A daring effort to raise the Kursk nuclear submarine from the Barents Sea floor ended successfully today when a Dutch consortium lifted it to a giant barge for transport to a dry dock.
The lift happened in the earlier hours of this morning and it took the Mammoet-Smit International Consortium about 15 hours to complete the operation.
The submarine was lifted on steel cables lowered from the Giant 4 barge and put in clamps under the barge, its protruding conning tower and tail fins tightly fitting into niches carved in the barge.
Vice Admiral Mikhail Motsak, the Russian naval commander overseeing the recovery operation, said the Kursk should arrive in harbour at Roslyakovo, near Murmansk, on Wednesday provided the weather stays calm, allowing the salvage team to take the shortest route possible.
"We know the weather forecast and will go directly to the Kola Bay," Admiral Motsak said.
If the seas get rough, the barge may take a longer journey, allowing it to wait out a storm near the coast. Weather showed a trend toward worsening on this evening, with snow flurries covering Murmansk with a thin, white film.
The lifting went on exceptionally smoothly and trouble-free in the background of repeated technical problems and delays throughout the preceding three-month preparatory work.
Experts feared it would be difficult to overcome the force of the sediment on the sea bottom, but that posed no difficulty.
Ms Larissa van Seumeren, a spokeswoman for Mammoet-Smit, said the submarine was less deeply embedded in the sea bed 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, said Captain Igor Babenko, a spokesman for the Russian Northern Fleet.
"The lifting has gone without a hitch. The divers have inspected the submarine and found no flaws in the salvage equipment," Captain Babenko said.
AP