Sequence of Events
At the time of the accident, the Nerpa was undergoing sea trials at the Russian Pacific Fleet's test range in Peter the Great Gulf, an inlet of the Sea of Japan adjoining the coast of Russia's Primorski Krai province. The vessel had not yet been accepted by the Russian Navy but was undergoing plant tests under the supervision of a team from the Amursky Ship Building Plant. For this reason, it had a much larger than usual complement aboard, totalling 208 people, 81 military personnel and 127 civilian engineers from the shipyards responsible for building and outfitting the submarine.
The accident occurred at 8:30 PM local time on 8 November 2008, during the submarine's first underwater test run. The submarine's fire extinguishing system was triggered, sealing two forward compartments and filling them with freon R-114B2 gas (Dibromotetrafluoroethane, known as khladon in Russian). The gas, a hydrobromofluorocarbon refrigerant, is used in the Russian Navy's LOKh (lodochnaya obyemnaya khimischeskaya - "submarine volumetric chemical") fire suppressant system. Each compartment of a Russian submarine contains a LOKh station from which freon can be delivered into that or adjacent compartments. Freon displaces oxygen, enabling it to extinguish fires rapidly in enclosed spaces. In high concentrations it can cause narcosis which progresses by stages into excitation, mental confusion, lethargy and ultimately asphyxiation.
Twenty people died of asphyxiation in the accident. The number of injured was initially put at 21 but was later revised to 41 by the Amurskiy Shipbuilding Company, a number of whose employees were among the injured. Many of the injured were reported to be suffering from frostbite caused by the chilling effect of the gas.
Following the incident, the Udaloy class destroyer Admiral Tributs and the rescue vessel Sayany were dispatched from Vladivostok to provide assistance to the stricken submarine. The injured survivors were transferred to the destroyer and sent to military hospitals for treatment, while the submarine returned under its own power to Primorsky Krai. According to naval spokesman Igor Digaylo, the vessel was not damaged in the incident and radiation levels remained normal.
Read more about this topic: 2008 Russian Submarine K-152 Nerpa Accident
Famous quotes containing the words sequence of, sequence and/or events:
“It isn’t that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history’s meaning.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography.... For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life. Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man’s judgement.”
—Francis Bacon (1561–1626)