Week Marked by Mass Casualty Event

Wednesday, December 5 at two pm a fuel truck from Scott Base en route to McMurdo discovered a fuel leak. Following proper protocol, the driver pulled over to report and contain the leak. While waiting for the spill response team from both bases, a Williams Airfield Shuttle collided head on with the truck. The passenger in the kiwi fuel truck was thrown from the truck down a steep embankment and was critically injured. He later died at the scene.

The 11 passengers on the shuttle were ejected from the shuttle onto the side of the road, just a few feet from the embankment. Their injuries ranged from a few cuts and bruises to a severed hand, collapsed lung, broken arms and legs and one passenger was impaled on an iron rod that was stuck in the volcanic ash. Another victim died at the emergency room of head trauma.

Medical response teams were called into action and the fire station responded immediately. The fire station was set up as a temporary hospital to receive the injured. After evaluation, five victims of the mass casualty event were airlifted to Christchurch for emergency surgery and treatment. No other fatalities were reported. Names of the victims are being withheld pending notification of family members.

The emergency response staff practices and trains for such events weekly and also has a large team of volunteers trained to respond to such emergencies. All systems operated as planned and the drill was considered a success.


I volunteered to be impaled! I figured Id seen enough episodes of ER and other hospital shows to pull it off and when would I ever get a chance to act this way? I think I am ready for my TV audition now!

The day I volunteered for this was a beautiful sunny warm day. The day of the staged event was snowy and windy. I dressed in my ECW (emergency weather gear) to be outside for a while and was "thrown" out of the shuttle and landed on an iron rod on a slight sloping hill just a short distance from the very steep embankment were the dummy was thrown down the embankment for the rescuers and SAR (search and rescue) folks to practice.

I lay there and even got myself to cry, one does not get impaled and scream hysterically, I was impaled right below my right breast. If that had really happened I would have had a broken rib, probably a collapsed lung and an injured liver or gall bladder. Screaming would be too painful. We were driven out to the site between the bases in an airport shuttle where I was "prepped" with the iron rod held on by duct tape and painted with fake blood. That stuff stains so I procured old clothes from a skua dumpster. I never dreamed I would be dumpster diving in Antarctica, but can proudly say that I can add that to my list of oddball accomplishments.

I thought of the scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace where Prince Bolkanski is lying wounded on the battlefield at Borodino and is removed from the pain by looking at the clouds go by over head, wondering why he never noticed clouds before. I started babbling incoherently about where's Jim and am I going to die and take this thing out of me it hurts. When the response team got to me, I started to try to pull it out, they taped my hands to my chest. They put me on a back board and taped my head down. They got my hair stuck there too, that actually hurt. After strapping me in, they lifted me; I was sure I would get dumped, but we were supposed to let that happen to show that they did not strap me down correctly. It felt like I was going to get dumped over the steep embankment and end up really impaled at the bottom of the hill with the dead dummy!

They got me to the ambulance and on a gurney, then covered me with a super warm blanket and rolled me into the ambulance. One of them said "this one deserves and Oscar". Unfortunately there were no cameras rolling! After waiting for the next "victim" we were rushed to the temporary hospital where they put me in critical, over by the dead people corner. If that had been an actual emergency, I would have been x-rayed and knocked out for the 7 hour flight to New Zealand. There are 2 doctors on site and 4 nurses. There are also military medical staff here and a flight nurse and doctor. The duct tape really could not keep that rod up in the air. Near the end of the drill as the kiwi doctor was making his last rounds, he asked if I needed anything. Well I needed some viagra to keep my rod up! At that point I was declared "good to go". I'll say!

It was weird, as they were working on me at the site, all the dust and ashes were falling in my mouth and on my face. I was also getting hit with the occasional snowflakes. Being wrapped up in all the warm stuff made for a really hot experience and did little to quell my claustrophobia. But the fire station was filled with people I work with, eat with and talk to everyday. There was Lorraine the courier being my vitals recorder, and Roger and Rick (the guy with the tacks in his head for Halloween!) rolling the gurney into the fire station. This is a hellava way to get the afternoon off, but they are desperate for victims and people who volunteer for this get kudos and brownie points although towards what I have no idea. It might almost rate as a boondoggle as they are so few and far between. I needed an afternoon off as well!

(So what do you do on your afternoons off?)

Tomorrow, my day off, I am going with some folks out to the LDB site where they launch science high atmosphere balloons. The buildings there are the tallest on the continent, specially designed for the payloads of scientific equipment. If the weather is good, I will ski back in time to hit the arts and craft show. It's a pretty big thing here, there are lots of talented people who make some really nice stuff. It's one place you can spend some money, I have pretty much maxed out on the 23 items at the store.

