Damaged Hatches Hamper Efforts to Get to Sub Crew

A rescue crew trying to dock with the crippled Russian nuclear submarine Kursk discovered Friday that the second of the vessel’s two escape hatches is damaged, further lowering hopes that either Russian or Western teams will be able to rescue the 118 seamen trapped inside.

“The chances of saving them are extremely low,” said President Vladimir V. Putin, who cut short his vacation nearly a week after the accident to return to Moscow. “But at least some chance remains.”

Russian rescue submersibles continued to work at the scene around the clock, pending the expected arrival today of a more advanced British vessel. But despite the British submersible’s superior abilities, it was unclear whether it will have better luck with the two damaged hatches.

“We just don’t know yet,” said Paul Sykes, spokesman for the British Defense Ministry in London. “We have to see the state of the hatches, and until we do that, we’re working in the blind.”

Earlier this week, rescue workers determined that the other escape hatch, near the midsection of the 500-foot-long Oscar II class submarine, had been severely damaged.

There have been no signs of life from the submarine since Tuesday, and some experts believe that the crew might have run out of oxygen. But Russian officials vowed that they will not slacken the pace of their rescue efforts until they learn the fate of the crew.

“People in the rescue capsules are dead tired, but they are not going to rest,” said Adm. Vyacheslav Popov, commander of the Northern Fleet. “They understand that it’s their comrades in arms who are down there.”

Hospital ships and onshore clinics around the sub’s home port of Severomorsk, about 85 miles south of the rescue site, were in a high state of readiness awaiting what they hope will be injured seamen, not corpses.

“Everyone on board the sub is alive for us until we know what happened there and we see what is inside it with our own eyes,” Navy spokesman Igor Babenko said.

The Kursk sank last Saturday in about 350 feet of water during naval exercises above the Arctic Circle in the Barents Sea. More than 20 Russian ships backed by aircraft have been working around the clock on rescue efforts.

Since Monday, strong currents above the powerless, punctured submarine have swept away Russian submersibles as they tried to lock on to the aft escape hatch. But on Friday, two submersibles made 10 dives, managing four times to lock on to the outer door of the hatch, said Vladimir Navrotsky, spokesman for the Northern Fleet.

However, rescuers discovered that the hatch was bent, preventing them from creating the necessary watertight seal around the door.

“We’ll keep on trying,” Navrotsky said. “We have hope the British will succeed, and we still have hope the Russians will succeed.”

Meanwhile, a second battle was being waged over the cause of the accident.

Russian officials have reported that the sub has a large hole in the starboard side near the bow and signs of damage from the bow to the conning tower.

The leading theory in the West is that an explosion in the forward torpedo bay ripped through the hull and flooded at least the first two of the sub’s 10 compartments, causing it to sink.

But some Russian officials continue to assert that the Kursk might have first been damaged in a collision--probably with a U.S. spy submarine--which then might have triggered an explosion.

“There are two possible reasons for the explosion--an external one, i.e. a collision, and an internal one,” Popov said. “Both versions are under consideration.”

Norwegian seismologists released data Friday confirming U.S. intelligence reports that there were two explosions at the time of the accident. However, the Norwegian data suggested that the first blast was very small--equal to just more than 200 pounds of dynamite--compared with the second, which was the size of 1 or 2 tons of dynamite. The shock from the second blast was equal to a 3.5-magnitude earthquake, according to the NORSAR seismological observatory, based in Kjeller, Norway.

Igor Kudrik, a naval analyst at the Norway-based nonprofit Bellona Foundation, said the second blast was about the size of an exploding torpedo. It was not clear whether a collision would generate a sound similar to the small explosion, so the first blast remains a mystery.

“It’s still an open question whether the [second] explosion was what caused the sub to sink, or whether it went down because of something else, like navigational error, and the explosion was triggered by the sub hitting the seabed,” Kudrik said.

A report published Friday in the opposition Sevodnya newspaper cited unidentified sources as saying Russian ships detected a foreign submarine lying on the seabed near the area of the Kursk after the accident. The newspaper also claimed that Russian intelligence intercepted a radio message from a U.S. submarine requesting emergency permission to enter Norwegian waters.

Northern Fleet spokesman Navrotsky said that there was no official confirmation of the information in the Sevodnya account, but that at this stage, “no theories have been ruled out.”

But U.S. officials Friday again insisted that no U.S. vessel was in the immediate vicinity when the Kursk sank, although they have acknowledged that three Navy ships were in the region observing the Russian exercise.

“I can only assure you and the American people that there were no American ships involved in this matter,” Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told a news conference in Washington.

U.S. officials also denied that any American vessel put into a port in the region for repairs.

Cohen also announced that the U.S. military is assembling a team of undersea rescue experts with special diving suits that could be dispatched to help the Russian effort if asked. He said the U.S. was prepared to take part in an international effort to provide advice.

Russia has not requested U.S. aid, asking instead that any assistance be coordinated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russian officials have consulted with the alliance during the week and have accepted help from Norway as well as Britain.

In Russian, meanwhile, public anger continued to flare over the apparently slow response of the nation’s navy to the disaster. The independent NTV network broadcast footage of women shouting angrily at Deputy Prime Minister Ilya I. Klebanov and navy chief Adm. Vladimir Kuroyedov, who met with family members Friday in a village outside Severomorsk.

Some of the public anger was directed at Putin, who has been on vacation at the Black Sea resort of Sochi since the day of the accident.

“They started acting much too late,” said Mikhail Shants, a 33-year-old former sailor waiting for a trolley in central Moscow. “They should have asked for foreign help much sooner; I don’t know why they didn’t. I think it’s because of our president. He was educated in the KGB and can’t get used to the fact that times have changed.”

In remarks to reporters before returning to Moscow on Friday, a tanned Putin said he had remained on vacation only to keep out of the way of the rescuers.

“Certainly my first desire was to fly to the region, to the fleet base, in order to become acquainted with the situation,” he said. “But I held myself back, and I think I did the right thing. High-ranking officials and various bureaucrats can’t help rescue people, and more often than not they get in the way of those who are.”

Meanwhile, new details of the accident have continued to emerge in recent days.

According to the Norwegian data, the two explosions occurred approximately two minutes apart about 11:30 a.m. At that time, the Kursk was scheduled to fire a torpedo and then lie silent for nearly 12 hours.

When the sub failed to surface and establish contact, naval officers suspected something had gone wrong, Putin said.

“Right away, as soon as the submarine did not make contact at 11 p.m. on Aug. 12, it became clear that the military was facing an emergency,” Putin said. “Measures were immediately taken to start rescue work. The fact that this information got to mass media late is a different thing. One can criticize that, but one can also understand that the sailors needed to sort things out themselves before official information was given.”

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Times staff writer Melissa Healy in Washington and Kirsten Studlien in London and researcher Patricia Gillespie in the Times Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.

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Russia’s Rescue Efforts

Russian rescuers tried unsuccessfully to dock one of two minisubs, or capsules, to the stricken Kursk. Each capsule tried twice to dock with the submarine but were thwarted by damage to the aft escape hatch.

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Sources: Federation of American Scientists, Associated Press, Reuters, Itar-Tass, staff reports. Researched by VICKY McCARGAR/Los Angeles Times