Harrison Okene: The Air That Saved Him Was Killing Him — Transcript

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1. 0:04On the 28th of May 2013, a diver reached
2. 0:08into the dark of a sunken ship and
3. 0:10something reached back. This is the true
4. 0:12survival story of Harrison O'en, cook of
5. 0:14the tugboat Jazzcon 4. He spent more
6. 0:17than 60 hours alive in a pocket of air
7. 0:20100 ft down off Nigeria. 11 of his crew
8. 0:23mates drowned. He did not. And the
9. 0:25reason has almost nothing to do with
10. 0:27oxygen. Over the next few minutes, I'll
11. 0:29show you what carbon dioxide, warm sea
12. 0:31water, and nitrogen did to his body, and
13. 0:34why the rescue itself was the most
14. 0:36dangerous part. Because the air that
15. 0:38kept Harrison O'ini alive was also the
16. 0:41thing that was slowly poisoning him.
17. 0:43Every breath he took made that room a
18. 0:45little more lethal. 4:50 in the morning,
19. 0:47the Atlantic, 30 km off the Niger Delta.
20. 0:51The Jazzcon 4 is an anchor handling tug,
21. 0:54a squat and powerful workhorse. It was
22. 0:56holding an oil tanker steady beside a
23. 0:58chevron platform. 12 men aboard, most of
24. 1:01them asleep. Okenny is awake. He is in
25. 1:04the toilet. Then the floor stops being
26. 1:06the floor. A heavy swell rolls the tug
27. 1:08and it keeps rolling past the point
28. 1:11where a ship comes back. He feels the
29. 1:13world turn over. He steps out into a
30. 1:15corridor that is upside down and
31. 1:17completely black. There is no emergency
32. 1:19lighting. There is no up. He hears the
33. 1:22others ahead of him moving toward the
34. 1:24exit hatch. And then the sea arrives.
35. 1:26Three men were in front of him. He saw
36. 1:28the first one go, then the second, then
37. 1:30the third. He said afterwards that he
38. 1:32knew in that moment those men were dead.
39. 1:35The water takes them and keeps coming.
40. 1:37Okini is thrown backwards through a
41. 1:39doorway into a small washroom attached
42. 1:42to an officer's cabin. And the water
43. 1:44stops rising. Not because anything saved
44. 1:46him, because physics did. The hole is
45. 1:49upside down. Air cannot escape downward.
46. 1:52A slug of it is trapped against what
47. 1:54used to be the floor. A pocket a little
48. 1:56over a meter deep, roughly four feet of
49. 1:58breathable space. He is 29 years old,
50. 2:01wearing nothing but his underwear in
51. 2:03absolute darkness 100 ft beneath the
52. 2:06surface. And he is, though he does not
53. 2:08know it yet, the last living man aboard.
54. 2:11Start with the thing that should have
55. 2:12killed him first. Not drowning, not the
56. 2:15dark. Temperature. The water around him
57. 2:17is tropical, somewhere near 25° C. the
58. 2:21temperature of a warm swimming pool.
59. 2:23That sounds survivable. It isn't. Your
60. 2:25body runs at 37°. Anything below that is
61. 2:28a leak. And water pulls heat out of a
62. 2:31body roughly 25 times faster than air
63. 2:33does. A man sitting in 25° water is not
64. 2:37comfortable. He is cooling continuously
65. 2:39with no way to stop it. The body fights
66. 2:42back the only way it knows. Blood
67. 2:44vessels in the skin clamp shut, dragging
68. 2:46circulation inward to protect the heart,
69. 2:49the lungs, and the brain. Fingers and
70. 2:51toes are sacrificed first. When Okina
71. 2:53came out, he described his hands and
72. 2:55feet as very white. Then comes
73. 2:57shivering, muscle burning fuel for the
74. 3:00sole purpose of making heat. It works
75. 3:02and it burns through energy he cannot
76. 3:04replace. Left in that water long enough,
77. 3:06he would have cooled past the point
78. 3:08where a heart holds its rhythm. So he
79. 3:10did the single most important thing he
80. 3:12did in three days and it looked like
81. 3:14nothing at all. In the dark by touch he
82. 3:17tore the paneling off the cabin walls.
83. 3:19He stacked it. He built a platform above
84. 3:21the waterline and he climbed out of the
85. 3:24sea. That is the whole trick. Legs in
86. 3:26the water, body out. A physiologist who
87. 3:28reviewed the case put it plainly. If
88. 3:31only his legs were submerged. That would
89. 3:33have greatly extended how long he could
90. 3:35hold his core temperature. Harrison
91. 3:37O'ina had no word for what he was doing.
