In November of 2008, the Russians were overwhelmed by a devastating maritime tragedy less than
a decade after the traumatic loss of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea.
K-152 Nerpa, an Akula-class attack submarine, was conducting routine trials in the Pacific
Ocean with a mixed military and civilian crew when something suddenly went wrong.
At 8:30pm, the fire-control system was activated, and two forward compartments were sealed.
Several crew members were now trapped inside with a dwindling supply of oxygen, unable
to escape, while others tried to make sense of the situation.
Inexplicably, there was no fire to put out…
The First Pancake
In 1993, the Russian Akula-class submarine Nerpa K-152 was laid down at the Amur Shipbuilding
Plant shipyard in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in the Russian Far East.
The 8,140-tonne nuclear-powered attack submarine, named after the Baikal Seal, belonged to the
Soviet Project 971 type of fourth-generation submarines.
However, her completion was delayed for nearly a decade due to the dire economic environment
of the collapsing nation during the early 1990s.
An anonymous worker at the shipyard once admitted that there were: (QUOTE) "Questions about
the quality of the metal that was used in building the nuclear submarine."
The unnamed source explained that a portion of the metal had been purchased from China;
moreover, he added that: (QUOTE) "When the first trials of the submarine were carried
out, water was leaking in between the seams!
So it is not surprising that the work dragged on."
The incomplete vessel was ultimately mothballed until the early 2000s.
It was the Indian Navy that showed interest in the submarine, and an agreement was signed
so that Rosprom, the Federal Agency for Industry, would finish the ship and lease it to India.
Incidentally, some reports in the Indian media claim that the resumption of construction
was indeed subsidized by Indian funds and that, in exchange, Nerpa would serve with
the Indian Navy for a decade.
Even so, several analysts sharply criticized the vessel's quality, as it had been below
standard.
For one, defense editor of the Yezhednevny Zhurnal newspaper, Aleksandr Golts, noted
that in the 1980s, the Amur shipyard delivered submarines: (QUOTE) "One after another, like
pancakes."
Then, between 1993 and 2008, the plant barely produced a single vessel.
And as it later turned out, the lone underwhelming submarine would eventually pay a high cost.
This Is No Drill
The submarine was expected to be completed no later than 2007.
Alas, that didn’t happen.
That year, Nerpa was transferred to the Vostok shipyard in the closed city of Bolshoy Kamen,
Primorsky Krai, to be fitted out.
Finally, after 15 years of extenuating development, the submarine was launched in late 2008.
However, before being delivered to the Indian Navy, the vessel would have to undergo sea
trials and be handed over to the Russian Defense Ministry.
Russia had a two-billion-dollar agreement with the Indian government that included the
leasing of Nerpa and another submarine, but the deal would be unexpectedly postponed.
Indian naval crews had been training to operate the Russian vessel as part of India's crucial
nuclear submarine program known as the Arihant class.
Some had received training near Saint Petersburg, while another group of sailors would arrive
in Vladivostok in late 2008 to carry out sea trials.
That November, Nerpa was undergoing sea trials at the Russian Pacific Fleet's test range
in the Peter the Great Gulf by the Sea of Japan.
The vessel was yet to be commissioned by the Russian Navy, and was merely undergoing plant
tests under the supervision of a team from the Amur Shipyard.
For the trial, the vessel had a complement that far exceeded the regular crew; other
than the 81 military personnel that boarded the submarine that day, 127 civilian engineers
from different shipyards responsible for either the building or the outfitting were also partaking
in the exercise.
Nerpa's first underwater test run was launched on November 8, but at 8:30pm, something went
wrong.
Suddenly, the ship's fire extinguishing system was triggered, and the security system sealed
two forward compartments, filling them with a noxious substance.
Several sailors were now trapped with no way out…
Caught Off Guard
Fire has always been a constant hazard when it comes to submarines.
Each compartment of a Russian submarine contained a LOKh station or a volumetric chemical fire-suppression
system.
If necessary, the fire-extinguishing gas could be released into the same compartment or the
adjacent ones.
Freon R-114B2 gas, or dibromotetrafluoroethane, better known as khladon in Russian, was not
an unknown substance for the nation's Navy, which regularly employed it as a haloalkane
refrigerant.
