The Big City; Aftermath of 40 Hours in an Elevator (1999)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The quick summary is that Mr. White recovered from the elevator mishap, but his $25 million lawsuit took four years and ruined his life. He ended up settling for low six figures, but lost his job and his friends.
"Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator."
found the info: "He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures"
https://www.overlawyered.com/2008/04/lawyers-making-clients-...
Undisclosed settlement, probably "low six figures" (between $100,000 and $500,000).
10 million: 8 figures
Obviously there are other factors to consider, like how recently someone ate or drank, their fitness level, the temperature, etc. but someone could certainly go longer than three days.
> In Turkey, for example, experts say those who were stuck in collapsed residential buildings may have had access to some source of water or food.
That article cites "the rule of 4s" which I've always heard this called the "rule of 3s" (3 minutes without oxygen, 3 hours without shelter, 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food), and that's what Wikipedia calls it but who knows.
Per a BBC article [1], the longest someone has ever survived without water is 18 days, but a wikipedia article about that person says that he "survived by ingesting condensed water" [2]
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/health/turkey-quake-rescues/i...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201016-why-we-cant-surv...
Technically, it would not be claustrophobia but cleithrophobia. Simialr but not the same.