A time to volunteer

The last couple of days have seen me doing a lot of volunteering. I'm writing this post from the librarian's desk since I'm just about to finish up my 8-10pm shift in the library. Before that I was helping to scrub pots in the galley from 6-8 and yesterday I was giving a tour of one of the historic huts about 1.5 hours away from the station.

Many of the part-time positions that keep the station recreation department running are paid: bartending, pin setting at the bowling alley, flipping burgers, checking out gear like skis. Some of the more relaxing/interesting duties like keeping the Library in order and being a tour guide are strictly on a volunteer basis. Time in the library keeps me reading and guiding tours helps me scratch my itch for history.

Volunteering in the galley is neither relaxing nor lucrative but the Dining Assistants (DA's) need as much help as they can get. The DA's and Janitors make the least of anybody on station and don't get any overtime for working a 54-hour week. As a General Assistant I'm on the same pay grade but I do get outside occasionally and change jobs from time to time which are both plusses. A large number of the DA's have advanced degrees in humanities fields since they don't have many practical construction or longistical support skills. DA's GA's and Janitors often will be promoted into other jobs in following years that nearly double their salaries.

Despite the usual drudgery scrubbing pots in the galley the DA's are also shorthanded right now. The weather at the South Pole has kept flights from going there for over a week which means there are a bunch of "Polies" taking up beds here that are meant for more relif DA's. Since I live near most of the DA's in FNG (New Guy) housing and have been hearing about the problems goign on I volunteered with my room mate Sean to scrub pots, which is fun when you know you won't have to do it again tomorrow.

In other news, the weather is getting warmer. (high of 4F today) and last week I did a 2 mile hike over to the New Zealand base to visit for "American Night." The person I walked over with handed me a drink as we left McMurdo and it was frozen solid after about 10 minutes of walking.

Where has all the paint gone?

After fruitless searching for paint yesterday we spent the morning in a warehouse that reminded me of the last scene from "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The DOS based inventory software was designed before the Berlin Wall fell and was never intended to keep track of a large project with supplies spread through 50 odd shipping containers and 4 storage buildings. After being fed up with the computer's lies and runarounds Matt (the other general assistant) and I decide left the power plant with a pickup truck and some tin snips to start opening boxes.

It took us a surprizingly short amount of time to find the paint. Luckily the Department of Transportation requires boxes filled with paint and paint thinner be labeled as such to warn firefighters if a truck carrying them gets into an accident. We started by opening anything that said "Paint Inside" and after a couple of hours had found everythign we needed.

This of course left us with a small problem. We had been budgeted the entire day to find the paint and we had it found, loaded in the truck and unloaded at the power plant by 10am coffee break. Our new boss is an easy-going guy in his late 20's but he's getting a little sick of us finishing stuff in 1/4 the anticipated time. He was happy to hear we found the phantom paint and told us he didn't have anything other than dusting for us to do for the rest of the morning.

We took a little detour on the way back to dusting. Matt had SKUAed a cable so we can now plug our iPods into the DeWalt jobsite radio and listen to music while we clean. While we are dusting, however, there is no safe surface to put the radio on. Solution: use Unistrut racks for hanging electrical panels to hang the radio on the wall. Which is exactly what we did.

I'm off to do some data processing for the digital controls this afternoon. Lots of moving numbers around on a spreadsheet but the winds are gusting to 30 MPH today so at least I'm inside for the time being.

Little things

A not so little generator.

Things changed a couple of weeks ago with the departure of the winter crew. The most noticable in the powerplant upgrade project is that nobody is there anymore. Our new boss came in a couple of weeks ago and while he is getting up to speed he doesn't have a lot of projects for me or the other general assistant to work on. We finished the clean-up from the winter in the first week (it was supposed to take a lot longer) and installed most of the trim on the roof that was left to be done. The painters aren't ready to start painting the floor and structural steel yet so we have pretty much been dusting and sweeping...all week. We're getting to the point that a wild goose chase all over station for a bucket of paint is exciting. (rather pathetic)

The new powerplant will have two 16-cylinder Caterpillar generators which turn at 1800RPM and put out about 2.4 MegaWatts of electricity each. I got a very good appreciation for the size of these things when I was assigned the task of dusting them. (that was a big pile of rags)

The floor in the powerplant is never clean. Nobody walks into our section except the two of us but we can sweep all day and the floor still looks dirty. We have a 5 gallon bucket that we are starting to fill up with all the sweepings to prove that it will be dust-filled by the end of the season. Feeling like some greek tragedy character destined to roll a stone up a hill forever I decided to bring my past experience to bear on this sweeping/dusting problem. iRobot has released a robotic shop vac so I ordered one that's on its way down. Hopefully I will have a present by Christmas time.

