The sunken Russian submarine Kursk could be raised on Monday following the promise of good weather over the next two or three days, a spokesman for the salvage company Smit International said Friday.
"The weather is good" in the Barents Sea and divers have "stepped up their rate of work," having now attached almost half the 26 steel cables that will be needed to bring the 20,000-ton wreck to the surface, Lars Walder said.
"They are currently fixing the 12th cable," he said.
The spokesman for the Russian Northern Fleet, Vladimir Navrotsky, said they expected "two or three days of good weather" at sea.
"The fixing of each cable is now taking three hours and 40 minutes, whereas when we started it was taking 12 hours per cable," he said.
The underwater divers are working in teams of three, each team being replaced every six hours.
Russian and Norwegian specialists taking water and seabed samples in the vicinity of the Kursk have detected no abnormal radiation, Navrotsky said.
The raising of the Kursk, which sank in unexplained circumstances on August 12 last year killing all 118 seamen on board, was originally set for September 15.
The salvage divers are in a race against time as the Arctic winter closes in and threatens to scupper the whole operation until next year -- MURMANSK, Russia (AFP)