Next week I will be joining the Christmas concert choir and doing an act in the Saturday Night Women's Soirée, a fundraiser for charities in New Zealand. My act will include, but not be limited to: singing, playing the tin whistle, telling MAPCON jokes (this is the massive DOS based data system that is the collective conscience of us all here) and a slide show behind me that will include strange pictures of things Antarctic. I figured hey at the bottom of the world who would ever know if I bomb? Turns out this is such a big thing that they make a DVD of it. Great. I will be forever immortalized making a fool of myself again. On another continent. Hey I have a reputation to uphold.


PS. Catch 22 of the week--this is true folks--the hair stylist has carpel tunnel and she only worked during regular work hours anyway which is when most people on station work so they had to take time off for a cut. They asked for volunteers, so I stepped up only to find that they have no scissors. I was told I could use the barbershop, but only during work hours with no scissors, but there is a shaver, so only people wanting their head shaved could get cuts, er rather shaved. I asked about after hours, but no, that's when they turn the barbershop into a massage parlor.

I have scissors on route, after which I will open my own side business and make money that way! I will do my part for Antarctic beautification, after all I have been cutting hair for some people for 30 years, haven't cut off an earlobe yet!

Getting to Summer? Traverse to the Pole and more!

It's getting close to summer now! The snow is melting and there are little rivulets everywhere. And the dust is getting stirred up. This is a dry place, this area on Ross Island is one of the few places that melts off big time under the hot summer sun. This is a very dusty and noisy place, it really resembles an ugly mining town that is constantly under construction and big tractors, weird looking tracked vehicles called Tuckers, cranes, piston bullies and deltas are everywhere. It's noisy all the time, sometimes even in that night. I stood by that rivulet and listened to the water babble down the rocks, trying to ignore all the other sounds. It was refreshing. Ah, the sounds of summer. I miss those chirping birdies though.

One of the rites of summer here is to move the ice runway that is out in front of my office, to other fields on snow and ice further up the sea on glaciers. I saw the last C17 come and go yesterday. It no sooner took off than the tractors and other vehicles wheeled in to move all the buildings of to the next place, Willy Field is about three or so miles and Pegasus runway which is primarily for the C17 is about 20 miles across the sea. These will be used for the next 5 months until the last flight out in April. That usually occurs late March but they are extending the season for a few folks as I mentioned before. The ice is expected to break up and it is rumored that whales are pretty close in this year, so I will be on the look-out for those, another sign of summer at the bottom of the earth.

The pictures I am sending this week are of the South Pole Traverse Group. One of the biggest tasks here is supplying the South Pole with food and fuel for the year. The regular practice was to fly 3,800 lbs of fuel on a C130 and the trip took 4,000 lbs of fuel, so it was always a big loss. Some other nations have figured out how to pull large quantities to their sites some time ago, but the US was a little behind the curve on this. This was tried years ago with only modest success. But 4 or 5 years ago they began construction of a 1,000 mile road to the pole. The biggest impediment is the unseen crevasses that form where glaciers interact with land and snow. Many people have died here falling into crevasses so it is a real and present danger.

Road construction is taking large bulldozers out behind a truck that moves very slowly with radar that picks up crevasses about 10 feet ahead of the lead truck. My friend Bill McCormick, a heavy vehicle operator, is driving the lead truck this year. After years of trial and error, someone designed these flexible plastic sleds with fuel bladders that can haul more than a C130. The whole expedition is hauling 1.2 million lbs of stuff, most of it fuel. They are supposedly "leak-proof" because a spill would mean a huge expensive clean-up and it would take a lot of people power to do that. Each year they have to re-check the route and refill any new crevasses. The going is slow and they left later than anticipated so they may not even make pole before they have to turn around, so I am not sure what they would do with the bladders. But they have a shot at making it by Christmas or New Years. The temps are warming at the pole, -23 today and expected to hit about 0 by late December. Here it is almost steady at about 30 for a high and 15 for a low. The variations are that the wind picks up from time to time and the clouds sock in.

This crew consists of 7 guys and a woman. They also pull their living quarters and a generator room with bathroom. They can take showers as long as they want, but first they have to shovel snow into the heater. The toilet has specially designed seats made of insulation as show below. The kitchen is fairly well stocked, but they have to do all their own cooking. Many of these size camps include a cook but not these guys. The tractors have a full around view and are heated, but it could get a bit monotonous out there. The landscape must be incredible though. Having been here for over a month I can say that getting out of town is the only was to really enjoy the beauty and magnificence of this strange continent. I am hoping for another boondoggle in the near future, lest I go nuts in the town here.

And now I am off on another ski trip. Last week we went out and found that the route that was snow covered year round just a few years ago is now largely rocks and ice. Global warming or human footprint? Hard to say, the jury is out on that one. But if it gets much warmer I think I have found the best place for the luxury condos and mall, it could be called Castle Rocks Height. Had a good Thanksgiving dinner and of course ate too much! I need that exercise today for sure!
Hope all is well, see that winter has set in there in Minnesota. Well I have to wear sunscreen and sunglasses at 1:30 am, and put aluminum foil over my window to keep the heat out of the room at night when the sun shines directly in my room!

