The Nigerian cook survived by breathing an ever-dwindling supply of oxygen in an air pocket. A video of Okene’s rescue in May that was posted on the Internet more than six months later has gone viral this week.
Okene’s ordeal began around 4:30am on May 26. Always an early riser, he was in the toilet when the tug, one of three towing an oil tanker in Nigeria’s oil-rich Delta waters, gave a sudden lurch and then keeled over.
As the boat sunk, he found a cabin that felt safe, he began the long wait.
He survived off just one bottle of Coke, all he had to sustain him during the trauma.
To this day, Okene believes his rescue after 72 hours underwater at a depth of 30 meters (about 100 feet) is a sign of divine deliverance. The other 11 seaman aboard the Jascon 4 died.
Three days later, divers sent to the scene were looking only for bodies. They had already pulled up four bodies.
So when a hand appeared on the TV screen, everybody assumed it was another corpse.
“The diver acknowledged that he had seen the hand and then, when he went to grab the hand, the hand grabbed him!” one rescuer who was monitoring the operation said in a telephone interview on Tuesday, adding that it was a shock for everyone involved.
As the temperature dropped to freezing, Okene, dressed only in boxer shorts, recited the last psalm his wife had sent by text message, sometimes called the Prayer for Deliverance: “Oh God, by your name, save me. … The Lord sustains my life.”
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