Here it is, a wonderful, wintry shot of McMurdo. Now you can get an idea of our size, all the buildings and a little layout of the place. You can see the hills behind us and to the left is the frozen ocean. That pipe leading to the lower left corner, that's our seawater intake so we can get seawater and make fresh water at the treatment plant.
Oh, and the golf ball at the top is some NASA stuff.
I know some of you wonder what I do down here, and sometimes I wonder that myself. As I’ve said to others, life down here in McMurdo makes me think I’m in the movie Groundhog Day! Seriously, for me I wake up, eat breakfast, head to the station, do whatever our Lieutenant has planned for us that day, eat dinner, and then have the night to ourselves. If I’m on duty I’ll spend the night here at the station and then wake up in the morning and head back to my dorm for my day off. That’s about it! Once in awhile when I’m at the station I’ll get lucky to have to do Dispatch, where I’m lucky enough to be the person who stays up all night and gets to answer the phone or deal with fire alarms through the night. Everyone loves that!!
Though it may seem like Groundhog Day it all goes pretty well and it’s pretty fun when it comes down to it.
In the next couple of photos you’ll see some of the stuff we have done here. The first ones you’ll see are when we had to empty the tanks in our engine so we could take it in to get worked on in the Vehicle Maintenance Shop. Nothing major crazy, but it was nice to shoot all the water out into the cold Antarctic air!
This is our driver/operator Rob getting things ready at the pump panel so we can discharge the water from our tanks.
Here we go!!! Engine 2 gets a little excited!!
Might be a little slippery when we get done?
That's our Lieutenant Bucher getting the discharge outlet set up with a nozzle so the water sprays farther out and cuz it looks cooler!
That's the other firefighter Grant in the background watching it all. He has his fire hood on to help keep himself a little warmer. Wus, and he says he's from Minnesota???
Warm water and cold air creates lots of steam right away.
The next photos you’ll see are when we had to get ready for a Confined Space Rescue possibility. They have a bunch of tanks here in McMurdo that are considered confined space, those with only one opening, not much area to move, etc. etc. In the past they really haven’t done much about when people would go in and do work inside these tanks, but this winter we have a new safety person so they are trying to keep things on the up and up, which means they needed to make sure the Fire Department was trained and ready for a Confined Space rescue if it was needed.
Getting ready for the drill. The tank we are dealing with is the large orange one to the left. It's about 3000 gallons and only has a small opening on the top. It's used to hold water for the sprinkler systems in the dorms.
Almost ready. The guy on the left if Lieutenant Dombrowski and he'll be our test victim going inside the tank.
And this is us up there getting our victim out of the tank. That's me on the far right and the guy who is our dummy is the Base engineer something or another.
For the most part everyone at the station has some confined space training with some more than others. In the photos you’ll see us going through an actual C.S. mock rescue so that all the “Head People” could see that we knew what we were doing and that we were ready for a rescue if needed.
It definitely was a little difference in our schedule and kind of fun to get all decked out in our safety gear and climb up on top of the tanks and pull people out of the tank like dummies. It didn’t last very long, but it was fun while it lasted!
So that’s what “Work Life” is like there in Antarctica. Now I know all of you are jealous and want to come rushing down here to work, but believe me, the hours are long, the work is tough, and sometimes it might be hard to get up when it’s still dark outside.
Enjoy and I’ll send some more soon!
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