When the gas was released into a given compartment, it would quickly displace oxygen, chemically
interfering with combustion.
As such, the non-flammable gas would occupy the space inside the enclosed rooms, thus
extinguishing the fire and preventing it from spreading throughout the ship.
In high concentrations, R-114B2 can cause narcosis, eventually creating mental confusion
and lethargy.
But in extreme cases, it causes asphyxiation.
Regrettably, the sailors aboard Nerpa were caught completely off guard.
The warning sirens only sounded after the gas had already poured in, and three military
personnel and 17 civilians lost their lives in the accident.
In addition, no less than 41 people were injured, several of whom were employed by the Amurskiy
Shipbuilding Company.
Many of them suffered from frostbite, as the gas has a chilling effect.
Immediately after the accident, the Udaloy-class destroyer Admiral Tributs and rescue vessel
Sayany rushed to the scene from the nearest city, Vladivostok, to assist the stricken
crew.
The injured sailors were transferred to the destroyer and hastily sent to military hospitals
for appropriate treatment.
In the meantime, the undamaged submarine returned to Primorsky Krai on her own.
But a question remained unanswered: no one knew what had set off the fire control system.
Unsanctioned Operation
The terrible news shocked the people of Vladivostok, and the incident was described as the most
gruesome submarine disaster since Kursk sank in 2000.
At first, the cause of the accident was attributed to the LOKh suppression system, whose newer
version had not yet been tested on any Russian submarine.
Earlier versions could only operate manually from the duty shift console, but the new system
could work automatically in response to smoke and temperature rises in the environment.
The speculations were not unfounded, as attested by an engineer from the Zvezda shipyard who
confirmed the system had already malfunctioned when Nerpa was being readied for the sea trials.
Indeed, many analysts speculated that the system could have been activated accidentally
due to an equipment failure.
On November 10, the Russian Navy publicly blamed the disaster on an unsanctioned operation
of the fire suppression system, claiming that the system had activated without any human
intervention.
However, the truth emerged a few days later.
As naval investigators looked deeper into the case, they discovered that it had been
a crewman who turned the system on: (QUOTE) "Without permission or any particular grounds."
The seaman, unofficially addressed as Dmitry Grobov, believed the local control unit was
not connected and started playing with the system out of boredom.
Under normal circumstances, the local control units would be protected by a five-digit access
code.
However, the access combinations were penciled on the units for the sea trials.
As such, the crew member increased the readings from 30 degrees Celsius to 78, causing the
computer to believe there was a fire on board and activating the otherwise appropriate protocol.
Sole Responsibility
When Grobov meddled with the control unit, it requested permission to start the fire-suppression
system, and the man granted it.
Whether or not Grobov was aware of what he was doing, he was charged and faced up to
seven years in prison, but the sailor was acquitted by a jury following an earlier not-guilty
verdict in 2011.
That verdict was overruled by the Supreme Court's military board in 2012, and a retrial
in the spring of 2013 confirmed the decree.
Even so, several colleagues expressed skepticism about Grobov's culpability, attesting to his
experience and specialty as a skilled crewman.
Moreover, a number of unnamed retired naval officers told the Kommersant newspaper that
it was doubtful the seaman was solely responsible.
They explained that no one person could activate the system because it required multiple levels
of confirmation.
Nevertheless, the terrible outcome could also be blamed on a simple fact: there were many
civilians on the submarine at the time of the accident.
Igor Kurdin, a former submarine commander, noted that civilian observers would be highly
untrained to respond appropriately to emergencies.
It was explained that the release of the firefighting agent had to be preceded by a specific light
and a sound signal that alerted the crew, after which they had to put on oxygen masks
that would grant them 30 more minutes while the compartments ventilated.
Moreover, it was likely that many passengers were asleep and unable to don the emergency
equipment.
This was confirmed by later reports indicating that some of the victims could not turn on
the breathing kits before they suffocated.
Even so, while the potential for such accidental discharges is not uncommon in the Russian
Navy, they seldom result in fatalities, and the irony of a safety measure attacking the
very crew it’s meant to protect was not lost on the authorities.
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