Submarine recovery A consortium formed by the Dutch companies Mammoet and Smit International was awarded a contract by Russia to raise the vessel, excluding the bow. They modified the barge Giant 4 which raised Kursk and recovered the remains of the sailors. During salvage operations in 2001, the team first cut the bow off the hull using a tungsten carbide-studded cable. As this tool had the potential to cause sparks which could ignite remaining pockets of reactive gases, such as hydrogen, the operation was executed with care. Most of the bow was abandoned and the rest of the vessel was towed to Severomorsk and placed in a floating dry dock for analysis. The remains of Kursks reactor compartment were towed to Sayda Bay on Russia's northern Kola Peninsula, where more than 50 reactor compartments were afloat at pier points, after a shipyard had removed all the fuel from the boat in early 2003. Some torpedo and torpedo tube fragments from the bow were recovered and the rest was destroyed by explosives in 2002. Official inquiry results Notwithstanding the navy's oft-stated position that a collision with a foreign vessel had triggered the event, a report issued by the government attributed the disaster to a torpedo explosion caused when high-test peroxide (HTP), a form of highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide, leaked from a faulty weld in the torpedo's casing. The report found that the initial explosion destroyed the torpedo room compartment and killed everyone in the first compartment. The blast entered the second and perhaps the third and fourth compartments through an air conditioning vent. All of the 36 men in the command post located in the second compartment were immediately incapacitated by the blast wave and possibly killed. The first explosion caused a fire that raised the temperature of the compartment to more than . The heat caused the warheads of between five and seven additional torpedoes to detonate, creating an explosion equivalent to 2–3 tons of TNT that measured 4.2 on the Richter magnitude scale on seismographs across Europe and was detected as far away as Alaska. Alternative explanation Vice-Admiral Valery Ryazantsev differed with the government's official conclusion. He cited inadequate training, poor maintenance, and incomplete inspections that caused the crew to mishandle the weapon. During the examination of the wrecked sub, investigators recovered a partially burned copy of the safety instructions for loading HTP torpedoes, but the instructions were for