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Haunting Photos Show the Aftermath of the Kursk Submarine Disaster in 2000
- Klaster_1 7mo ago[removed]
- ahhhhnoooo 7mo agoI found several photos haunting.
- brookst 7mo agoI found the story and photos entirely haunting. Those sailers had no chance.
- tokai 7mo agoThe survivors possibly had a change if Russia had accepted the offer for help from the Norwegian rescue divers right away.
- gbuk2013 7mo agoFrom the article > Analysts concluded that 23 sailors survived the initial blasts and took refuge in the small ninth compartment at the rear of the submarine. > Evidence suggests they remained alive for more than six hours. When oxygen grew scarce, they attempted to replace a potassium superoxide chemical oxygen cartridge, but it fell into the oily seawater pooling on the floor and exploded on contact. > The resulting fire killed several crew members and triggered a flash fire that consumed what remained of the oxygen, asphyxiating the last survivors. That does not suggest a possibility of a foreign rescue vessel making it there in time.
- WithinReason 7mo agoAlso: "No search was launched for more than six hours." "It ultimately took over 16 hours to locate the stricken vessel, which lay on the seabed at a depth of 108 meters (354 feet)."
- bahmboo 7mo agoHindsight. They should have tried given they didn't know. I remember it unfolding at the time and astonished at the lack of Russian response.
- infecto 7mo agoFound it pretty haunting myself. You could pick a different descriptive word but haunting fits.
- giraffe_lady 7mo agoBeing able to look at a full actual likeness of a person who is dead is incomprehensibly novel to human experience. It has never stopped giving me chills.
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoReading a note written by a sailor, in the dark, by feel, estimating his changes to be 10%, certainly felt haunting to me.
- Mikhail_Edoshin 7mo agoChomsky wrote that Western media publishes only what is "useful" for certain ends, usually political. So you think the article is useful, don't you?
- nradov 7mo agoWhy would anyone care what a "useful idiot" like Chomsky thinks?
- vrosas 7mo agoOne of the most interest facts about this disaster is that if the submarine was standing on its tail straight up, its nose would be sticking 150ft OUT of the water it sunk in.
- thedanbob 7mo agoAnd yet even in that shallow of water the pressure would have been around 10 atm. It's amazing how dangerous something as mundane as water can be.
- lencastre 7mo agonothing but respect for water
- atomicnumber3 7mo agoDefinitely a strong contender for favorite 3-atom molecule
- jtbaker 7mo ago[flagged]
- HoldOnAMinute 7mo agoSangamon's Principle
- pavel_lishin 7mo agoWhich sounds good, but isn't Nitrous Oxide actually pretty fucking bad for you if you use it continuously?
- watwut 7mo agoThis is the first time I see someone refer to 100m deep as shallow.
- FridayoLeary 7mo agoThe story depresses me a little. One of the greatest engineering marvels in history, destroyed by stereotypical Russian negligence, incompetence and corruption and more then 100 lives lost in the process. The Soviets for all their many sins were at least capable of building incredible things, the protections on the nuclear reactor held up, for example, preventing a massive environmental catastrophe.
- giraffe_lady 7mo agoIt's stereotypical now but I remember at the time this was taken as a kind of confirmation that russia had been coasting on and also neglecting a lot of the soviet-era infrastructure. It's hard to reflect back now but in 2000 the soviet collapse was recent memory and the role and effectiveness of its successor was an open question, internationally. I do remember that in the 90s the "russia understanders" were split into two camps: now that russia is free of the shackles of communism it will step into its destiny as supreme global superpower vs the soviet system was actually quite effective at large scale mundane infrastructure & logistics in a way the russian federation isn't. By 2000 the weight of evidence was already fairly strong for the second view but this disaster, and especially their response to it, really settled the matter. This is how I remember feeling about it all anyway.
- Gagarin1917 7mo agoRussia had roughly half the population as compared to the Soviet Union. There’s just no way they could have ever competed on the global stage the same way.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoIf one took the view that communism was holding back roughly half of their their potential, then it would have been a reasonable prediction.
