Fire at the Sea by Romanov and Moore

[UglyMowgli]

Fire at the sea is the story of an angry man (Romanov) who was the chief enginer of the construction of the Komsomolets , this submarine sank during 1989 spring in the norvegian sea.
The author take a look at the incident from the fire to the lost of the ship, arging a faulty crew , he gives a lot of evidence of lack of capacities in damage control and other procedures.

After the sink, a comiision conclude that it was the fault of the shipbuilder not the crew so the author explain he is point of view : the ship was perfect but the lack of maintenance, robbery and crew without experience and under trained was the casue of the ship loss.

The book is sometime technical but clear with photos and a lot of schemes about the sub sub-systems. It s a very documented book about this accident.

[Bill Nichols]

I agree. The technical details provided by the author were most interesting. Too bad he let his emotions get in the way of the story.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki II]

To be fair, who could blame him. Most of the stories we hear of Soviet submarine tragedies so far are told by the submariners, who of course try and make their actions blameless and split the blame between high command and the shipbuilding industry. Just right that a designer occasionally fights back.