The Argentine Navy on Thursday confirmed that an unusual noise heard in the Atlantic near the last known position of a missing submarine appeared to be an explosion, dashing the last hopes of finding the vessel’s 44 crew members alive.
Relatives of the missing sailors reacted with grief and anger to the news after holding out hope since the sub was reported overdue at its Mar del Plata base on Friday last week, two days after the explosion.
“An anomalous, singular, short, violent and nonnuclear event consistent with an explosion,” occurred shortly after the submarine’s last communication, navy spokesman Captain Enrique Balbi told a news conference in Buenos Aires.
After days of false hopes, some of the relatives said the navy had withheld information about the sub and lied to them over the past week.
“I feel cheated,” said Itati Leguizamon, whose husband, German Suarez, was a sonar operator on the ARA San Juan.
“They did not tell us they died, but they tell us they are 3,000m deep,” Leguizamon added, as other family members shouted angrily around her. “They lied to us.”
“They just told us that the submarine exploded,” said a sobbing Jessica Gopar, whose husband, Fernando Santilli, was an electrician aboard the San Juan, after leaving the sub’s base.
“He was the love of my life, engaged seven years before we got married,” Gopar said. “How can I tell my son that he no longer has a father?”
Underwater sounds detected in the first days of the search by two Argentine search ships were determined to originate from a sea creature, not the vessel.
Satellite signals were also determined to be false alarms.
The San Juan, a 34-year-old German-built diesel-electric submarine, had reported a battery problem on Wednesday last week and said it was diverting to Mar del Plata, but did not send a distress signal, the navy said.
Balbi on Wednesday admitted that the situation for the sub and its crew appeared to be worsening.
However, he refused to speculate at that point on the origin of what he initially described as a “hydroacoustic anomaly” detected in the ocean almost three hours after the sub’s communication and 50km north of its last known position.
Balbi said that information about the unusual noise only became available on Wednesday after being relayed by the US and “after all the information from all agencies reporting such hydroacoustic events was reviewed.”
Explaining the lack of debris on the surface, Balbi said that “nothing will end up floating to the surface,” because a submarine “implodes.”
Gustavo Mauvecin, director of the Center for Hyperbaric Medicine at Mar del Plata, said that hydrogen “is always an issue with submarines with electric engines.”
The San Juan “has 500 tonnes of lead-acid batteries, which release hydrogen if there is an overcharge in the battery. Hydrogen in contact with oxygen is explosive,” he added.
“In my opinion, after an explosion like that, it’s difficult for there to be survivors,” a former submarine commander told reporters.
Newspaper La Nacion said one hypothesis is that there was a short circuit in the batteries, which would explain the sub’s failure to communicate and the fact that it did not have time to send off a distress signal.
The commander said a problem with batteries, as the sub had reported, could cause a blast.
“A severe problem with batteries might generate hydrogen. Hydrogen above a certain percentage is explosive,” said the commander, who requested anonymity.
The San Juan would have had enough oxygen for its crew to survive underwater in the South Atlantic for seven days since its last contact, officials said.
That time had elapsed by 7:30am GMT on Wednesday.
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