MIDRATS

Even though this station has been under civilian management for at least 10 years, it's interesting to note how much of the lauguage on station still has a military feel to it. The kitchen/ dining hall for example is called "the galley" and the midnight meal for day-sleepers is called MIDRATS. (short for Midnight Rations) It might seem clever to call the people who work nights "Mid-Rats" but that name hasn't ever stuck.

Usually when I'm on shift in the power plant at night I'm alone. Since I can't leave the plant unattended to go get food from the galley it means I usually skip MIDRATS and microwave something I find in the power plant's top-loading "deer meat" freezer. The exception, of course, is if there is another operator hanging out in the power plant who can relieve me for a few minutes so I can go grab a plate of food.

Grabbing a plate of food has a different challange since the local scavenger gulls called Skuas have showed up. Since they don't have any natural preaditors in Antarctica and the Antarctic Treaty prevents us humans from "interfering" with them these birds have no fear. A couple of times I have walked within two feet of Skuas and they turn their head a little but don't otherwise move or make any indication that they might want to. Several times during the season there will be the remnants of food lying on the ground near the galley being pecked up by Skuas who have successfully scared someone into dropping it and running.

(Our "take it or leave it" recycling bins where people put useable things that would normally be sold at a garage sale are labeled "SKUA" in honor of these lovely birds)

I'm not working tonight so I'll be heading to MIDRATS in a few minutes. Only about 10% of the station works at night so I probably will pass the rest of the time tonight by doing "fun reading" or catching up on e-mails.

As a brief side note: lots of people down here keep blogs so they can keep people at home updated on life here. I'll start posting blogs of people I know in the "links" section on the right side of this page. (insert disclaimer about me not editing what they write on their own blogs here)

Christmas

It's Christmas here, at least I think it is.

The sun got to its highest point in the sky a couple of days ago so from now on it spirals back down toward the horizon. This means it's also about as warm as it's going to get. Most of the snow around station has melted but the temperature stays in the 20's to low 30's. The lack of snow doesn't make it feel that Christmasy around, especially considering how much of it I've seen in the past four months.

I'm working in the power plant the evening of the 24th and the 25th. Most people on station get Sunday and Monday off. I'm working both but I really don't mind. I was off last night so I got to go to the Saturday night Christmas party in the Heavy equipment shop. All the tools and equipment were moved out so there was a cavernous hall full of sleds and giant wooden snowflakes. One of the walls had pictures projected on it of people back home. It was a good time.

Just before I started this shift (at 6:30 pm on Sunday) I broke out the suit I had brought down to go to Christmas dinner. The galley did an awesome job making a overflowing table of desserts and an all around great meal. (there were even lobster tails flown in on the last flight)

Back in high school I had a job at a video store and as the new guy I had to work on Christmas. I remember thinking I would never want to work on Christmas again. Maybe it's because I know this is an important job to the 1100 people on station who use lights or maybe it's because I wouldn't be seeing my family even if I wasn't working but I don't feel bad about working on Christmas this year.

I did get a present while I was on shift tonight. Another penguin waddled off the ice and up to the edge of town so I could easily see him from the window of the power plant. I don't know why but they are obnoxiously cute.

The internets are a wonderful thing

Part of working nights in the power plant also means my time off is while most of the station is sleeping. Tonight I had volunteered for the late shift in the library from 8-10 pm. Having slept during most of the hours from 8am-6pm today I was still pretty awake when 10pm rolled around so I left the library open and started reading things on the internet. I did check out a few good books from the library but I probably will save reading those until I am on shift in the power plant "waiting for things to go wrong."

Things are certainly different from 100 years ago when clubbing seals or playing solitare (with cards) were good ways to pass the time.

Below are the results from a personality test I just took.The written description (below) seems surprizingly accurate. (at least in my own head)

You are an Inventor

Your imagination, self-reliance, openness to new things, and appreciation for utility combine to make you an INVENTOR.

You have the confidence to make your visions into reality, and you are willing to consider many alternatives to get that done.

The full spectrum of possibilities in the world intrigues you—you're not limited by pre-conceived notions of how things should be.

Problem-solving is a specialty of yours, owing to your persistence, curiosity, and understanding of how things work.

Your vision allows you to identify what's missing from a given situation, and your creativity allows you to fill in the gaps.

Your awareness of how things function gives you the ability to come up with new uses for common objects.

It is more interesting for you to pursue excitement than it is to get caught up in a routine.

Although understanding details is not difficult for you, you specialize in seeing the bigger picture and don't get caught up in specifics.

You tend to more proactive than reactive—you don't just wait for things to come to you.

You do your own thing when it comes to clothing, guided more by practical concerns than by other people's notions of style.

Generally, you believe that you control your life, and that external forces only play a limited role in determining what happens to you.

If you want to be different:

Try applying your creativity to more artistic arenas, and letting your imagination take less practical forms.

You are Benevolent

You are a great person to interact with—understanding, giving, and trusting—in a word, BENEVOLENT

You don't mind being in social situations, as you feel comfortable enough with people to be yourself.

