So, in May a Nigerian tugboat sank in about 100 feet of water. Three days later, a commercial diving crew went down to recover the bodies of the dead (that has to be a fun job). And lo and behold… inside of a trapped air bubble they found a survivor.
Try to imagine that… trapped for three days in the pitch black in a sunken ship, when all of a sudden up pops a scuba diver.
The divers were equipped with video cameras and the communications with the surface were recorded. Note that the diver sounds like a chipmunk: this is because diving to 100 feet is *not* a healthy thing to do. The divers are breathing a mix of oxygen and helium, not nitrogen, as a measure against The Bends. Of course the survivor – one Harrison Okene – has spent three days breathing compressed air – oxygen and nitrogen. If they were to bring him directly to the surface, the dissolved nitrogen in his blood would bubble out and give him the worlds worst case of the Bends, certainty killing him. So they transported him to a hyperbaric chamber for two and a half days of decompression.
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