Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

Journal Photo/Bill Murphy
Navy Cmdr. Daniel Shultz, commander of the Juliette Task Force, announces that today's mission to raise the sunken Russian submarine has been delayed 48 to 72 hours

Deep down, we knew this was a possibility, didn't we? But we held out hope.

The operation to raise the sunken Russian submarine has been delayed.

"Forty-eight to 72 hours," according to Navy Cmdr. Dan Shultz.

The culprit? Pontoons.

According to Shultz, at about 2:30 a.m., the group was doing its final checks when something came up.

"We had an issue," he said. The placement of the pontoons -- 80 pontoons -- wasn't correct.

Ideally, the pontoons would help guide the submarine to the surface. But ideally, the museum vessel, Juliette 484, wouldn't have sunk off Collier Point Park during a storm in April of 2007.

The mission faced failure -- and possible injury -- Shultz said, if they went forward and something went wrong.

"The United States Navy, United States Army, and the U.S Department of Defense is not risk adverse by any stretch of the imagination," he assured reporters, "but we are prudent with risk."

Shultz said as far as he knows, there's never been a sunken submarine that has been raised in the first attempt. He wants to change that.

"This submarine's coming to the surface," he said forcefully.

Just not yet. Check back in 48 to 72 hours.

-- projo.com staff writer Brandie M. Jefferson

 Tags  Navy Russian submarine

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