Your caring nature goes beyond a basic concern: you take the time to understand the nuances of people's situations before passing any sort of judgment.

You're a good listener, and even better at offering advice.

You're concerned with others at both an individual and societal level—you sympathize with the plights of troubled groups, and you can care about people you've never met.

Considering many different perspectives is something at which you excel, and you appreciate that quality in others.

Other people's feelings are important to you, and you're good at mediating disputes.

Because of your understanding and patience, you tend to bring out the best in people.

You do your own thing when it comes to clothing, guided more by practical concerns than by other people's notions of style.

Generally, you believe that you control your life, and that external forces only play a limited role in determining what happens to you.

If you hold the mouse over the colors on this chart it will show you how I rate in certain areas from trust to feminity. Clicking the link at the bottom will let you take the test for yourself

Benevolent Inventor

Adam 2

I'm in hour 11 of my first 12 hour shift as the power plant Operator.

The power plant is staffed by at least one operator 24 hours per day to make sure the six diesel generators are well behaved and the lights stay on. During the day a mechanic and electrician are around doing maintenance but at night the operator is the only one here.

Six weeks ago one of the operators, called Adam 1, got sent to the Pole to replace a "toasty" mechanic that had been there for 15 months. His absence meant the station was one operator short. The electrician filled in for "a couple of weeks" and Adam 1 recommended me to take his place. Six weeks later the paperwork has gone though, my title has changed from General Assistant to Power Plant Technician.

Me putting generator #2 online, the syncroscope is over my right shoulder

As crazy as it may sound these old gens really are a lot of fun to play with. The control room is a big wall of switches and dials that look impressive. The generators themselves are geriatric. They're going on 30 years old with over 100,000 hours on their clocks so they need babying, including "diaper changes" to keep the oil off the floors. Getting them synchronized is done manually with luck, practice and a crazy-looking "syncroscope" made of two lights and a dial.

The control panels are the same sort of thing my dad used when was in college. There is no computer in the original system so everything is controlled by relays which makes a lot of satisfying clicks and clunks when things work properly.

The generators all have their own quirks and personalities with lots of fun little bugs and I can't stop smiling.

The generator room: generator #4 is being overhauled so it is in pieces,
the biggest piece of #4 is on the right. (click to enlarge)

The new power plant will be online in a year or so and give these old gens a rest but I'm glad to have the chance to work with them.

Green Up

It's been around freezing here for the past week. The sun gets highest in the sky at local noon so there is a little more solar energy during the "day" than at "night." The difference has been enough to melt some snow during the day and freeze over the tops of puddles at night.

The melting snow means there are several streams running through town. Luckily all the buildings are on stilts (for a number of reasons) so there hasn't been any flooding. It also means that the snow banks are disappearing and revealing the trash they covered during the winter.

I spent some time yesterday gathering the pieces of shipping crates that got hidden from the snowplow in the snow and picking up the construction debris that littered the road. The odd thing about picking up trash down here is that while there isn't snow on top about half of it is still frozen to the ground. So there is a lot still to pick up but I'll have to wait a couple of weeks for it all to warm up and come loose.

Fixin a hole

One of the things we did here before all the painting was to dig a hole for a "platform" foundation. It looks like a deck or a porch to me but it's made of steel so it needs a more macho name. :)


This platform replaces a temporary one that got put in over the winter. The door with the sign on it in the picture allows people to go into the new radiator room where extra heat from the new generators gets sent.

Pretty much the entire station is run off JP-8 jet fuel which is similar to diesel. All of the generators on station and heavy equipment are run with standard diesel engines that have been "derated" meaning they don't work quite as well or provide as much power as they would with normal diesel fuel. This is a trade off but with 60% of the fuel on station being used by aircraft it makes sense since only one type of fuel needs to be brought in on the yearly tanker ship.

So in the old power plant about 18% of the energy in each gallon of diesel is turned into electricity is turned into electricity and the rest becomes "waste" heat. This seems horrifically inefficient but it's pretty standard for diesel engines, especially diesel engines that were built the year my parents got married.
This "waste" heat isn't all wasted, however. The Glycol (antifreeze) that is pumped through the engines here dumps the waste heat into another giant loop of pipe which brings the heat around town to the dorms, the galley, and the work centers. By using this heat the buildings have to run their own boilers (like the one I cleaned last week) less and they save enough fuel to make installing the system cost-effective.

Our new power plant's engines have better controls and 28 years of better engineering in them so they are about 24% efficient. Waste heat is going to be collected from the engine coolant like in the old power plant but also from the exhaust which will mean that much more "waste" heat can be harnessed to heat the town.

So getting back to the picture. The radiator room has two large radiators not unlike the one in your car that will cool the engine coolant if there isn't demand for enough of it in town. During the winter all of the waste heat will go toward heating town but when we get into the "warmer" summer months all the heat from making the electricity on station will be more than enough to heat all the buildings hooked up to the waste heat loop.