While work isn't progressing very quickly my time at the gym is showing results. When I weighed myself yesterday I had lost 9 pounds since arriving here working out to a little more than a pound per week. That puts me at 19 lbs (or 9%) less than my weight at graduation. My Carheart work pants aren't fitting very well anymore and I will probably have to trade them in for a smaller pair soon. Another few months of this and I will be in better shape than when I was playing football in high school.

Remember to close the door behind you

One of the linemen went home early with an ankle injury so I spent today helping the one remaining lineman on station get the power lines up for the NY Air National Guard buildings out by the airport.

This, of course, meant I was back out on the sea ice today. The high winds out on the ice blew up snow in a haze that made it hard to see farther than a few hundred yards around but when we looked up we could see blue sky. At one point the sun lit up all the airborne snow and the entire sky was gold. With my amber sungoggles on the white sky over and piles of snow made by bulldozers looked reddish like pictures from Mars.

When the lineman was getting ready to connect the last cable he had me go into all of the buildings and make sure the breakers were all off. Simple enough task. Simple, that is, if there hadn't been a blizzard last week that blew fine particles of snow through any crack in the buildings.

One building had its entryway completely filled with snow through a crack above the door. To get in I had to throw all my weight against the door several times, stick a pry-bar in between the door and its jamb and then scoop out the snow from behind it a spoonfull at a time. (I keep a spoon sticking out of my parka's sleeve pocket so I can tell which Big Red parka is mine on the coat racks) In all I spent two hours opening the door and cleaning out the snow from inside.

After that I found another building with a huge pile of snow in front of the breaker panel. Foutunately that one had a back door and I could climb around the snow to get to the breaker. (Picture above)

Happy Camper School

The weather was bad on Wednesday and Thursday’s forecast had called for bad conditions so the flight schedule was pushed back 48 hours. Luckily for me this meant a lot of people didn’t come in on time and there was a free slot in the Friday-Saturday Snow Survival (aka Happy Camper) School.

Since class only started at 9am I got to sleep in a little on Friday. Sleep was a good thing since I had been out late Thursday playing shuffleboard in the smoking bar with my winter-over friends who were about to fly home. The morning was mostly classroom sessions talking about hypothermia and keeping warm in general. Most people don’t realize hypothermia most commonly kills when the weather is 50 degrees and raining.

After class we got to the fun stuff. The 36-ton Nodwell tracked vehicle is out of commission after it’s “incident” at Happy Camper School last week so we used three Piston Bullies to get out to camp on the ice shelf. The weather was spectacularly clear and after a brief introduction to the mountain ranges we could see we were making camp.

There were two kinds of tents used at happy camper. One called the Scott Tent has been used in the Antarctic since the “heroic age” in the 1900’s. The others were basic four season mountain tents very similar to what I use backpacking in Vermont. The Scott Tent weighs nearly 80 lbs, has double layered walls and thick metal tubes to make a pyramid shape. It’s designed to hold up in 80+ mile-per-hour winds, sets up fast and can squeeze in 10 people if the weather gets to condition 1. (it only sleeps four) You can stand up in a Scott Tent and the cotton walls breathe well enough to cook over a coleman stove with the door closed. Double layered cotton keeps it warm but would be useless in the rain. Luckily it never rains here.

The mountain tents weighed only about 10-15 lbs so even with extra tie-downs they can’t take as much wind. To keep them from blowing over we built a wall out of ice blocks as a wind break. We cut the blocks into the ground with hand saws and then wedged them out with shovels. We did a really good job considering the ice was either too soft to stay together or too hard to saw most of the time. Some of us put a lot of effort into sawing. Some of the people I was with seemed to have super-human endurance.

After some wall building I volunteered for cooking duty so I stayed up late and made sure everyone got fed. The side benefit was I got to stay in the Scot Tent with the stove running and stay comfortably warm. The low humidity meant vapor from the boiling water was everywhere and the kitchen felt more like a sauna. People were glad to come in and warm up before spending a night on ice 600 feet thick.

The next morning the piston bullies we had kept nearby had a dead starter so we pulled a lot of our gear back to the instructor hut by sled. After that we had some radio training where we learned how to use an HF radio “designed to be used by an 18 year-old marine in the jungle of Vietnam.” They take a bit to put together but they are bomb-proof and work long range. I was on the radio when we managed to get through to the South Pole Station. It’s odd though, when you have South Pole on the phone what are you supposed to ask? I managed to find out the guy there enjoyed the cereal he had that day for breakfast and it was -85F and clear outside.

