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Any submarine sailors’ survival hopeless |
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August 19, 2000
MOSCOW (AP) - Rescue efforts Friday to find any survivors on a shattered submarine looked increasingly hopeless after Russian officials said the crew probably had no time to escape a "catastrophe that developed at lightning speed." The pessimistic assessments came after film of the crippled Kursk showed massive damage reaching from the bow to the conning tower, which was much more extensive than earlier thought. Navy officials said there was no sign of life Friday on the wreck of the nuclear submarine trapped 108 meters (350 feet) below the surface of the Barents Sea for six days with 118 men aboard. About 10 attempts by four Russian rescue capsules to reach the partially flooded submarine failed overnight and Friday morning, navy spokesman Capt. Igor Dygalo said. For the past four days, strong currents stopped them latching on to the Kursk and clouds of silt reduced visibility on the bottom to near-zero. Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, the head of a government commission that reviewed the rescue effort Thursday, said there was a "terrifying hole" on the starboard side of the submarine. "A rather big part of the crew was in the part of the boat that was hit by the catastrophe that developed at lightning speed," Klebanov told reporters in Murmansk, home of the Russian Northern Fleet. "There have been no sounds for quite a long time" from within the Kursk, he added.
Both Klebanov and the Navy commander, Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, have said that any survivors were expected to run out of oxygen Friday, but other high-ranking naval officers have given them until next week. Kuroyedov and Klebanov flew Friday to the rescue site, where about 20 ships are leading the operation. British and Norwegian rescue teams were not expected to reach the site until Saturday at the earliest, after Russia initially resisted accepting western assistance. A British navy team with a sophisticated rescue submarine was heading to the area on a ship. President Vladimir Putin, who is under fire at home for his slow response to the disaster, talked by telephone to British Prime Minister Tony Blair about the rescue operation. Adding to the rescue problems, Dygalo said the Kursk was slowly sinking into the mud. The submarine is already leaning at a sharp angle, impeding rescue work. Bad weather has also been a problem. The skies Friday were foggy and the sea relatively calm. The Russian Navy's deputy chief of staff, Vice-Adm. Alexander Pobozhy, met Friday with NATO officials in Brussels to discuss technical aspects of their assistance.
Russian officials have not determined how the Kursk got into trouble Aug. 12. Officials have offered various explanations, including a collision, an internal explosion or even contact with a World War II mine. Klebanov said evidence suggested the submarine, which was taking part in naval exercises off Russia's northern coast, hit an unspecified "huge, heavy object" about 20 meters (66 feet) below surface and plunged to the sea bottom in seconds. But officials could not explain how a highly sophisticated submarine, filled with advanced electronic guidance systems, could crash into a large object. Submarines use radar and other guiding devices that allow them to spot objects many kilometers (miles) away under water. There have been no reports of other ships being damaged and the U.S. Navy has said its vessels in the area were not involved. Alexander Ushakov, deputy head of the Transport Ministry's northern sea route, said Friday there were no civilian ships in the area when the Kursk sank. U.S. submarines monitoring Russian Navy exercises when the Kursk was lost detected two explosions at the time, U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity. The second explosion was much larger than the first, the officials said. A likely scenario was that a torpedo in the Kursk's forward torpedo compartment exploded, setting off a much bigger explosion in the compartment which is packed with torpedoes.
The Kursk can carry up to 28 torpedoes and anti-submarine missiles, each with warheads weighing up to 450 kilograms (1,000 pounds). A blast involving even a few torpedoes would have caused catastrophic damage. The Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper published a special issue Friday with a list of the men aboard the Kursk, claiming it had paid navy officials 18,000 rubles (dlrs 650) for the names. The navy has not officially said who is aboard, angering family members and fueling criticism about the military's slow, confused and often-contradictory response to the disaster. "There's a lot of hearsay about what's going on," Irina Lyachin, wife of the Kursk's commander, said in Murmansk. "I hope they will tell me the truth when the time comes." |
