He described opening a bathroom door and seeing crewmates being swept into the sea — an account that suggests at least some of the crew reached the interior corridor space before being overwhelmed by flooding. He heard shouting. Then the shouting stopped. He assumed, during the hours that followed, that the crew who had been shouting had found a way out. He learned only later that they had not.
The current of flooding water pulled him into what he identified as the second engineer’s cabin. The cabin had a bathroom attached to it. The bathroom did not flood completely.
The reason it did not flood completely is the central physical fact of Okene’s survival, and it deserves careful explanation.
When a vessel capsizes and sinks, the air inside the hull does not immediately escape. As the vessel descends and the surrounding water pressure increases, the air that is trapped in closed or semi-enclosed spaces is compressed by that pressure. It occupies a smaller volume but does not disappear. In spaces where the geometry of inversion has placed the air at the top of what was previously the lower part of a room — bathrooms, storage spaces, sections of compartments where ceiling and floor have swapped positions — that compressed air can persist as a pocket that resists complete flooding.
The size of the pocket, the rate at which it diminishes, the temperature of the water surrounding it, the specific chemistry of the air as the person inside breathes it — all of these factors determine how long a human being can survive inside it. The LLNL scientists who later modeled the Jascon-4 scenario were not working from direct measurement of the pocket; they were working from reported conditions and physical modeling. Their calculations, and those of other diving medicine experts who commented on the case, were estimates rather than precisely measured facts.