Video: How the African managed to survive in a shipwreck after 3 days on the seabed
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Harrison Ojegba Okene served as a tugboat cook. When the shipwreck happened, he survived and spent three days in an inverted tug at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. At the end of the third day, Okeene suddenly saw lights in the water. It's a diver! Salvation seemed so close and inevitable, but not everything was so simple.
Okeene was the only one who was able to survive in the crew of twelve when the tugboat capsized and sank. This circumstance still haunts him. The young man, who is only twenty-nine years old, carries a huge load of guilt for the fact that everyone died and he survived. In addition, there are some superstitious Nigerians who believe that he saved himself only with the help of black magic.
The tugboat Jascon 4 capsized and quickly sank to the seabed to a depth of about thirty meters. The cook spent all these three days on one bottle of cola. He found two flashlights that went out in less than a day. In complete loneliness and darkness, he almost lost all hope of salvation.
Feeling utterly hopeless, Okene constantly prayed to God for salvation. Seeing the last hope only in God's mercy. When he suddenly heard the noise of another ship, the knock on the side of his tug, and then saw the lights - joy and hope overwhelmed his tortured mind. His prayers have been answered! But then something more terrible happened - the lights suddenly disappeared. Filled with fear and timid hope, Okene began desperately sailing in pitch darkness across the sunken ship to catch up with the diver. Harrison could not find him and, mentally burying himself, swam back to the cabin, which contained his precious but gradually shrinking air pocket. The young man could hardly catch his breath, he wanted to cry from despair.
Salvation was so close and so unattainable! Okeene knew that it must be a diver for sure, but he himself was at the wrong end of the boat. “He went in, but he was too fast, so I saw the light, but before I could get to him, he had already swum away. I tried to follow him into the pitch darkness, but I could not follow his path, so I returned,”says Harrison.
Rescuers from the Dutch company DCN Diving were looking for only bodies, no one thought there were survivors. Before they stumbled upon Oken, they had already found four dead.
When the diver returned again, Harrison had to swim again to get to him. Although the young man did not even see the direction in which he needed to move. Finally, a miracle happened - Okene caught up with the diver and patted him on the back of the neck. He was incredibly frightened and shouted into the microphone: “Corpse! Dead body! Dead body!". He did not notice Harrison at once. Okene pulled the rescuer by the hand, and he, finally realizing that there was a survivor in front of him, reported to the rescue ship: "He's alive!"
The painting was surreal. Okene called the diver to follow him into his saving air pocket. After the cook said: “When the diver gave me water, he watched me very carefully. All this time, while he was looking at me, he was trying to understand whether I really am a person. It was evident that he was actually scared."
The diver first used hot water to warm Okene, then put on an oxygen mask. After being rescued from a sunken boat, Harrison was placed in a decompression chamber for sixty hours. Only then was he able to safely return to the surface.
The 29-year-old continues to have nightmares at night and vows never to return to the sea. Instead, he took a new job. Now he is also a cook, only on land.
Prior to his rescue, Okene believed that his colleagues had fled, abandoning him. Their boat was one of three towing a Chevron oil tanker in the oil-rich waters of the Nigeria Delta, but on May 26, something unexpected happened - the ship suddenly banked and capsized.
“I heard the screams of people, I felt the ship sinking, I heard a voice saying:“Is this ship sinking or what?”… At that moment I was in the toilet and the toilet fell on my head, everything began to fall on my head … My colleagues shouted: "God, help me, God, help me, God, help me." Then, after a while, everything was quiet and I didn't hear anything else."
When Harrison talked about the miraculous salvation in his local church, the pastor asked him if he used black magic to survive. “I was so surprised! How could a man of God say that? Okeene said, and there was hurt in his voice.
The young man could not even go to the funeral of his colleagues, because he was afraid of the reaction of their families. Nigerians tend to be very religious, but also terribly superstitious. “I couldn’t go because I didn’t know what the family would say, thinking,“Why is he the only one who survived,”Okene said.
This question initially shook his unshakable faith. Harrison asked, “God, why just me? Why did my colleagues have to die? " There can be only one answer to this question: it means that Okene is still needed here. The cook says that he made an agreement with God when he was at the bottom of the ocean: "When I was under water, I told God: if you save me, I will never return to the sea, never."
Okene's 27-year-old wife, Akpovona, said he still has nightmares. “Sometimes he just wakes up at night and says:“Darling, look, the bed is sinking, we are in the sea. It's very scary.
Read another story of the miraculous salvation from death in the depths of the sea in our article which of the Russians were aboard the Titanic and which of them managed to escape.
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