- Gagarin1917 7mo ago
- jeffrallen 7mo agoSoundtrack for this post: https://youtu.be/3qF95ANVHSg https://youtu.be/3qF95ANVHSg Kursk, by The Vad Vuc
- jvuygbbkuurx 7mo agoThat is an absolute unit. The photos at the end with people inside the wreck put it in perspective.
- ge96 7mo agoDamn that's crazy seeing Putin back in 2000
- andyjohnson0 7mo agoHe had the same dead look as he does today.
- dlev_pika 7mo ago“He wouldn’t lie to me.” - American President
- fusslo 7mo agoThe description of the survivors last hours is horrifying.
- dlev_pika 7mo agoCompound that with knowing that your military doesn’t give a damn about it and whether you have any chance of being alive - brutal
- gettingoverit 7mo agoThe statement is a bit too strong. It's not malice, it's just plain old stupidity. In the same way as soviet nuclear reactors don't explode, nuclear submarines don't either. Nobody have thought it might happen, nobody was aware, and no special "on call" service for recovering people from sunk submarine ever existed. _Of course_, it would never happen in just 6 hours. In the same way, if you don't have anyone on-call to recover the backend along with backups and recovery plans, the chance to have production up and running in 6 hours will be zero. In case of a way more physical thing of "submarine sunk in polar cold waters", it'd take a good 4 hours just to get _something_ there. Not to mention extracting a person from 300ft involves a good plan on avoiding decompression sickness, and you can't really bring a 50-ton decompression bell on a helicopter and hover for half a day. I can hardly imagine what would such a disaster recovery plan even be.
- dlev_pika 7mo agoIt would be unfair to form such a generalized opinion from a single incident, even it that incident was quite brutal. However, 4 years of following RU military attempts to take over Ukraine have reinforced my belief that RU army doesn’t give two shits about its personnel. They got plenty of people, and their value seems to exclusively correlate with the person’s usefulness towards the Tsar, which at an individual level is generally zero.
- drivebyhooting 7mo agoHigh Test Peroxide is incredibly dangerous. Even a slight contaminant can catalyze a runaway decomposition. This is the main reason HTP has been abandoned as a storable propellant.
- LgWoodenBadger 7mo agoI'm surprised 5-7 torpedo warheads detonating didn't do more damage to it. About 2750kg-4000kg of high explosive.
- serf 7mo agonuclear submarines are first and foremost built as a protective sarcophagus for the powerplant, and that's on top of submarines being designed to compartmentalize damage, anyway. i.e. if it could totally destroy itself with a full payload that'd be a very bad design choice, not that there wasn't plenty of bad choices wrt the kursk.
- bluGill 7mo agoThey are designed for war. They have to assume that it will be hit at some point - you still want it to return as many of the highly trained people on board back home as possible. If you can repair it so much the better. They can't always meet this goal (the enemy goal is to make that impossible), but it is a design goal of any reasonable navy.
- headsman771 7mo ago> Dutch company Mammoet was awarded a contract in May 2001 and, within three months, designed, fabricated, and deployed over 3,000 tonnes of custom equipment aboard a specially modified barge. Impressive, particularly by today's standards.
- sparky_z 7mo agoBefore clicking on this link, I hopped over to the Wikipedia page and read the intro section to get some quick context. Turns out that was unnecessary because this "article" is literally just the Wikipedia intro, almost sentence for sentence, with some minor rephrasing here and there. It's pretty blatant. Wikipedia is mentioned in the photo credits, but there's no attribution for the text, which I think is a violation of the Creative Commons license and counts as plagiarism? Pictures were interesting, though.
- conartist6 7mo agoAlso in the movie about these events, rescuers have finally located the wreck and the crew are still alive and banging on the hull with a wrench, but the movie-Russians at that point make needless further delays which cost the crew their chance at survival. There is no evidence anywhere that anyone was alive in the vessel by the time it was reached by rescuers. Nobody heard a wrench banging. Hollywood made that up to paint a picture of the Russians.