Salvage
Most of the submarine's hull, except the bow, was raised from the ocean floor by the Dutch marine salvage companies Smit International and Mammoet in late 2001 and towed back to the Russian Navy's Roslyakovo Shipyard. The front section was cut off because of concerns it could break off and destabilize the lifting. It was cut off using a chain of drums covered with an abrasive, pulled back and forth between two hydraulic anchors dug into the seabed; the cutting took 10 days. The remnants of the bow have been destroyed by explosives in September 2002, raising further concerns among the adherents of the conspiracy theory.
The bodies of the dead crew were removed from the wreck and buried in Russia – three of them were unidentifiable because they were so badly burned. Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree awarding the Order of Courage to all of the crew and the title Hero of the Russian Federation to the submarine's captain, Gennady Lyachin.
The first five fragments to be raised were a piece of a torpedo tube weighing about a ton (to ascertain if the explosion occurred inside or outside), a high-pressure compressed air cylinder weighing about half a ton (also to ascertain the nature of the explosion), part of the cylindrical section of the hard frame and part of the left forward spherical partition to determine the intensity and temperature of the fire in the forward compartment, and a fragment of the sonar system dome.
The presence of explosives in the unexploded torpedoes (about 225 kg TNT equivalent each) and especially in the 23 SS-N-19 cruise missiles aboard (about 760 kg each, plus about 7 kg TNT equivalent of the silo ejection charge), together with the risk of radiation release from the reactors, presented a unique set of challenges to the salvage teams.
Read more about this topic: Russian Submarine Kursk Explosion