| The rubberised coating on the Delta IV class submarine Yekaterinburg caught fire at a dock in the Far Northern Murmansk region, the latest serious accident to have struck Russia's navy in the past years. "The fire has been liquidated. There is no burning," Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu told a meeting of officials. The emergencies ministry has repeatedly insisted that there was no sign of above normal radiation in the area and Shoigu said radiation monitoring would revert to normal. "We are halting the increased monitoring of radiation and will move on to normal regime," he said. Television pictures from the closed military Arctic Circle port of Roslyakovo, just over 100km east of Norway, had shown emergency workers firing jets of water onto the smoking hull of the Yekaterinburg. Overnight, the smoke plume had been visible for kilometres around during the polar night, local media reports said. A number of crew stayed on board to monitor security during the fire-fighting efforts which included partially submerging the submarine. In a sign of the gravity of the incident, President Dmitry Medvedev dispatched Russia's military chief of staff Nikolai Makarov to the scene, the Kremlin said. He also ordered a full inquiry to identify those responsible for the shipyard blaze, which was initially triggered when wooden structures next to the 11740-tonne Yekaterinburg caught fire. There had been a succession of contradictory reports after the fire broke out with several ... |