Tootles,
Audrey

Stormy Weather

This week was marked by stormy weather, some really unusual stuff for the time of year. It wasn't too cold, rather it was balmy by the standards here, but the winds were wicked. It went to condition 2 here on station and condition 1 several times in outlying areas. This means the winds are exceeding 55 knots and visibility is extremely limited to 0. The wind chills can exceed -50. There were three low pressure systems that just hung off the station and caused winds like a hurricane with calm followed by blinding blowing and drifting snow. Very little new snow ever falls here, but the snow that is here just blows around and around. It was very misleading, one would dress for a regular windy, overcast day and two hours later there would be an all out blizzard, the kind that would shut down Minnesota for sure! Walking up the hill from the power plant where I work to the galley was tough.

A few days I bummed a ride in a pickup truck with some of the guys trying to get the new generators up and running. They are only 2-3 years behind schedule, and are hoping to achieve power up around Thanksgiving, and have the old generators off line by mid December. We will see. The snafu thing, it's a reality like no where else I have ever witnessed!

And I finally witnessed sublimation happening, when solids snow skips the water phase of evaporation and goes right to vapor or gas. The weather prevented planes from coming in, many lucky folks were stuck at Christchurch for a week. And there were the winter over Polies trying to get out of pole, they too were stuck. A C17 got in yesterday. The C17 lands, refuels, loads and leaves, turn around time is about 1 1/2 hours. My office overlooks the ice runway so I see all the action, the DC3, the Bassler and various helicopters plus the weirdest looking all terrain vehicles you can imagine, truly like something out of an old space movie. Most of the vehicles are at least 10 years and older. They have a shop that maintains them all, not too much extra cash around for such frivolities, much more important stuff to spend it on, like war. I think that’s one thing that really separates us from the kiwis. They take great national pride in their Antarctic program and research. Many Americans don’t even know where Antarctica is.

I took the tour of the Crary Science lab, a really cool science facility here, last week. Lots of cool stuff happening there. I heard much more about the volcanic activity of Erebus, the Andrill ice coring project and much more. I also got into the aquarium filled with tanks of seawater at 28 degrees and odd looking and feeling creatures. There are several divers here, and according to them there is a lot more life below the ice than above. At the aquarium folks can stick their hands in frigid water and hold some of the weird stuff. Can't grab the fish though, but they are so curious and almost blind, they swim to the surface and pop their heads right out of the tank. One actually bumped into my camera! The water is too cold to leave one's hand in for long, but the allure of the tactile experience, touching some of the strangest looking creatures on earth is too much to overcome. My hand stopped aching after about fifteen minutes.

Lots of folks walk out to Hut point, a place built by Scott in 1902. There is a dead seal there, has been there for over a hundred years. God forbid if it gets really warm here! Shackleton also used this structure. It is a pleasant and short walk. There are always things one comes upon. I found this "Biodiversity" garden planted (?) by researchers at the University of Minnesota. Looks like it's been a bad year for tomatoes! I should apply for a grant to plant a rock garden and see how it grows.

I tried like hell to get another room, I never really give up, even came close to moving, but missed by one point. There is a point system here and seniority is everything. So I am still in the closet with a view. But a real nice guy, Ken, a carpenter, does modifications to stuff , or rather add ons to things and is building a different support structure for the room so the beds can be arranged different thus allowing for more open space and better use of the miniscule berthing. The pay, a bottle of rum. He is the top carpenter here, it is worth it!

I have 4 packages on route, the folks on station are getting restless and want their mail and packages. Might lead to a mutiny some day! Rumor has it that because so many flights were cancelled, they will be flying in one and maybe 2 flights a day for the rest of the week so stuff will arrive soon. The natives are getting restless! The weather has cleared and it is much, much better. Everyone is getting excited about the prospect of fresh fruit called freshies. Maybe at Sunday brunch this morning!

Last night was Freak Train, or more aptly stated, desperate people at the bottom of the earth in search of entertainment. It was a lot of weird acts, having nothing what so ever to do with talent, of folks getting up and doing things like pulling small chains through their nose and up out of their throats. It was janitors reading poetry about cleaning up after slobs and some of it was quite graphic, so I won't even try to repeat it! I even got up and played the tin whistle. Had my fortune told by the foul mouth fortune teller; seems I am going to grow up and be a cheerleader.

Today Karen, Charlie and I are going out to the ice runway staging ground for the South Pole Traverse. We sat at dinner with a guy, Bill, who is an old mountain climber. He is driving the lead vehicle with the radar to find crevasses. This is an ambitious undertaking, they are trying to do away with flying fuel into the pole. This traverse has happened before but never at this level of payload. It's a fairly big thing here. More on that later. He’s personally invited us out to the ice runway for the complete tour.

