October 10, 2001	Wednesday	Rajab 22, 1422

MURMANSK: Schoolteacher Lena, 21, is deeply apprehensive about the arrival of the wrecked Russian nuclear-powered submarine Kursk at a naval installation close to here, her home city.

If people elsewhere in Russia can afford to sit back and wonder at the impressive recovery of the sunken colossus from the seabed, Lena and her family feel uncomfortably close to events - ”I have a bad feeling about all this,” she said.

Her parents’ home is a few kilometres away from the dry dock at Roslyakovo where the flooded submarine with its twin nuclear reactors and gruesome load of crewmens’ bodies will arrive Wednesday.

The site on the Kola peninsula is only 20km from this city and its population of 400,000 people.

It is not known what navy experts will find in the once 155-metre-long warship which sank in the Barents Sea after explosions on Aug 12, 2000.

They will first remove the remains of dozens of the 118 crewmen who died. Many more sailors were simply obliterated by a huge blast that swept through the submarine from the bow torpedo compartment. The section was cut off and left on the seabed for retrieval later.

Nor is it clear what damage may have been caused to almost two dozen cruise missiles stored in firing tubes along the sides of the submarine. The navy says none were armed with nuclear warheads.

Both of the Kursk’s 190 megawatt reactors shut down automatically during the accident, the Russian authorities insist. These will be removed later at another shipyard in the area, before the ill-fated warship is dismantled entirely.

“If we thought there was even a million to one chance that something could happen to the reactors, we would not have started the operation,” First Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who leads a government inquiry into the sinking, said here on Tuesday.

The work will take place under strict security. “For weeks already people get checked entering my parents’ village,” Lena said.

No one without strict authorization will even set eyes on the submarine in the coming days. It is being towed underwater into the no-go zone around Roslyakovo. The opposite shore of the bay from the dock has been sealed off to prevent journalists filming from a distance.

Lena’s student friend Irina is reluctant to believe there can be a great danger for the people in the coastal region. “Even an accident while they raised it from the sea would have caused only a small local radiation problem,” she said, happy to take official assurances that all is well.

Eighty per cent of respondents in a recent poll here by the Russian survey organization Sotsium believe people should be worried about the arrival of the Kursk.

But half in total expressed confidence in the abilities of the navy and the foreign salvagers to install the wreck safely in the dock.

A cloakroom attendant in the city, was among locals who felt helpless. “My only feeling is worry - but they don’t tell us ordinary people anything.”

Even if the Kursk is a unique case, other residents of this Arctic region of Russia simply shrug off an old story.

The Kola peninsula, home of the Russian northern fleet, has been a graveyard for old nuclear-powered submarines for decades. The Norwegian ecological organization Bellona counts at least 71 decommissioned submarines still containing spent nuclear fuel.

Meanwhile, the governor of the Murmansk region, Yury Yevdokimov, oozed optimism. “We have taken into account all possibilities in preparations for the recovery of the Kursk,” he said.—dpa