Russian Sub Ordeal
PaPaPeng
http://english1.peopledaily.com.cn/200508/10/eng20050810_201427.html
Aug 10, 2005
Russian prosecutors Tuesday opened a criminal enquiry over the
near-fatal snaring of a mini-submarine with seven crew under the
Pacific Ocean.
The investigation into the three-day drama of the AS-28 mini-sub
"revealed that a series of people involved allowed negligence in the
organization of the submarine's work. On this basis, the decision was
taken today to open a criminal enquiry," Deputy Naval Prosecutor of
Russia's Pacific Fleet, Roman Kolbanov, said.
"Names of the people involved are not yet being revealed," he said in
the far eastern Russian port city of Vladivostok.
Twenty investigators are working in the enquiry, which is being
conducted in the Russian cities of Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Nizhny
Novgorod, Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, prosecutors said
in a written statement.
They said suspects broke fleet rules by sending out one mini-submarine
by itself, instead of two, in a mission off the Kamchatka Peninsula
last week.
Kolbanov said investigators from the Pacific fleet and Ministry of
Defence had been to the port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to examine
the AS-28, which was cut free from underwater obstacles on Sunday by
an unmanned British naval submersible.
'We just had to wait'
In the pitch dark, lying flat on their backs and under orders to
breathe as lightly as possible, the crew waited.
They started writing farewell letters to loved ones as water supplies
dwindled and the air thinned in the claustrophobic mini-sub entangled
in undersea cables.
When a British vessel finally freed the sub, it became clear just how
close they had come to death: in six hours, their oxygen would have
run out. For the crew, freedom came when they opened the hatch and
inhaled rich, fresh sea air.
They looked a bit bewildered when they stepped on shore hours later -
the deep green of Kamchatka's trees and the clamour of journalists
were a sudden burst of colour and noise after 76 hours trapped in the
hushed darkness, listening to their hearts and minds race.
"We understood we were trapped. We just had to wait for a decision.
When they said that they've put everything into action, we lay flat
and began to wait," said Gennady Volonin, an employee of the company
that made the AS-28 mini-sub who was on board with the six crewmen.
They did not know what exactly they were waiting for and officials on
land or aboard ships circling the accident site sometimes appeared not
to know either.
The Interfax news agency quoted a medical official in Kamchatka as
saying that the crew only had three or four gulps of water a day. The
men wore thermal suits to protect them against temperatures of about 5
C as they lay in the dark.
"The main thing was the lack of water. There was also a problem with
oxygen - not critical but the body felt it was not enough," crew
member Alexander Uibin said in footage shown on the Rossiya television
channel.
At first, the navy announced that it would send down another mini-sub
of the same type - then that plan disappeared and a navy spokesman
later said the vessel was in too poor condition to go down 190 metres
where the stricken sub lay.
The navy called for foreign help. Japan was the first to respond,
sending rescue craft steaming north. But the craft would have reached
the site probably only on Monday, and even the most optimistic
estimates of how much oxygen the sub had left indicated that all those
ships could do would be to raise a vessel full of dead men.
Then the United States and Britain agreed to send sophisticated
remote-control vehicles that could cut through the thick cables
snaring the sub. The cables were either those of a fishing net cast
off by poachers or those holding down an underwater surveillance
antenna, or both, depending on who was giving the information.