The luckiest people in survival history

Normally in an emergency situation, a person’s survival normally comes down to their individual skill, knowledge, and what they have to work with. Now and then none of these factors matter and the reason someone will survive is down to things out of their control, so here are a few stories of the luckiest people in survival history.

Harrison Okene

Underwater for almost 3 days

During a voyage off the coast of Nigeria in 2013, Harrison Okene was aboard a ship working as the chef when one night a storm caused the ship to capsize and rapidly fill with water. Due to the size of the ship, it should have taken a few minutes at least for it to sink, but water rushed in so quickly the crew below deck didn’t even have enough time to get to the top deck.

After the ship started to sink, Harrison ran out of his room looking to escape but was cut off by the rising waters and forced to take refuge in a small room at the front of the ship. As it sank all the oxygen inside moved to the top where Harrison was and compressed slightly due to the outside water pressure building up as the ship traveled towards the sea floor. After almost 3 days a search team located the wreck and dived to it, not expecting to find anyone alive. When Harrison heard the diving team he began to bang on the wall and was quickly located by a very surprised diver. He was given scuba equipment and taken back up to the surface and ended up making a full recovery.

Arthur john Priest

The unsinkable Stoker

Arthur was born into a poor household in Southampton in 1887 as one of twelve children. As soon as he was old enough he started to look for work and found it on board a steamship working as one of its stokers, a member of the engine team responsible for shoveling tons of coal into the ship’s furnace. He worked on many ships during his time, but five of the major ones all suffered disasters and saw hundreds of people die, but each time Arthur was not among them.

He worked on ships that were torpedoed, caught in storms, ran into reefs, and crashed into other ships and survived every time, but nothing would be as impressive as his escape from the Titanic. Working as a stoker on its enormous engines, Arthur was in the worst place possible for an accident. Not only was he on the lowest level which would be first to flood, but he was also the farthest away from the lifeboats on the top deck. After the hull was punctured, Arthur managed to swim through freezing water and wade past bodies to reach the top deck, only to find all the lifeboats had gone and the ship was up-ending and sinking fast. He was wearing nothing more than shorts and a t-shirt through all this due to the heat of working next to a furnace, clothes that didn’t help when he was forced to jump overboard into the sea. Luckily for him, he was eventually picked up by one of the lifeboats sent to look for survivors and made it back to safety in one piece.

Frane Selak

The worlds luckiest man

Frane was born in Croatia in 1929 and went on to be named “the world’s luckiest man” by the media. His survival story is more of a lifetime of events that he was lucky enough to escape from unharmed when dozens of others died. It began in 1962 when he was riding a train during an especially bad storm and during one turn through a canyon, the train slipped off the tracks and fell into a river. Selak broke his arm and was in no condition to escape on his own, but fortunately, someone else pulled him out to safety in an event where 17 of the other passengers died. In 1963, he was experiencing his first plane flight ever when a malfunctioning door blew open and caused the plane to crash, but Selak was sucked out the open door and ended up landing in a large stack of hay before the plane hit the ground and 19 people were killed.

In 1966 during a bus ride, the driver lost control and slid into a river. The bus quickly flooded with water and four people drowned, but Selak was able to swim to shore with nothing more than a few bruises and small cuts. During the early 70s, he would avoid two major car incidents, the first of which was avoiding an engine explosion just in time after his car caught fire while driving. The second involved his car engine getting sprayed with oil from a faulty fuel pump and igniting, sending flames shooting into his car through the vents, but again Selak escaped unharmed, apart from some singed hair. His last escape was in 1996 when he collided with a truck and crashed through a guard rail on a mountain road. He wasn’t wearing his seatbelt at the time and was flung out the car door and landed on a tree while his car fell 300 feet into the canyon below. That was his last escape from death but not the last of his luck because in 2003, two days after his 73rd birthday he won the lottery.

Poon Lim

Blown up and alone at sea for over 4 months

Poon Lim was a Chinese sailor working onboard a British merchant ship called the SS Benlomond. It was on its way from South Africa to New York when a German U-boat fired two torpedoes into its hull, making a direct hit and sinking the ship in about 2 minutes. There were 54 crew on the Benlomond and only a handful of them managed to survive the explosion and sinking, making it into the sea to find something to hold onto. After a couple of hours, Lim found a life raft and climbed in, finding some supplies and a few flares, but at this point, there was no sign of any other survivors.

For the next 133 days, Lim floated around in his life raft and rationed the supplies that came with it. He caught rainwater using a life jacket and made fishhooks out of wire and nails, but even with his efforts both food and water were always desperately low. He saw a number of ships while stranded in the raft with at least one of them seeing him, but for some reason didn’t come to pick him up, probably because they may have mistaken him for a Japanese sailor. Eventually, Lim’s raft drifted into a river inlet, and he was rescued by three Brazilian fishermen who took him straight to hospital. During his ordeal, Lim only lost 9kg in weight and was able to walk on his own upon rescue. Later on, he was told that no one in history had survived alone at sea for longer than him, to which he replied: “I hope no one will ever have to break that record.”

William Brydon

The only survivor of 16,500 people

William Brydon was a surgeon in the British East India Company who served in the first Anglo-Afghan War (1839 – 1842). The war wasn’t going as well as planned for the British, and they were forced to retreat from the city of Kabul in a convoy of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 civilians. In January of 1842, the convoy left Kabul and began the journey to a British stronghold in Jalalabad 90 miles away, a trip that would mean moving through thin valleys and mountain passes. Almost right away the attacks came from angry locals and small tribes, picking off the occasional soldier or civilian here and there, but further along the journey two powerful warlords joined in and the attacks became bigger and more organized.

The convoy was attacked at every opportunity and hundreds of people were cut down in each attack, breaking up the convoy into a number of smaller groups. One of the remaining groups of soldiers made their last stand at a place called Gandamak on January 13th, 1842 on a snow-covered hilltop, but every one of them was killed or captured and never seen again. Brydon was in one of the forward groups trying to get to Jalalabad as quickly as possible and was part of a small group of 12 mounted officers. They were also attacked constantly and Brydon barely managed to escape with his life on numerous occasions. After they killed the other 11 people he was with, along with his horse, Brydon finally managed to make it to Jalalabad and became the only person out of the 16,500 people in the convoy to ever be seen alive again.