The quoted portion below is from a story in the Los Angeles Times ( LINK ) about a temporary camp set up on the Arctic ice in March, 2007. The story is by Tomas Alex Tizon, a Times Staff Writer. Photos and VIDEO are by Myung Chun (LAT)



3 days of minus 20 on an Arctic ice floe
By Tomas Alex Tizon, Times Staff Writer
May 16, 2007

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At a temporary military camp on a mile-wide ice slab in the Arctic, life can be numbingly hard -- and death can come with surprising ease.

Beaufort Sea, Arctic Ocean — FOR three days in March I camped on a drifting slab of ice, 200 miles north of Alaska, as close as I'd ever get to the top of the world and to knowing what it would be like to live on an ice cube....My shelter was a plywood shack, which I shared with five men whom I seldom saw. Beneath us, under the ice, the ocean plunged 12,000 feet deep....

"How thick is the ice here?" I asked the man leading us to camp.

He nodded, clearly unable to hear me through his ski cap and parka. "It sounds hollow," I half-shouted. He nodded again.

THE man was Barry Campbell, a 22-year veteran of the Navy's Arctic Submarine Laboratory, a largely civilian detachment based in San Diego, devoted to submarine operations in the Arctic Ocean. A stocky, squinty-eyed man with a grizzled beard, Campbell was the officer in charge at the camp. He promptly led us to the heart and soul of the place: the mess hall, a shack attached to an oversized canvas tent where two cooks prepared and served meals. Once inside, Campbell provided camp logistics.

Population of the camp tonight: 37. The number changed as personnel — scientists, engineers and technicians — came and went on twice-daily flights. Our location: an ice floe about a mile wide, roughly circular, and ranging in thickness from 3 to 8 feet. Picture a giant dinner plate floating on the water. The floe was drifting westward at a rate of a quarter- to a half-mile a day, fast as floes go but not detectable except by measuring instruments.

The Navy, every few years, builds a temporary ice camp like this one to run submarine war games. When the games end a month or so later, the Navy removes the equipment and burns the camp. Every camp is built in a different spot.

Submarine

On this morning Ray and a small group traveled two miles from camp and were waiting for the U.S. submarine Alexandria to surface. The 6,900-ton nuclear submarine was engaged in exercises with the Tireless, a 5,200-ton British nuclear sub. Though largely unseen, Alexandria and Tireless were the twin players around which the camp revolved....

At that moment, Alexandria was about 200 feet directly below us.

Within moments a black tower broke through the ice, like a giant chisel through glass, and rose nearly three stories. It was Alexandria's sail. The position of the sail indicated where the shorter rudder would surface, but the rudder was off target by about 30 yards.

"Oh no," someone groaned.

"Get out, get out! Go, go, go!" yelled Ray, as the rudder broke through in the spot where bags and radio equipment had been placed in a mini-encampment. A few bystanders — including me — stood momentarily frozen in awe. Blocks of ice, 3 feet thick, fell away. We quickly moved to safety as the 25-foot rudder eased the equipment and bags aside, like a whale's gentle nudging.

Tragedy

Officer in charge Campbell was just commenting on the success of the day's submarine surfacing when lab test director Jeff Gossett, a big gray-bearded man (there were a lot of them in camp), rushed into the mess hall from a side door. His face looked ashen. He told the group there had been an accident on Tireless. There may be casualties. Submerged a few miles from camp, the sub was frantically searching for a spot to surface....Apparently an oxygen canister — used to generate breathable air — had exploded in one of the sub's forward decks, killing two sailors and seriously wounding a third. No one was prepared to say what caused the blast; the investigation is ongoing....The injured sailor was placed on an inflatable raft, which was pulled like a sled back to the ice camp. A helicopter flew him to Deadhorse, and from there National Guard pilots rushed him to a hospital in Anchorage. The journey from submarine to hospital took about eight hours.

The bodies of the two sailors were brought to the ice camp later that night and put in one of the plywood huts in the middle of the village. They would be flown back to Britain the next morning.

Back in the mess-hall-turned-infirmary, four hours after he had broken the news, Gossett slumped in a chair and sipped a cup of coffee. Sagging circles weighed down his eyes. "In all the years, nothing like this has ever happened," he said softly. I could barely hear him. "You can't prepare for it. Not something like this. You can't."

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Very interesting Hill. As you can imagine the LA Times is not normally on my reading list (perhaps it should be ), so thanks for sharing.

There's another video and some photos on the HMS Tireless website. There's a statement about the accident too from the Commanding Officer. The crewmember who was injured is now back in the UK.

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crewmember who was injured by the initial blast and thrown to the deck. He recovered himself despite his injuries, placed an emergency breathing mask on his face and in complete darkness and zero visibility, due to the smoke, extinguished the numerous small fires in the compartment and allowed access to the Fire fighting and medical teams.

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“Whether one looks at the Arctic Ocean from the scientific or military perspective, it is truly unique. The Arctic remains the most poorly understood ocean environment on earth. The physical features that make it different also make it difficult to study and understand,” said Jeff Gossett, ICEX test and technical director, U.S. Navy Arctic Submarine Laboratory.

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