Class finished up around 1 on Saturday and my boss gave me the rest of the day off. I changed out of my Extreme Cold Weather (ECW) gear and started my laundry before running into Etosha in the hall. Etosha and I had graduated from Olin together back in May and she had come in on the latest flight while I was out on the ice. Now we officially have 2 of 66 Olin Graduates in Antarctica.

Official Summer

Yesterday afternoon the wheels of the first summer flight touched on the new Ice Runway and summer season officially began on station. The weather was beautiful and clear while the plane was landing. Four hours after it took back off we were in a condition 2 blizzard. McMurdo Station has three runways. The Ice Runway was built over the past six weeks by a crew that came in with me during WINFLY. (Winter Flights) The Ice Runway is for wheeled aircraft to use from October until November when the ice melts. At that point all of the wheeled aircraft (and all the lights and the control tower) are moved out to Pegasus Field. Pegasus (where I flew in) is on glacial ice that never melts but it’s an hour drive from the station.
The third runway is called Williams (Willie) Field and it is a "skiway" for the planes with skis that fly in and out of South Pole station. South pole can't support aircraft with wheels because the heavy equipment needed to build a hard-surface runway don’t fit into the planes with skis on them. Last winter, however, a convoy of Caterpillar tractors made a round trip between pole and McMurdo. This was the first "overland traverse" to ever make it back to McMurdo: the last attempt was Capt. R.F. Scott back in 1912 whose party froze/starved on the way back. With traverses running the needed equipment could drive to Pole and there may be a hard-surface runway for wheeled aircraft in the near future.

Combine a hard-surface runway at Pole with the new C-17's that can make it all the way from New Zealand to Pole and back to New Zealand without refueling and McMurdo may have a lot less air traffic in the future. (One of the favorite pass-times at McMurdo is speculation and rumors, this is a good example) For the moment it’s a little exciting to see 125 new people on station, though it’s getting harder to find a seat in the galley at dinner time. The winter-overs are much more excited by the prospect of going home than by new faces. I'll be excited when the plane comes in with 8000lbs of "freshies" I don't think I've ever been this excited by fresh fruit and salid in my life.

Note: The picture is from a friend who was out on the sea ice during the landing. I was technically “at work” so I couldn’t stray too far from the power plant.

Antarctica on video

A Kiwi who works in the IT group here at McMurdo took a bunch of time lapse videos over the course of a year here. There's some pretty cool shots involving frost and some everyday type stuff. The video can be seen online at youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TemK6CF6lF0

This and that

Things are getting exciting here on station. Tomorrow the first flight of the summer comes in. There haven't been any flights in or out for the last six weeks while the summer runway has been built out on the sea ice so we have gotten used to the same 390 faces around. Tomorrow's flight brings in 125 new people and takes about 25 of the winter-overs off the ice. Most of the winter-overs are ready to head home or travel for a while. All of the 100 or so winter-overs still on station have been on station since at least February some for a year or more. By the end of the five flights this week we will have 500 new people on station. Even with a large number of the winter-overs leaving the population here in MacTown will double by Friday.

The weather has been clear and the sun has been out for four days now. After a week of blizzards last week I'm not sure what to do with myself.

The days are getting longer here too. Last night I walked out of the windowless library at 9:30pm to see the sun about to set. Someone at lunch told me they saw it at 3:30 this morning. Last weekend was also the start of New Zealand Summer time so we all "sprang forward" our clocks. The station manager had given us two hours off on Saturday afternoon to give us all a rest before the flights come in and to make up for the hour of sleep we were going to miss. It was much appreciated and I celebrated with a nap before my evening work-out.

Working out has been going well for me. I've taken off a couple of pounds since I started and my over-sized work pants are getting obnoxiously large. Hopefully I'll still be able to find a spot in the gerbal gym when the main crew gets here.

Last week we all got a jolt when there was a vehicle crash just off station. One of the big, old tracked vehicles was carrying 14 people back from a survival excercize and lost its power and brakes before rolling off the road and down a 60 foot cliff. Luckily an empty fuel pipeline kept it from falling down a bigger hill and rolling onto the sea ice. Nobody was majorly injured: one sprained ankle a strained back and a few bruses were all that came of something that could (some say should) have been much worse. I heard about the accident but didn't get any news about my roommate sean who I knew had been on board until dinner that night. It made for a very tense afternoon. The day before I had been trained as an emergency medical tech for large accidents and I was glad we didn't have to be called out with the stretchers and triage tags. The whole "incident" brings home the fact that this is a dangerous continent that puts a lot of strain on people and equipment. All the crosses around that are memorials to dead explorers are a little more chilling now.

It's the end of lunch now so I'm heading back down to work. Most of the winter-over tradesmen down there are leaving on Friday and the rest head out next week. The project is officially on hold aside from some small jobs for me to work on over the summer so it's going to be a big change from the last six weeks.