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2007-04-20 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
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Gor'easter sinks Soviet sub
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Soviet sub museum, that is!
An old Soviet submarine now used as a floating museum sank and was completely submerged in the Providence River after being battered by a powerful noreaster earlier this week, The Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
All that could be seen of the Russian Sub Museum Wednesday was about two feet of its periscope, and workers said it could be months before its open again.
We got hit with a freak storm with astronomical high tides, ships engineer Damon Ise said. A tidal surge paired with direct and powerful easterly winds from the storm on Sunday and Monday pushed the sub up onto a shoal adjacent to where its anchored along the western bank of the river, Ise said. Then water began seeping into the inoperable sub, which is not watertight. The sub was listing to its left, or port, side Monday. Late Tuesday night, Ise said, the sub tipped further and sank.
Museum officials believe the sub is filled with water, though they dont think the instruments are damaged because they are water tight.
Ise said the sub, alternately designated as K-77 or Juliett 484, is the only submarine of its kind in the United States. For those of us who put a lot of time into this, its heartbreaking, he said.
K-77, launched in 1965 as part of the Soviet Northern Fleet, is about 282 feet long and 31 feet wide, and was diesel powered. The Juliett class was initially planned as a nuclear missile platform for strikes against the United States and carried four nuclear cruise missiles. Later, it began tracking U.S. aircraft carriers.
The sub was used in the 1990s as a restaurant and vodka bar in Helsinki, Finland, and later as a set for the Harrison Ford movie K-19: The Widowmaker before being acquired by the USS Saratoga Foundation, a private, nonprofit group. It opened as a museum in 2002 and has since had tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world. Its also a popular place for birthday parties and even hosted a wedding in 2005, volunteers at the museum said Wednesday.
Laurie Prete and her 14-year-old son Louis, of North Providence, have been volunteers at the museum for four years, and the two spent part of Wednesday in the subs ticket office with other workers peering out the window at the empty space where the sub once floated. Louis is a docent and leads tours of the sub, he said. He got so into history, World War II, everything, because of this sub, Laurie Prete said. I feel like I lost a family member.
A salvage company was working on a plan to bring the sub off the river floor and pump out the water, Ise said. The sub is insured, and he said that should pay the tab for the work. I assume its going to cost a huge amount of money, he said. This is going to be a huge salvage operation.
It was too early to know how long it might take to raise the sub and clean it out, but Ise said it took workers three months to get it ready for visitors before the museum opened in 2002. This time around, theyll be contending with what he termed a slime line left by the water.
Still, workers were taking the news with a sense of humor Wednesday.
Ise was calling it the Russian Sunken Sub Museum.
Riffing off the museums motto of Our museum can sink your museum, volunteer Ken Johnson came up with a new one: Our museum can sink. Your museum? 
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Posted by Seafarious 2007-04-20 00:00||
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Posted by JosephMendiola 2007-04-20 01:59||
2007-04-20 01:59||
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Posted by Pappy 2007-04-20 09:02||
2007-04-20 09:02||
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Posted by Frozen Al 2007-04-20 09:43||
2007-04-20 09:43||
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Posted by tu3031 2007-04-20 14:06||
2007-04-20 14:06||
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