ST.PETERSBURG/ROSLYAKOVO. April 8 (Interfax-Northwest) - Ship-repair plant No.82 in Roslyakovo in the Murmansk region has completed 70% of work on sealing holes on the hull of the Kursk nuclear submarine, the plant's administration told Interfax on Monday.
The workers intend to complete the sealing of the sub and send it to the Nerpa ship-repair plant for further scrapping by mid-April, according to plan, the administration said. The 82nd plant has already received several orders for dock repairs of the Murmansk sea steamship line's vessels, while the floating dock that currently houses the Kursk is to house the Admiral Kuznetsov heavy aircraft carrier soon.
At the same time, the sending of the submarine might be "indefinitely postponed," the Interfax source said. It is planned to conduct an experiment in the ninth compartment of the Kursk, as "the sub needs to completely thaw out before we obtain full and reliable information on whether the compartment is airtight." "It is not ruled out that investigators will wait for the weather to become warm," the source added.
As it was earlier reported, the mother of Kursk crewmember Lieutenant Captain Dmitry Kolesnikov asked Northern Fleet Commander Admiral Gennady Suchkov in February to hold an experiment on the submarine's leak-proofness. She told Interfax that the experiment may serve to establish the progress and speed of the 9th compartment's flooding. Kolesnikov and 22 more crewmember died in that compartment.
The sailor's mother recalled that Kolesnikov said in his last note that nothing threatened the lives of the boys in the compartment for four hours after the blast in the Kursk's bow.
The Kursk sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, killing all the 118 crewmembers.