Providence’s Russian Sub To Be Dismantled From Stem To Stern

By Tom Mooney, The Providence Journal, August 10, 2009

PROVIDENCE – Imagine a 3,500-ton hot dog resting within an equally gigantic bun and you have a picture of how demolition crews working from two barges will slowly pick away at the former K-77 Soviet submarine starting this week, reducing what was once a waterfront museum into manageable portions of scrap metal.

 On Tuesday, crews from Rhode Island Metals Recycling are scheduled to move the submarine, which has been tied up at Collier Point Park off Allens Avenue for seven years, down the Providence River about 1,000 yards. From there they are expected to cut open the top of the sub and remove the copper, brass and other metals before turning their attention on the submarine’s hull.

The entire job should take about three months, said Edward Sciaba, general manager for the recycling company: “It’s going to be very interesting.”

Armed with metal-cutting torches, workers are expected to first remove the four missile silos aboard the Cold War-era sub before removing the sub’s sail, said Sciaba.

That will allow crews to climb down into the belly of the sub and start stripping away its metal innards.

As they cut, a crane on one barge will lift the metal out of the submarine and deposit it onto the other barge, he said.

The submarine should start to lift in the water as more and more weight is removed. Eventually workers may be able lift the sub’s “shell” out of the water, Sciaba said, and place it on one of the barges. From there workers will cut the submarine into pieces and truck it away.

The nonprofit group USS Saratoga Museum Foundation Inc. purchased the submarine in 2002 with the hope that it would draw curiosity seekers to the waterfront and raise money for its efforts to try to berth the decommissioned aircraft carrier Saratoga in Rhode Island waters.

The K-77 was commissioned in 1965 and served in the Soviet Baltic and Northern fleets until its decommissioning in 1994. Later it was reincarnated as a restaurant on the North Sea and was used in the making of the 2002 Harrison Ford film K-19: The Widowmaker.

The foundation operated the Russian Sub Museum for a time but disaster struck in 2007 when water entered the sub’s hatches during a torrential rainstorm and the sub sank.

It spent more than a year at the bottom of the Providence River before Navy and Marine salvage experts helped raise the sub but the damage was too costly to repair, said the museum’s director, Frank Lennon, in December.

Operators of the Russian Sub Museum agreed to hand over the badly deteriorated sub to Rhode Island Recycled Metals earlier this year after determining that it could not be salvaged. During Tuesday’s move, both Collier Point Park and the R.I. Recycled Metals property will be closed to the public.

The submarine weighs about 3,500 tons, Sciaba said. Currently recycled steel is worth about $200 a ton, he said – half the price of a year ago. Steel prices crashed with the rest of the economy when automobile manufacturers stopped producing so many cars and steel mills around the world closed.