It's another week coming up so I will try to find more interesting and odd things to send along to you all. Having my first official work station barbeque on Tuesday. I do miss my loved ones very much and I miss trees and seeing stars. I wear sunglasses at midnight, very odd.

Boondoogle to Cape Evans, pee before you leave!

Boondoggle here is a special trip or assignment outside of one's normal work to visit and witness cool and unusual things in order to build moral. I got my first one, a field trip to Cape Evans, the site of Scott's Antarctic headquarters. (FYI He died on the 1912 trip to the pole on his way. He was attempting to be the first there but missed by about a week, Amundsen from Norway beat him to it and then he (Scott,) and all his men perished in a blizzard on the way back to this hut. They died of starvation and exposure, his last entry into his diary was on March 12, 1912. ) Shackleton also used this site for 2 of his trips as well. Several folks wintered over here, I can't even imagine it.

We rode in the delta, an old Navy tracked vehicle, that is repaired with duct tape! Not exactly the comfort ride! It takes about 1 hour to get out there if one does not stop for any reason. They stop for wild life. And there was some.

As mentioned earlier, there is far more life under the ice than above. But there on the ice were ice slugs, Weddell seals that look like slugs. You can see one in the pix with me in it. They are pretty boring on the ice. The cool thing is to see them coming out of the seal holes, many of which have been bored by scientists to encourage them to come up and get tagged for study. I attended a talk on seal research here and in other places around the world. They were looking into the huge decline in the seal population a few years back. Under the water, they are far cooler to watch.

So after taking shots of that and of Mount Erebus, one of the most active volcanoes in the world and only 1 of three of that particular type, we climbed back in and rode on out to Cape Evans where Scott's Terra Nova hut is. It is run by the kiwis historical society and they were excavating and removing snow drifts from around the hut. It still smells like seal blubber, the main source of food and heat, yum. There was also an old bicycle there and a dead penguin on the table, desert anyone? The shelves are stocked with food presumably brought in about 1916. There were things like Heinz ketchup, anchovy paste, canned cheese and rhubarb. The shoes left here had wooden strips nailed to the bottom to increase traction. The4re were some room dividers but for the most part it was one large open room. They even had horses here at one point, the stable being attached to the living quarters. They also had dogs. In the 1990’s a new treaty was signed that forbid the bringing of any non native species to the continent, save humans. That was a very controversial thing, there are people who left and vowed to never come back because of that.

This boondoggle is not for the faint of heart tourist; once we leave McMurdo, there is no place to pee, never on the snow, it is a violation of the Antarctic treaty! There are some places it's allowed but not there. The kiwis live in camps and the human and hazardous waste is choppered out. In the delta we took to get there, driving on the sea ice about 7 feet thick and 500-800 feet deep under that, there was a plastic lidded bucket and it was rolling around. Someone picked it up and it said HUMAN WASTE. That was the toilet, no one wanted to use it or do that to the rest of us in the delta, there is no privacy so one just holds it. You should have seen the rush to the bathrooms when we returned! It was a 5 hour trip and it was worth it. When we started out it was actually hot, for Antarctica, +26 sunny and no wind. We all have to take all our special issued survival gear in case we were stuck out there. It is too damn much to wear, I would have been sweating profusely! So I wore my own clothes and carried my ECW. (extreme weather gear). Also got up really close to an Adelie penguin that had strayed from the colony. We are not allowed to touch or approach it, but we sat or stood very still and it came right over to us, it was about a foot away! They are the little penguins, about 2 ½ feet tall. Besides the skua, this was the first real wildlife I had seen up close.

This was a big week, I got out on my first ski trip from Scott Base to McMurdo with my new skis and it was great, the wind was at our backs. I got a tour of the South Pole Traverse set-up. They are dragging fuel to the Pole for the year on these giant plastic sleds with huge fuel bladders. To fly in the 130's it take 4,000 lbs of fuel to deliver 3500 lbs. This trip is semi historic for the US. Its the most that is being attempted to be pulled such a distance in such conditions by the USA. Others have already used this method to refuel and supply inland camps. It will take them about 45 days to get 1,000 miles. It's not quite that far but the road isn't a straight line. I got to befriend one of the guys going, Bill McCormick, who gave us a tour last Sunday before we went skiing. They have some pretty nice accommodations for such a trip which gets pulled on gigantic tractors. The lead tractor uses radar and sonar to find crevasses and the others fill in the crevasse to build the road as they go.

Also climbed Observation Hill for the first time. It rises up taller than the IDS tower and it was a crystal clear evening, at 9PM bright sun, very little wind. I could see open water 20 miles away. And I bowled a phenomenal 163 at the world’s most unique bowling alley!

In the continuing story of the Snafu/catch 22, an Airbus was to fly in from NZ today, but suddenly it was realized that there was no ramp to fit it. The jet may have landed, the door open and someone says, oh shit, we forgot the stairs. Yes they could use the slide but getting back in would be a bitch, especially with the survival gear everyone has to have in order to fly in here just in case. This is a test of feasibility to determine if it would be more cost affective to fly the humans down in a regular jet rather than the C- 17 as addendums to cargo.

