Kursk successfully raised

Mark Oliver

Mon 8 Oct 2001 18.18 BSTFirst published on Mon 8 Oct 2001 18.18 BST

The Kursk nuclear submarine was successfully raised from the Barents sea floor today, more than a year after it became a tomb for its 118 crew.

In an audacious 15-hour operation costing the Russian government £44m, a Dutch-led international consortium pulled the Kursk to a giant barge for transportation to a dry dock.

The submarine was lifted on steel cables lowered from a barge before being clamped underneath the barge. The Kursk's protruding conning tower and tail fins tightly fitted into niches carved in the barge.

The lifting went exceptionally smoothly - which was perhaps surprising after the series of technical problems and delays which have dogged the preceding three-months of preparatory work.

Other submarines have been lifted in the past, but none has been comparable in size to the giant, 18,000-ton Kursk, which exploded and sank in August 2000 during naval manoeuvres, killing all hands.

Once it is put in dock, the navy will remove the remains of the crew and 22 Granit supersonic cruise missiles.

There had been calls not to disturb the 'graveyard' of those who died but the government said the Kursk must be raised to avoid any potential danger to the environment from its nuclear reactors.

Concerns had also been voiced that the Kursk may threaten the safety of ships because of its position in shallow waters, lying just 108 metres (356 feet) below the surface, 140km off the coast of Russia.

In raising the Kursk - an operation led by the Dutch Mammoet-Smit international consortium - the navy also hopes to determine the cause of its sinking, which remains unknown.

Despite fears over safety, the Russian Navy and the salvage team said the reactors have been safely shut down and posed no threat to the salvage effort. No holes were cut in the compartment housing the twin nuclear reactors.

Vice Admiral Mikhail Motsak, the Russian naval commander overseeing the recovery operation, said the Kursk should arrive in the harbour of the town of Roslyakovo, near Murmansk, at around 12pm Moscow time (0800 GMT) on Wednesday.

However, he warned that the trip could be hampered by bad weather which would stop the salvage team from taking the shortest route possible.

If the seas get rough, the barge may take a longer journey, allowing it to wait out a storm near the coast. Reports threatened worse weather for this evening, with snow flurries covering Murmansk.

Experts feared it would be difficult to overcome the force of the sediment on the sea bottom, but that posed no difficulty.

Larissa van Seumeren, a spokesman for the consortium, said the submarine was less deeply embedded in the seabed than believed. "We started to pull and there was almost no suction," she said. "It was lifted up easily."

Throughout the lifting, remote-controlled cameras and divers inspected the submarine, checking gauges monitoring radiation and the vessel's angle in relation to the barge, according to Captain Igor Babenko, a spokesman for the Russian Northern Fleet.

He said: "The lifting has gone without a hitch. The divers have inspected the submarine and found no flaws in the salvage equipment."

The Dutch consortium had already severed the submarine's mangled forward section, which was left on the seabed because of concern that it might have broken off and destabilised the lifting.

While the submarine was still being lifted, the barge pulled up its eight anchors and began drifting slowly to choose the optimum position to minimise roll.

Each of the 26 cables lowered from the barge and plugged into the holes cut in the Kursk's hull is a bundle of 54 super-strong steel ropes. A central computer was controlling every centimetre of lifting, neatly balancing the required effort between lifting cables.

The Kursk, one of Russia's most modern submarines, will be towed to the dry dock in Roslyakovo at a speed of about 3 knots per hour.

Five other nuclear submarines - two American and three Russian - that have sunk in the past remain buried at depths of up to 5,000 meters (16,000 feet) because of the cost of raising them.