The 15-year-old vessel, which was on an otherwise routine Cold War nuclear deterrence patrol in the North Atlantic 1,090 kilometres (680 mi) northeast of Bermuda, suffered an explosion and fire in a missile tube.

[2] Although Augusta was operating within the area, both the United States Navy and the commander of K-219, Captain Second Rank Igor Britanov, deny that a collision took place.

K-219 weapons officer Alexander Petrachkov attempted to deal with this by disengaging the hatch cover and venting the missile tube to the sea.

[7] An article in Undersea Warfare by Captain First Rank, Igor Kurdin, Russian Navy – K-219's previous XO (executive officer) – and Lieutenant Commander Wayne Grasdock, USN described the explosion occurrence as follows: At 0514, the BCh-2 officer and the hold machinist/engineer in compartment IV (the forward missile compartment) discovered water dripping from under the plug of missile tube No.

At 0532, brown clouds of oxidant began issuing from under the missile-tube plug, and the BCh-2 officer declared an accident alert in the compartment and reported the situation to the GKP (main control post).

[8] Up to 25 sailors were trapped in a sealed section, and it was only after a conference with his incident specialists that the Captain allowed the Chief Engineer to open the hatch and save the 25 lives.

When Preminin tried to reach his comrades on the other side of a door, the pressure difference prevented him from opening it, and he died of asphyxiation in the reactor compartment.

Before those orders could be carried out the flooding reached a point beyond recovery and on 6 October 1986 the K-219 sank to the bottom of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain[11] at a depth of about 6,000 m (18,000 ft).

[12][13] In 1997, the British BBC television film Hostile Waters, co-produced with HBO and starring Rutger Hauer, Martin Sheen, and Max von Sydow, was released in the United States by Warner Bros.

In 2001, Captain Britanov filed suit, claiming Warner Bros. did not seek or get his permission to use his story or his character, and that the film did not portray the events accurately and made him look incompetent.

[3] In a BBC interview recorded in February 2013, Admiral of the Fleet Vladimir Chernavin, the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy at the time of the K-219 incident, says the accident was caused by a malfunction in a missile tube, and makes no mention of a collision with an American submarine.