Actually they may have figured on a staircase for the occasion, but there does look to be a possible Herbie (storms that move in from the southeast and carry drifting snow, the kind that kept hitting when I was first here, you know those first 2 weeks when the WC here was colder than the South Pole! ) It feels more like summer now, one can venture out without the tons of gear, thankfully.

This was a good week, I even got my broom closet room redesigned with the help of the head carpenter down here, for the price of a bottle of rum. For next week, the powers that be have decided that our Thanksgiving will be on Saturday to coincide with the weekend, thus we get off early on Friday, AND have Sat. and Sunday off. Tomorrow is the Andrill open house, the biggee research on coring down into the actual land, through the 2 miles of snow and ice to check out the distant past of the continent, the climatic shifts and geology. It appears there are many lakes, a rival perhaps to the 10,000 of Minnesota. After all this continent is bigger than all the of lower 48 by some piece. There should be lots of things here! It's just they're so hard to find. Would make ice fishing a real challenge!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Audrey in Antarctica

McMurdo Speak, Antarctic culture!?

As with every subculture (and this is one) there is a language that is unique to that subculture, and that is true of McMurdo Station. (i.e.: Mactown, town, station, base). When one arrives here for the first time it is almost as if a foreign language is being spoken. There are lots of acronyms and strange phraseology, "when did you PQ?, I just skuaed my boots, that's been retroed, did you get some freshies?, are you winfly or mainbody? oh she's a winter over polie", etc...Part of the arrival exhaustion/culture shock is due to this, and folks who have been here a while just think you know what it all means. After all, they do. So what does it mean?

Well, silly, if you PQed then you are physically qualified to deploy to Antarctica. Skua is actually a bird, a rather annoying one at that, and if one gets close enough it is said that they stink, they are the "pigeons" of Antartica! These become more prevalent as the season progresses and feed on penguin eggs and penguin chicks. They eat dead seals and penguins, and would eat dead people if they could. They are very aggressive and actually dive bomb people walking about outside with food. I actually saw a guy walk out of the galley with a sandwich and two were waiting on the roof of the door way. The guy was attacked from above. I couldn’t get my camera out of my pocket until after the birds moved in for the kill on the sandwich as seen above. (One always carries a camera lest great pictures are missed. One can achieve temporary fame by posting the most bizarre pictures on the I drive, the common drive) Skua are protected so no one can bat them away or take a swipe at them, and after all these years, they know they have the upper hand.

Skua is not a nice term. Things that people no longer want or have to dump when redeploying(leaving) to make the weight limitations and get left behind for other folks are skuaed; there is a small building filled with stuff like a free store in the states, it is skua central. I got here late mainbody, so all the good stuff that had been skuaed was gone, I did skua a shirt though. Ah, yes mainbody, that's when the big bunch of people arrive starting in early October and throughout the month. By end of October, mainbody is here. Windfly are the folks who arrive on the first flight into base mid-August. There is a sort of season hierarchy, at the top are winterovers, those souls who stay here through the Antarctic winter, something I KNOW I will not do! Windfly are next and the mainbodies, well we are just too common to be special. Polies are the people who stay at the South Pole, they are in a class of their own.

Freshies are not people who would get slapped on the face for being rude or crude or out of line, they are a really good thing, fresh fruit and veggies newly arrived on the C17 or the C130's. And it is a treat, although as long as I have been here, we've only had about a week of withdrawal from freshies. During the winter over, they go for a long time, no flights come in for about 6 months. This year that is rumored to be shortened to 4 months. They will be adding a new term, extended season. This is to accommodate ongoing research that will go into the first part of April.
Retroed? Stuff that is here and is considered too much to store or has outlived its usefulness is retroed back to New Zealand or the states. There is a whole department dedicated to reducing the human footprint on the continent. This place is so ugly and filled with stuff, they have a long way to go. Once something is retroed, it’s as good as gone. Some electrician needed some piece of equipment, two of which had been retroed, stuck in a milvan in the retro yard, but he was not allowed to break into the milvan and get the piece of equipment, he was told to order one and wait until in arrived either on ship in late January or, if he’s lucky, on the C17. After much back and forthing for weeks, he was allowed to get one out but not without all the bureaucratic paperwork and angst associated with such an unspeakable move. In a way we are all eventually retroed (or are we skuaed?). And a milvan? It’s a container the size of a small room (it is about the size of my prison cell, oops I mean room) There are many others words and phrases, but I am still in the learning phase, although I do not stare at people with that "I really have no idea what the hell you are talking about any more" look, I am learning McMurdo speak! Question: does that mean I am being assimilated? Let's not go there!

