Rescuers struggle to save trapped sub sailors
An international effort is underway to rescue seven people trapped aboard a Russian mini-submarine off the Pacific coast.
Captain Igor Dygalo said a British-supplied vehicle, called a Super Scorpio, was being unloaded for transport to the area where the submarine has been trapped at a depth of some 190 meters since Thursday.
It was unclear how long it would take for the vehicle to reach the site and anxiety was mounting over how much oxygen remained aboard the diminutive vessel.
Navy officials have given various estimates of the air supply, with some saying it could last into Monday.
Admiral Vladimir Pepelayev, deputy head of the navy’s general staff, said on the NTV television channel today that the air would probably last another day.
The US Navy was also sending three unmanned underwater vehicles to aid in the rescue effort – two Super Scorpios and another called a Deep Drone. News reports said a plane carrying the Scorpios arrived about an hour after the British plane.
The cash-strapped Russian navy apparently has no rescue vehicles capable of operating at the depth where the sub is stranded and its rescue efforts have focused on trying to grab and drag the sub with a trawling apparatus.
Pepelayev said underwater video cameras show the submarine has been hooked, but the vessel is caught on an underwater antenna assembly that is part of Russia’s coastal monitoring system.
The antenna system is anchored with a weight of about 60 tons, news reports say.
Dygalo earlier said rescuers had managed to move the sub about 60 meters toward shore by hooking onto a part of the underwater antenna on which the sub was caught. A Russian remote vehicle that was transmitting pictures was helping to monitor the process.
Initial reports said the sub had become ensnared in a fishing net.
Dygalo said rescuers made contact with the sub crew at about 1.15pm local time (1.15am BST) and their condition was reported to be “satisfactory”.
The events and the array of confusing and contradictory statements darkly echoed the sinking of the nuclear submarine Kursk and the deaths of 118 sailors almost exactly five years ago.
That disaster shocked Russians and deeply embarrassed the country by demonstrating how the once-mighty navy had deteriorated as funding dried up following the 1991 Soviet collapse.
The new crisis underlined that promises by President Vladimir Putin to improve the navy’s equipment have apparently had little effect.
Putin was shrply criticised for his slow response to the Kursk crisis and reluctance to accept foreign assistance. By early today Putin had made no public comment on the latest sinking.
In contrast to the Kursk incident, Russian officials asked for outside assistance on Friday within hours of news breaking about the sinking – instead of waiting until hope was all but exhausted as they did in 2000.
The mini-submarine is trapped in Beryozovaya Bay, about 47 miles south of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the capital of the peninsula region north of Japan and west of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
The vessel, which was participating in a combat training exercise, was too deep to allow the sailors to swim to the surface on their own or for divers to reach it, officials said.
