Steve Thorpe – The Kursk disaster
I didn’t do a SPAG deployment, but when I left SETT, the Kursk went down the week after, and I was meant to be going to Turkey with the Rescue Vehicle to conduct an exercise out there. In fact, it was the day I joined Vanguard back in Scotland, and I got put on notice that night to deploy with the Kursk ‘cos the next day we flew to London and then flew to Oslo and then flew up to the Port and went up to the Kursk rescue with LR5 as it was then, the Rescue Vehicle.
Simon: And what was the Kursk?
So that was a Russian submarine that had a torpedo explode in the fore ends that blew the front end of the submarine off on an exercise. Something to do with the fuel that thy used to use on the torpedoes that we used to use in the ‘60s and got rid of it for that very reason.
So, they basically had an accident and they had two explosions. One was the first torpedo going off and the second was a sympathetic explosion with the other torpedoes …
Simon: Sympathetic means it blew the other one up.
Yeah, so basically they blew the front end of the submarine off, so they were all in the rear end of submarine. But there was a lot of politics involved. The Russians didn’t want the Americans involved who also had a rescue submarine.
We sort of forced the hand by landing in Oslo before the Russians had asked for our help. We then went up there, a lot of politics about where we should be and what we should be doing.
Then they basically popped the hatch overnight so confirmed that there was nobody alive, but the note that they found off one of the … when they opened up the compartment, when they re-floated the submarine, the date time group on it we were above them so we could have rescued them if they had allowed us to do it.
Yeah, which was a bit heart wrenching to be honest.