I have been bowling of late. I had my first cosmic bowl game, bowling under black lights with luminescent balls! There is one guy who's really into it and proudly wears the shirt reading "no split is too big if you have the balls". It too glows under the black lights. And they have human pinsetters. This is a really tough job, to do this a time or two a week is a rough workout good weight loss plan. Each pin weighs something over 2 lbs and then the balls are picked up, placed on the roll back gully and sent careening back at the bowlers. This can be a bit dangerous, the lanes are not super flat and the ball return is warped. Occasionally the ball hops off the return and comes back at you at a good speed. Then someone yells "incoming" and stops it with their foot if it doesn't bounce and take out a kneecap first. God, it's a harsh continent--to quote Robert Falcon Scott who knew how harsh it is, he died here in 1912 just a short distance from the food his party needed to survive.

The pin setters (seen above) wear special brightly stripped socks so the bowlers can see if they are still right behind the pins, don't want to send a 15lb ball rolling at top speed into their legs. After they pick up or set the pins they have to jump up on a ledge with their legs pulled up to keep from getting hit by flying pins or balls. These are the only human pin setter lanes known to exist in the world, all others are extinct. Brunswick offered to replace it for free, but it just won't be the same. A vestige of the past hangs on despite all odds. People sign up to do this for free, but we all leave them nice tips. There are only two lanes so this is considered a big deal to do.

Last week a couple of us took a stroll, just a wee Sunday walk. Nothing is wee about it here. I found myself walking on a ledge about a foot wide with vertical inclines up and down, down a long ways, like 200 feet. Walking is actually difficult, this place is all volcanic rock and ash, very slippery and it is way too easy to turn an ankle. This little walk was more like amateur rock climbing. I have acrophobia so the stomach turns easily. It is breathtakingly beautiful, the frozen sea, the mountains and islands all angular and harsh looking, majestic and bathed in every hue of blue. So I had to just get over it, stand there and take it all in. The half moon was rising over Observation Hill and the surface half way up this old volcano looks like Mars, it is reddish brown and black.

When the sun is out and the rocks are exposed, it is actually hot. I wear tons of sunscreen owing to the lack of ozone layer and the reflection, but I always come back with red cheeks. I am beginning to think it's the exertion of climbing up steep, slippery slopes and the almost always present wind. As I was praying that I didn't take a wrong step and slide down hundreds of feet over sharp rocks, over the hill comes an extreme biker! The path is not big enough for us to be on at the same time, we managed to let him pass and I just had to take his picture. I thought we had seen the worse of the path, but no it got steeper and smaller over the top of the next slope! I am always grateful for making it back alive with no sprains or breaks after my strolls!

Yesterday I thought it would be nice to go for a quick ski out the ice runway road. I went by myself. It was looking ominous to the south, where the worse weather seems to come from. It's not a big distance, maybe 3/4 of a mile one way and the roads are all lined with flags to guide one back to the base if the visibility should drop precipitously. I could see that a blizzard was coming, the sight lines are incredible on the ice. So I turned around and hightailed towards the shore. I got back just as it hit, high winds and blowing, blinding snow. Of course to get to my dorm I have to trudge uphill 200 feet on, you guessed, more volcanic ash and rock while hanging on to the skis in high winds. No lack of adventure when one is outside! By the time I returned to my room visibility had dropped to about 10 feet and the wc was -10 or so. That's not as bad as when I first arrived, but I wasn't really dressed for it, the winds howl and whistled around the buildings. The blowing snow subsided, but when I went to bed I tried to open the window a smidgeon, the wind caught it and it almost hit me in the head! Dorothy, this isn't Kansas any more!

Last Saturday at Gallagher's, one of the bars here, they had live music, and it was pretty good. Early on they had a reggae band which I missed, but then they moved into bluegrass. They were playing jugband music, and quite well. We all had a blast. After that there was another band, I had to wear earplugs and it gets so unbelievably hot, like a sauna! The walls actually drip with moisture- ah sweat, that's weird to see because it is so dry here. This band was good too and the dancing got crazy complete with mosh pit. I am just a bit too old for that, but I stood on the sidelines and took pictures. My friend Karen got in there (see above) and mixed it up with the best of 'em, she is a good deal younger than me and in far better shape, she works in FSTP a survival safety instructor (pronounced F-stop) and SAR, search and rescue (--just more McMurdo speak, don't mind me).

It is strange to be so far away from home on this upcoming Thanksgiving holiday but I am making lots of friends. I will be having the turkey dinner with all the makings on Saturday with lots of folks from the power, water and waste treatment plants, my co-workers. Our motto is--"we send you heat, light and clean water, all you send back is shit!" We will have a huge table and they have all the fixins'. They do try to make it special.

That's things, it's a long weekend for us, a rare thing. I plan to sleep, ski, eat and socialize. It will be fun! Hope you all had too much to eat and can be thankful for all the good things we have in life. Until next time,

Good wishes,
Audrey

SNAFU a go-go!