92. 3:40He knew he was cold and he got out of
93. 3:42the water. It bought him the hours he
94. 3:44was going to need. The second enemy came
95. 3:46wrapped in its own solution. He was
96. 3:48sitting inside an ocean and he had
97. 3:50nothing to drink. Sea water is about
98. 3:52four times saltier than the fluid inside
99. 3:54your cells. Drink it and your kidneys
100. 3:57need more fresh water to flush the salt
101. 3:59than the water gave you. You dehydrate
102. 4:01yourself faster by drinking. Some of it
103. 4:03got into his mouth anyway. He described
104. 4:05it later in one sentence that tells you
105. 4:07everything. The salt water took the skin
106. 4:10off his tongue. 60 hours without fresh
107. 4:12water will not kill a healthy man, but
108. 4:14it takes him apart slowly. Blood volume
109. 4:17falls. The heart beats faster to move
110. 4:19thinner blood. Thinking turned slow and
111. 4:22sticky. His skin soaking in salt for 3
112. 4:25days began to loosen and peel. He was
113. 4:27starving, chilled, and desperately
114. 4:29thirsty. And none of that was the thing
115. 4:31that was actually going to kill him.
116. 4:33Here's where almost everyone gets this
117. 4:35story wrong. Ask anyone what kills a man
118. 4:37sealed inside an air pocket and they
119. 4:40will tell you the same thing. He runs
120. 4:42out of oxygen. He doesn't. The clinical
121. 4:44director of a university diving medicine
122. 4:46center put it bluntly. In a space like
123. 4:48that, your carbon dioxide reaches a
124. 4:50toxic level. It gets there before you
125. 4:52use up the oxygen. Understand what that
126. 4:55actually means. The danger was not the
127. 4:57air disappearing. The danger was the air
128. 5:00changing. Every time Harrison O'ini
129. 5:02breathed out, he added carbon dioxide to
130. 5:05a room with nowhere to vent it. The
131. 5:07oxygen went down slowly. The carbon
132. 5:09dioxide went up relentlessly and carbon
133. 5:12dioxide is not a passive waste gas. It
134. 5:15is an active poison. Dissolved in blood.
135. 5:17It becomes an acid. Blood pH starts to
136. 5:20fall. Your brain stem detects that shift
137. 5:23before anything else does. And it
138. 5:25responds by making you breathe harder
139. 5:27which produces more carbon dioxide which
140. 5:29makes you breathe harder still. That is
141. 5:32the trap. The reflex built to save you
142. 5:34accelerates the thing killing you. First
143. 5:36the headache and the hammering heart.
144. 5:38Then a strange floating drunkenness.
145. 5:41Then confusion. Then the body simply
146. 5:43switches off. The specialist who
147. 5:45reviewed his case put numbers on it. At
148. 5:47around 56 hours, the first real
149. 5:49symptoms. At around 79 hours,
150. 5:52unconsciousness. and unconsciousness for
151. 5:54a man balanced on a stack of wall panels
152. 5:57above black water is not sleep. It is
153. 6:00drowning. The divers reached him at
154. 6:02roughly 62 hours. He had somewhere near
155. 6:0417 hours left. You can see it in the
156. 6:06rescue footage. The support technician
157. 6:09on the surface noticed it afterwards.
158. 6:11Okini is gasping and his eyes are
159. 6:13slightly glazed. That is the carbon
160. 6:15dioxide visible on camera. 62 hours is a
161. 6:19long time to be a body. It is a much
162. 6:21longer time to be a mind. He could not
163. 6:23see his own hands. There was no light at
164. 6:26any point in any direction for three
165. 6:28days. But he could hear. He heard the
166. 6:30ship settle and groan. He heard the sea
167. 6:33working at the steel. And he heard the
168. 6:35fish arrive. They found his crew mates
169. 6:37before the divers did. He listened to it
170. 6:40happen. He could hear the sound. He said
171. 6:42it was horror. He prayed. He thought
172. 6:44about his wife and about the fact that
173. 6:46they had no children yet and that she
174. 6:48was about to become a widow. His body
175. 6:50was running every emergency protocol it
176. 6:52had. None of those protocols cover
177. 6:54listening to your friends being eaten in
178. 6:56the dark. And then on the afternoon of
179. 6:59the third day, a new sound. Metal.
180. 7:01Striking metal. Boom. Boom. Boom. Divers
181. 7:04were on the wreck. They had come to
182. 7:06recover bodies. Now watch what Harrison
183. 7:09O'ini does because the whole story turns
184. 7:11on it. He is alive because he stayed
185. 7:13inside that pocket of air. The air is
186. 7:15the only reason he still has a pulse.
