Crew safe after mini-submarine surfaces
(AP)
Updated: 2005-08-07 14:08

In sharp contrast to the August 2000 Kursk disaster, when authorities held off asking for help until hope was nearly exhausted, Russian military officials quickly sought help from U.S. and British authorities. All 118 people on board the Kursk died, some surviving for hours as oxygen ran out.

As U.S. and British crews headed toward the trapped sub, Russian officials considered varying ways of freeing the vessel.

A video grab shows a Russian rescue team heading out to sea in the Pacific Ocean August 6, 2005. [Reuters]

The Interfax news agency quoted Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Viktor Fyodorov as saying crews planned to try to blow up or tear away the anchoring system in an effort to free the vessel — an idea that apparently was later discarded.

Dygalo later said Russian rescue crews managed to loop cables under the assembly and were preparing to try to lift the vessel closer to the surface, where divers could try to rescue the sailors.

That effort failed. But by Sunday afternoon, a British remote-controlled Super Scorpio cut away the cables that had snarled the vessel in Beryozovaya Bay, about 10 miles off the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula, which which juts into the sea north of Japan.

But even that attempt was hampered. A mechanical problem with the Super Scorpio forced workers to bring the rescue vehicle to the surface, just after the discovery of a fishing net caught on the nose of the submarine, Russian officials said.

The United States also dispatched a crew and three underwater vehicles to Kamchatka, but they never left the port.

Officials said the Russian submarine was participating in a combat training exercise and got snarled on an underwater antenna assembly that is part of a coastal monitoring system. The system is anchored with a weight of about 66 tons, according to news reports.

Officials said the sub's propeller initially became ensnared in a fishing net.

The events and an array of confusing and contradictory statements — with wildly varying estimates of how much air the crew had left — darkly echoed the sinking of the Kursk.

Russia's cash-strapped navy apparently lacks rescue vehicles capable of operating at the depth where the sub was stranded, and officials say it was too deep for divers to reach or the crew to swim out on their own.

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