea. Frantically running through the ship’s corridors trying to find a way to escape, Okene managed to reach the engineering room which was a little under 4 feet high.
The ship sank upside down to the bottom of the ocean which had a depth of just under 100 ft, and Okene was trapped in an upside-down room half filled with water. After the ship had settled on the seabed the water stopped coming in so quickly, and Okene managed to build a platform out of mattresses to stay above the cold water.
Normally being trapped in such a small room would see the oxygen supply quickly run out and cause the victim to die from carbon dioxide poisoning, but luckily for Okene, there is something called Boyle’s law.
Since there was so much air trapped in the ship, instead of just bubbling out it was trapped in various compressed air pockets throughout the ship. These pockets contained significantly more oxygen than air at normal pressure, and so provided him with enough oxygen so he didn’t die of C02 poisoning.
Harrison Okene survived for a total of 60 hours and was rescued by South African divers who were there to recover the bodies. They didn’t expect to find anyone alive so it came as quite a shock when Okene started to bang on the hull with a hammer. He was brought diving gear and after a short stay in a decompression chamber was otherwise physically unharmed.