187. 7:17Leaving it, even for a minute, is a bet
188. 7:20with his own life, and he leaves it. He
189. 7:22drops off his platform into black water
190. 7:24and swims down into the flooded cabin,
191. 7:26looking for something hard enough to
192. 7:27make a noise. He finds a water
193. 7:29dispenser. He tears the filter off it.
194. 7:32Then he hammers on the hull and waits to
195. 7:34find out whether anyone heard. Someone
196. 7:36did. A South African saturation diver
197. 7:39named Nico Vanhiran was working through
198. 7:41the wreck. He had already recovered
199. 7:44three bodies. A light moved through the
200. 7:46water. And here is the detail that tells
201. 7:48you more about this man than anything
202. 7:50else in the story. Okina did not lunge.
203. 7:53He did not grab. He came up behind a
204. 7:55diver who believed he was alone inside a
205. 7:57tomb. And he touched him gently so as
206. 7:59not to terrify him. Then he pulled his
207. 8:01hand back and waved to show he was not a
208. 8:04body. He was a person. On the surface,
209. 8:06the audio from the helmet camera catches
210. 8:08the moment the team understands what
211. 8:10they are looking at. He's alive. He's
212. 8:13alive. And the supervisor's voice comes
213. 8:15down the line, steady. Just reassure
214. 8:17him. Pat him on the shoulder. 62 hours,
215. 8:2011 men gone, one hand in the dark. And
216. 8:23now the part almost no version of this
217. 8:25story tells you. Finding Harrison O'Ne
218. 8:28alive was not the hard part. Getting him
219. 8:30to the surface without killing him once.
220. 8:32100 ft down, the pressure is about four
221. 8:35times what it is at sea level. For 62
222. 8:37hours, he had been breathing air at that
223. 8:39pressure. Under pressure, gas dissolves
224. 8:42into liquid. Your blood and your tissues
225. 8:44are liquid. So nitrogen, which normally
226. 8:46passes straight through you, had been
227. 8:48forcing itself into his body hour after
228. 8:50hour and staying there. Most human
229. 8:52tissue reaches full saturation in about
230. 8:5524 hours. He had been down for more than
231. 8:5860. Harrison O'Ne was completely
232. 9:00saturated. He had accidentally become a
233. 9:03saturation diver. Pull him straight up
234. 9:05and the pressure holding all that
235. 9:06nitrogen in solution disappears in
236. 9:09seconds. One of the scientists who
237. 9:10reviewed the case used the perfect
238. 9:12image. It is what happens when you open
239. 9:14a bottle of sparkling water. The gas
240. 9:17comes out of solution. Except here, the
241. 9:19solution is his blood. Bubbles in the
242. 9:21joints, bubbles in the spinal cord,
243. 9:23bubbles in the brain. A diving medicine
244. 9:26specialist was blunt about it. If he had
245. 9:28surfaced immediately, he would have
246. 9:30died. So, they did not surface him. They
247. 9:32sealed him into a diving bell that held
248. 9:34the pressure of the seafloor. They
249. 9:36lifted the bell and moved him, still at
250. 9:38depth, into a decompression chamber.
251. 9:40There was one more problem. He had
252. 9:42saturated on ordinary air, not on the
253. 9:45helium mixtures commercial saturation
254. 9:47diving is built around. The team had to
255. 9:49improvise a protocol for a situation the
256. 9:51industry deliberately avoids. Then they
257. 9:54brought the pressure down slowly over
258. 9:56roughly 60 hours. Read that again. It
259. 9:59took him about as long to come back up
260. 10:01as it took him to survive down there. He
261. 10:03came out with peeling skin, a raw
262. 10:05tongue, and a hunger nobody could
263. 10:07satisfy. For a long time afterwards, he
264. 10:09woke up screaming, convinced the bed he
265. 10:12was lying in was sinking. In 2013, he
266. 10:15said he was not sure he would ever go
267. 10:16back to sea. In 2015, he qualified as a
268. 10:20commercial diver. The certificate was
269. 10:22handed to him by the man who pulled him
270. 10:24out. He works underwater now, down to 50
271. 10:27m. He has said that he finds the ocean
272. 10:29relaxing, that he feels more comfortable
273. 10:31there, that the ocean, he says, is his
274. 10:34world. The cook of the Jazz Con 4 spent
275. 10:3662 hours in a steel box on the seafloor.
276. 10:39He listened to it, take every man he
277. 10:41worked with, and then he went back down
278. 10:43on purpose for the rest of his life. If
279. 10:46you want these cases explained from the
280. 10:47inside, real physiology at the edge of
281. 10:50survival, subscribe to Anatomy of
282. 10:52Survival: The Body Should Have. Here's
283. 10:54why it didn't.