November 4, 2007
SNAFU
Yes that’s right folks, situation normal all fucked up. And here on the frozen end of the world one would like to think that things would be run a bit more efficiently, but add the government or this contractor to the operation and one gets a ridiculous, bordering on the insane methodology of dealing with small problems. Safety is the number one thing we are told repeatedly as getting injured badly requires a medivac trip to New Zealand, a 7 hour flight on the C130. One wants to then assume that safety is the first priority, but I have found several things that could not be done correctly due to lack of parts, small parts, equipment and tools. I have also "stumbled" upon safety irregularities but to report stuff seems to be put on the hot spot, one person likened the experience as being under some sort of criminal scrutiny. Rumor has it that one gets to do this reporting and filling out of endless paperwork on your time off. Since there is little of that, one day off a week, lots goes unreported.

Case in point, there is this out of compliance ladder to a trap door in a building and there was a work order to replace the ladder with an aluminum one. My friend spent the entire morning getting the materials together to fix it and at lunch found out he needed a different kind of order, which had been issued, but not marked on the order. So after lunch he found the real order and looked at the job, but to use what is on site would require the trap door to be removed and a railing put around the opening to make it "safe". But that is not what’s in the order. Now the whole thing has to wait for approval on high, a job that could have been done in one or two days is now going to take 4 or five weeks, and that’s if any parts needed can get flown in or come on the ship that arrives in February. If it comes on the 09 ship then it will get fixed some time in 09. Meanwhile, the thing remains "unsafe". Yes your tax dollars at work folks! My dear brother in law, I think of you and your work in improving efficiency. I can see why you would not want to deal with government operations, it isn’t about fixing the problems, it’s about creating work for the minions!

So in my first week, they medivaced out 2 or 3 folks. The first was a young lady who was issued a ladder for her bunk bed, but they had no bolts on site. This is a safety issue if ever there was one. She was alone in her shared room climbing in the bunk Saturday night, rather early as she was on an early shift and the ladder fell off. She fell and hit her head on a desk and was found unconscious on the floor. No one knew how long she was there. Word has it that she has a severe case of amnesia and is still in the hospital in Christchurch. Another guy cut of a chunk of his hand on a table saw. Rumor has it that a third was shipped in from Pole who was really sick and needed hospitalization. That’s just the first week. They say that the worse time for this stuff is in January. We’ll see.

One would think it might be too cold for viruses. Not so, the flu was going around big time. I got a shot and have been ok so far, but when it hits, one goes into quarantine. That means one is stuck in the room and food is brought in. I am not sure if that means the roomie is also, but my room resembles a Siberian prison cell with a view (except it is warm, unlike the common bathroom). I would loose it for sure! We had an interesting weather day yesterday; with the wind chill it was colder than Pole, -18, wc -49. Yeah. Walking was interesting. Not too bad with the wind at one’s back, but I work at the bottom of a hill and the wind was in my face. I bummed rides from workers in trucks so it worked out. Today is better and I think at -5 wc -20..

Took my first trip to the kiwi base 2 miles away. This is very rocky, hilly, volcanic terrain. Took a shuttle as it was damn windy then too although the walk is a pleasant one over, coming back is mostly uphill. Anyway I was struck by how well thought out and organized the kiwis are. The bar is a bit too pristine; at least the bars at McMurdo have some character to them. But Scott Base is very well built. One gets around almost the entire base without going outside under difficult weather conditions. This was figured out a long time ago in Minnesota and other places, they are called malls and skyways! Anyway this is the perfect place to practice for colonization for life on other planets and the moon. That’s what is happening at Pole.

McMurdo started out as a temporary military outpost and it seems like someone threw some stones up in the air, where they landed was where stuff got built. It’s not unlike old Boston that was built around the cow trails. There are some really nice modern buildings; they are all about the science which is the reason for being her in the first place. There are about 200 scientists here doing work. So the question is how many worker bees does it take to replace a light bulb for one scientist and other equations of that variation. Apparently a lot. You do the math. There are about 1,000 people here in station. At my first all hands meeting we were informed that accidents have been reduced and things are running more "efficiently". Yikes.

The bar scene is pretty wild and crazy. My favorite is the coffee house and wine bar; it reminds me of the dome, that’s Deer Lake Charlie’s in northern Minnesota. It was the old navy officers club. Gallagher’s is where they have most of the wild bands, (yes improv bands, not organized long time bands, they do a pretty good job.) Last night was 70 and 80’s night. And it gets very hot and sweaty and very crowded. They close at 11 on work nights, 1 on Saturday nights. The Southern reminds me of the Neighborhood Tavern, Effie, MN in atmosphere. Have yet to get to the corner bar, can’t do everything in the first week. But at least I made it though. The food is pretty good, they get freshies (fresh fruit) in on every flight and there are 2-3 in each week not including the returns on the medivacs.

