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ARGENTINA’S NAVY IS hunting for one of its submarines, which has been reported missing in the South Atlantic with a crew of 44 on board.
The navy said it had not had any contact with the submarine, the San Juan, for 48 hours.
“We have not been able to find, or have visual or radar communication with the submarine,” navy spokesman Enrique Balbi told a news conference.
The United States, Britain and Chile had offered “logistical support and information exchange in this humanitarian search,” the foreign ministry in Buenos Aires said.
The TR-1700 class diesel-electric submarine had been returning from a routine mission to Ushuaia near the southernmost tip of South America, to its base at Mar del Plata, around 400 kilometers (240 miles) south of Buenos Aires.
The San Juan’s last contact with the navy command was on Wednesday morning, Balbi said.
Argentina said it had launched an air and sea search yesterday, involving a destroyer and two corvettes.
An initial search in an area around the sub’s last known position, some 430 kilometers off the southeastern Valdez peninsula, provided no clues.
Balbi said an initial search was hampered “because it was carried out at night and in bad meteorological conditions prevailing in the area of operations.”
The three navy ships and two aircraft flying rotations had “already swept 15 percent of the search area,” Balbi told reporters.
The vessel had not activated its emergency beacon, he said.
The navy denied a press report that there may have been a fire onboard.
Balbi appealed for caution.
“I don’t want to dramatise the issue. We’re lacking communication and don’t know what happened,” he said.
“There may be a battery issue, a problem of power supply,” the spokesman said, adding that navy protocol was that the submarine would surface if any power problems were detected.
The San Juan sailed 10 days ago from Mar del Plata to Ushuaia. It spent three days there before heading back to base, Balbi said.
Among those on board is Argentina’s first female submarine officer, 35-year-old weapons officer Eliana Krawczyk.
“Let us pray that nothing has happened to any crew member. At sea they are all brothers, and a submarine carries more risk than a ship,” her father Eduardo told Todo Noticias TV.
The San Juan is one of three submarines in the Argentine fleet.
Sixty-five meters (213 feet) long and seven meters wide, it was built by Germany’s Thyssen Nordseewerke and launched in 1983.
It underwent a re-fit between 2007 and 2014 to extend its usefulness by some 30 years.
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Retrofitting is only available to the people with plenty of cash . Same as most other benefits .
All I read in the above article is that we need to lower our living standards drastically. I do not trust anyone who tells me we need to eat less meat and then replace it with processed crap.
@An Drew Bearla: Yes, all that came out of the big meeting in Davos is that we must stop eating meat and dairy or the world will starve, and we must share our cars or cycle or walk, all the mullarkey Ryan is spouting and all from a bunch that then sat down to a four course meat laden lunch after flying in on 1500 private jets. The narrative to blame the ordinary consumer and deflect away from their lavish carbon laden lifestyles is ridiculous. Animal farm springs to mind
Will do this, will improve that. All talk and no action. The government has no motivation to implement any of these policies. Still using diesel commuter trains ffs.
@Tomo: We are making progress faster than ever before. I would live to speed it up too, but denial of what’s happening is nor helpful.
Bottom line is what comes out of our chimneys and out of the vehicle tailpipes isn’t good for us and has resulted in worse health for our population and more deaths. Even if you think climate change isn’t real (it is) then only a fool would continue to not tackle us poisoning ourselves.
@Barry Somers: a few more new taxes will sort everything.
That’s the problem, the greens solution is to tax the problem with no alternative. Of course, people are turning against it
@Jim Buckley Barrett: Not true.
@Nicholas McMurry: Yes it is true. Tax tax tax from a fella that knows about as much about climate change as my 8yr old. All the solutions Eamo is pushing for at present are financially or infrastructurally unviable like hydrogen which is inhibitively expensive to make or offshore wind which we have no way due to planning restrictions and lack of infrastructure make, but which are the chief objectives of E3G which ol Eamo is/was a senior associate of, as usual the self serving bull we have gotten used to in Irish politics. Any man that signs off on tax incentives for fuel for private jets and the writing off of carbon footprint for such is not green. No viable alternatives for anything, no reduction in our carbon footprint despite all the waffle, lying about our agricultural footprint throwing our farmers and food producers under a bus because they are a soft target while letting big corporations off the hook by giving them all our carbon credits from our grasslands, hedgegrows and forestry. Ireland is not one of the worst polluters as we are so often told to justify taxing the life out of us we just fall foul of the carbon credit rules that the large industrial countries set up to make themselves look far better than they really are, America, Germany France etc
@Nicholas McMurry: of course its true, if the government and greens in particular wanted to actually do something that wasn’t a punitive tax measure, it would be a shock.
Insulation is the most effective measure, yet they persist in making the retrofitting policy, part of the convoluted seai scheme which requires “trained” certified installers, when homeowners could, depending on their current skills learn to install it just as effectively themselves, by watching a few instructional videos, just like the “trained” installers did…
Subsidising insulation for domestic projects with a zero vat rate, would encourage more people to retrofit insulation to their homes themselves, reducing the amount of heating from all sources, along with particulate and carbon emissions across the board.
Better put the old age pension up. Where will all the food come from? More homes will be needed.
Anyone find those TRVs (main image) a complete waste of time?
I find that after a year the da*n thing is stuck on full heat. (I’ve checked the pin underneath and it seems to move freely) Was this just another way for the plumbers to make a few bucks :) ?
So, if we live in England or Wales and insulate our homes we could live for 836,000 years. I don’t want to live that long.
Why does an article in an Irish publication write about a foreign country without stipulating that it is a study done in that foreign country?
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