Installing the platform meant we had to take out the old one. Which meant I was driving a pickle (forklift) to hold the old platform up while my fellow GA Matt used the cutting torch to cut through the supports.

For the next two weeks we dug a hole for the concrete footings that you see at the bottom of the picture. Digging holes here goes slowly because all the dirt is frozen into place so we had a big heater to melt the ice. We would set up the heater to run for a few hours then run outside and shovel as fast as we could before the dirt refroze. We could usually get up to six inches deep before we had to set the heater back up and reheat the ground. Finally a crane came in to drop the footings in and some welders put the new platform together. It's a lot of work considering nobody should need to go in the room when everything is working. But with the thawing and freezing of the ground around here we have to make sure the footings go deep enough to not shift the building.

Film Crews

There are no less than four film crews on station right now. Two are filming documentaries about living in Antarctica and two are reporters working on stories about climate change.

I've gotten used to walking around corners and staring into the lens of a camera but one of the reporters from MSNBC committed a bigger sin in the eyes of the McMurdo community a couple of days ago: he published a whiny article.

You would think this would make us feel proud, he described the hardships we have to go through to get here which should impress the people back home right? Well actually, he came off as whining about the little stuff and not realizing he was getting the chance to see one of the last frontiers on earth. Sure people lose luggage on airplane flights and there isn't a movie on the military transport but YOU'RE IN ANTARCTICA!

The article got printed out and left around the galley where many people read it and everyone talked about it. He has since apologized for writing while he was so grumpy but before his apology the other reporters' reaction was priceless. The two documentary crews have been here for a couple of weeks so people know who they and they were safe but the other crew of PBS reporters who came in on the same flight with the luggage-loser were looking very sheepish around the galley and could be heard saying "We're not them!"

I made a sign for the PBS guys that the camera man ended up wearing on his back which said in huge letters:


We're with PBS

NOT MSNBC

They were very thankful when I gave it to them. We are generally a friendly bunch down here who will go out of our way to help people when they need it. Most people here know, however, what we go through isn't anything compared to the explorers of the Heroic Age (1902-1922) and trying to impress people with stories of your "hardships" doesn't win you many friends here who are quietly working to get through just as many problems with equipment and bureaucracy so the science can continue. Publishing your troubles in a national news source is right out

The articles have gotten better and while they aren't totally accurate do give a reasonable idea of how life is down here so now I'll share the link to the article you've all been waiting for.

This is one response to the article published on Big Dead Place which is a site run by an old disgruntled employee who knows the cynical side of Antarctica. It's witty.

Chim Chiminey...

Me after I had scrubbed of a layer or two of soot

The Utilities Technician or UT shop needed help cleaning boilers this week so I got volunteered. It was actually a welcome change for me since I have spent all of the last few weeks in the new power plant. I came home covered in soot and looking like a coal miner or chimney sweep but I had fun seeing people's reactions.

The UTs are a fun group who do a good job of keeping the aging equipment on station running. The head of the shop is an amazingly nice guy who speaks with a thick Czech/Russian accent. His kind demeanor is even more impressive in light of his menacing tattoos and all the legends about him like his being drafted into the Soviet army to fight in Afghanistan and his escape to America.

After two days of cleaning boilers I spent a day working for "The Legend" checking furnaces in the huts out at the Ice Runway. (the ones I shoveled the snow out of two months ago) The ice runway can't support the weight of planes landing any more and all the huts are all being moved so I had to work fast.

While I was off cleaning boilers one of the painters got shocked by some half-installed electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. The painter managed to get herself off down from where she was working and is fine but it startled all of us who work down here. I had been painting around them a couple of days before and had been treating them as if they were live -which turned out to be a good thing- The whole project got shut down for a couple of days while there was a safety review going on. I don't know what is going to officially happen. There are a lot of what if's and should haves in everybody's mind. I'm less concerned about the fact that it could have been me and more angry at myself for not asking my boss to have an electrician come down and check the wires.

The painting has been a nightmare of working around all sorts of stuff. The construction schedule didn't allow for painting because "more critical" things needed to be put in to try and get the project done on time. Now that the plant didn't get done on schedule and the project's officially on hold there's time to paint AROUND everything. Half the time there hasn't been a good place to stand and I've had to squeeze myself into all sorts of odd positions.

I'm amazed that with all the safety training I've had to go through, with all the weekly safety meetings, with all the signs around that say "work safe" and even with a boss that is very approachable I got so focused on trying to get the @#%$ing painting done that I didn't think it was worth waiting a while to have a circuit checked. It bothers me that with all this emphasis on safety I didn't push back more and say the painting job was unsafe. I'm surprised by how much pressure I felt to get the job done when nobody was really putting any pressure on me. I guess I was just trying to be a good first-year GA.

Enough of that for now. It's a nice day out, the temperature's getting up toward freezing and the sun's really warm without that Ozone layer getting in the way. It's Sunday so I think I'm going to go enjoy my time off and play outside.