Gone South for the Winter

Technically I am not an "empty nester", my 2 adult children are currently living at home. I am no longer feeling the need to chaperon, chauffeur, cook and clean (the 4 C's as I call it). If fifty is the new thirty, then I am ready to go! I have decided to see as much of the planet as I can afford. I started with the hardest place, Antarctica. I got a job at McMurdo Station on Ross Island.

People say what was it like? Big, white, far away, like being on another planet. Parts were fabulous, parts were horrible. I met the greatest people there, all with a stories of their own. I wrote to many people each week with a different theme. I was asked to publish some of them and so here it is. The above picture of me was taken on a trip to Cape Evans. We rode in a delta and that thing over my shoulder is an ice slug, a Weddell seal. Here's my first communique:

Greetings from the bottom of the Earth

Hello to all, what an experience getting here! I had window seats for the entire trip with the exception of the C17 military transport to McMurdo. I flew right over the fires in California. They were very bright at the nighttime take off from LAX. I got an entire row to myself on the trip to New Zealand, so I got a good night's rest for being on a plane! I am still adjusting to the time though but I think it was an easier transition than going east to Europe or Africa.

New Zealand is great, in the height of spring and all flowers and gardens were in their finest. It smelled good too. The houses are all neat and tidy, no slums to speak of and the streets of Christchurch are very clean. They do drive on the opposite side of the road from the US so it takes a bit to get used to crossing streets. Had only a short time there, the Y is a nice place to stay. We flew out on the 26th to the ice. Flying in the C17 was neat, but weird not to be able to see or have a sense of where one is on take of and landing. The flight was over a lot of ocean, I have included what it looked like flying over the continent. Antarctica is larger than the lower 48 in the USA. There are lots of mountains and glaciers easily visible from the C17. Landed on the sea ice where the ice is about 7 feet thick, obviously enough to hold the weight of the enormous plane.

The day I landed was the nicest one they've had down here for some time, it was a balmy 1 above and no wind. I traveled south with lots of "polies", folks shipping out to Pole. They are still here in town (McMurdo), so it's pretty crowded. Speaking of crowded, my room is a glorified broom closet, albeit one with a great view of Mt. Discovery, one of the three largest mountains in the area. It's pretty warm in the all the buildings. The food is not too bad, although the milk is made (pretty well) from powder. All the buildings have the equivalent to an air lock, much like being in space or what living on another planet might be like.

Last night was the first of what I am told are many big parties. It was the annual Halloween party, and it was jammed packed. They get pretty creative with the costumes! As it got hotter and hotter with the wild dancing in the old gymnasium (which was dark except for the special lighting), when ever anyone opened the doors, bright light would spill in as well as huge amounts of condensation and the effect was to make the whole place become enveloped in fog, like dry ice effects on a very large scale. Just about everyone has those red coats called big red, locating yours own is interesting. Hundreds are hung or thrown on the floor and they are almost identical. Everyone has their name on a Velcro strip so that you know who is who outside and which one is yours inside. Really have to remember exactly where you dropped it. I did lose a mitten though, I will try to retrieve it later today. Sunglasses are required at all times outside, even at 3 AM.

I have an office to myself, and it's bigger than my room, overlooks all the action out on the runway and later in the season, the dock for the icebreakers and, fuel ship and freighter. I thought maybe I'd move in there! There is lots to do, I am helping with the conversion of the power, water and waste water treatment plants to a new system of accounting for time worked, work orders and maintenance schedules. Its the life link for the base, if the power goes out, we are screwed! I am getting a hepatitis vaccine to work there although I will not be doing anything with the plant contents.

I also hope to be taking a winter survival course way out on the bay, which is frozen to a depth of 20 feet. I will have to sleep outside and learn to survive on the survival kit all are issued when leaving the base in any vehicle. I am hoping to put it off a long as possible so that it will be warmer. It's really the wind that gets one here. I will sleep in either a tent or an igloo that I will build. My "travel mate" Karen who I met in Denver is one of the survival instructors. She is an experienced mountain climber and instructor who works at Denali in Alaska. We've hit it off pretty well.

There is lots to do here, 3 or 4 bars, workout places, movies, a library, a store, where I already spent money, a funky bowling alley with humans as pin setters like in the old 'n timey days, and as I have yet to discover, outside activities. I hope to get out for a hike today, it is sunny, but too windy for skiing at the moment. it's 2, wc -35, spring weather for sure! Lots damn colder at Pole, like -65. Sun is up all the time, there are dark covers for the windows, it’s an adjustment.

It’s been kind of hard to get on the sleep schedule when it is light all the time, they provide a shade for the window but it really is not enough to stop the light. The sun is directly outside the window and it gets hot! I brought a fan with me, I am a fan addict and the white noise is good. The walls in this building are thin as paper, and I am definitely the oldest woman in the building. I share a bathroom with 22 other young women, 2 sinks, 2 stalls, 2 showers. Interesting. Privacy is fleeting at best. Modesty is highly overrated!

What a different world!

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