One of which was a book on the Kursk which I skimmed/read in two days.
It’s the second book I’ve read on the somewhat unusual topic (for me) of submarine disasters. About four years ago I read The Death of the Thresher by Norman Polmar in an equally quick amount of time. That one was about America’s first (of only two) nuclear sub disasters. The one I read last weekend, Cry from the Deep by Ramsey Flynn, is about the Russian sub Kursk, which sank in August 2000. Twenty-three survivors of the initial two torpedo explosions died over a three-day period 340 feet under the sea while the Russian government did little to save them.
I remember the incident vividly. I was working the second shift (12-9 pm) at Marriott Desktop Support that summer. Though we supported Marriott’s global operations round-the-clock, calls tended to drop off after 6 or 7 every day, so the three of us at the help desk spent a lot of time surfing the web. When the story broke that week, I followed it every day, trying to get as much information as I could from a whole variety of sources. And one of those sources was one of the guys I worked with.
Ron was an ex-Navy man and spent twenty years in the submarine service. Still youthful in his late-forties, he was living off his pension and doing the desktop support thing as kind of a paid hobby. He sure had some interesting stories to tell of his time under the waves. Once, he said, a sub he was on, entering a port in the US (I forget exactly where) hit something hard enough to cause damage. The problem was, nobody knew what the heck they hit. They had all the underwater charts for the area, and nothing was supposed to be there. But something was. To that day no one knew what this submarine hit. A foreign sub perhaps? Ron was mum.
But to get back to the Kursk. The story horrifies me. I can’t think of a worse death, I suppose, than to die in any of the couple hundred ways possible in a nuclear submarine. As a matter of fact, I would never, ever, ever go in one, despite my fascination. There’s an old World War II sub docked in twenty feet of water a couple towns over that I plan to take my daughter to see; that’s about as far as I’ll go.
Now, I skimmed the book last week, and the incident itself is almost nine years old, so if I leave out a detail or speak out of turn, forgive me. But it seems the ship was a death trap even before the events of August 12, 2000. Russia at that time was going through an internal crisis of sorts. Putin was the new president, or dictator, or whatever the true position is, but cold economics had forced the Russian navy to mothball and neglect to a fairly great extent large portions of its fleet over the preceding decade or so. One part of the navy that bore the brunt of this neglect was the stockpile of torpedoes.
Most of the Russian torpedoes were constructed to utilize a particular kind of fuel system which gave them the ability to run faster and longer than other types of underwater missiles. It was also cheaper than other types of fuel. Cheaper always brings with it a downside, and in this case, the fuel oxidizers tended to corrode gaskets and valves in the torpedoes after a certain period of time. You can see where this is heading.
Financial setbacks also resulted in undeveloped search-and-rescue vehicles, training, and programs. The Kursk had a sister ship which could not be used in any rescue or search-and-find capacities because it lay in dry dock, much of it cannibalized to keep the Kursk herself running.
There were actually two explosions which did in the Kursk during a highly anticipated military exercise in the Barents Sea. The first was caused by leaking oxidizer in one “problematic” torpedo that was to be demonstrated. The explosion destroyed something like the forward quarter of the submarine, killing dozens of men including the captain and all those in the command center. Temperatures reached into the thousands of degrees.
The survivors knew they had one chance. The Kursk had a built-in escape module at the center of the ship as part of the conning tower. Over the next two minutes more than forty men lined up in the cramped, claustrophobic quarters to await entry into this module, built to hold over a hundred men. But the hatch could not be opened.
Two minutes and fifteen seconds after the first blast, the remaining torpedoes exploded. A wall of molten metal at supersonic speeds slammed backwards into the sub, killing those waiting men instantly. The remaining twenty-three crewmen headed to the aft compartment as the sub began its dive to the ocean bottom. There was still a chance, perhaps …
At the very rear of the sub was a hatch where men in pressure suits could attempt an escape to the surface. True, the bends could kill or injure them, but that was a risk some were willing to take, but were overruled by the majority. An emergency beacon was released, or thought to have been, to signal to the world their position. However, such beacons were known to be welded to the hull to prevent them from falling off and becoming a drag during maneuvers.
The aft compartment housing the turbine for the propeller, which had a tendency to fill with seawater when the ship was not moving. There was no power so the bilge pumps were not working. Water at 38 degrees filled the dark chamber as the men rested to conserve oxygen. The horror that must have gone through their minds … A few wrote notes to loved ones. In fact, one such note, as well as the fact that many were wearing pressurized diving suits, immediately proved to the world that Russian authorities lied in stating that all perished immediately in the explosions.
Sometime around the third day a fire broke out in the compartment, killing the surviving members of that group of twenty-three.
Finally, the Russian government acquiesced to aid from foreign rescue forces. The corruption, ineptitude, and culture of CYA in the Russian high command was a thoroughly disgusting undercurrent throughout the whole book. May the Lord have mercy on the souls of those evil and cowardly men.
However, Putin was true to a promise to survivors to raise the Kursk no matter what the cost. All but two bodies were eventually recovered and buried with full honors. For a brief moment the Russian people were exposed to a government who fully revealed all its mistakes and responsibilities for its failures to the young men and dedicated officers sworn to protect her.
But it was fleeting. Putin resumed harsh, Soviet-era crackdowns on Russian media shortly after.
No comments:
Post a Comment