Condition 2

When I woke up this morning, most of the area was at least under Condition 2. Lots of wind, blowing snow, the whole 9 yards. We had enough time after shift change to go down and pick up one of the crash trucks to bring up to do weekly checks, but then the weather went south in a hurry. They canceled all the flights in and out of town. At one point, a few of us tried to go down to the Ice Runway to pick up the extra trucks that needed to be checked, but visibility was down to about 20 ft, so we had to turn back. It's a good thing we did. Evidently last year a couple of firefighters took a truck down there and visibility was down pretty low, but they kept going. They ended up having to start a SAR team to go pull them out of a snow drift (if you saw the snowdrifts down here you'd understand why they would have to call a SAR team.)

I took some pictures when we came back, but I haven't uploaded them yet. I also took a video but haven't gotten to that one yet either. At any rate, it was windy and snowy. Just before dinner we were able to go down to Station 2 to drop off the truck we had brought up in the morning, and the snow was drifted up against the buildings pretty high. I didn't get any pictures of that, unfortunately. It was still quite snowy down there. I'm told that when we have airfield ops, and there are C-130's or C-17's on the ground, we have to stay down there, even when they evacuate Ice Town. Supposedly there is an emergency food locker in the galley, but considering the galley in town hasn't gotten down there to really put food in there, I'm guessing there isn't much left down there, and what is there was left from last year.

So basically, we didn't do anything today. There was some training on extrication equipment and stuff, but other than that, nothing. We were really looking for something to do. I worked on memorizing the map of town (we have to pass a test of all the buildings and where and what they are). Basically a boring day.

Because we had so many people today, I got sent home again. For the record, being sent home isn't a bad thing. It's just that we have more people than beds, since Station 2 isn't really operational yet. They rotate us around as to who gets sent home. Tonight is my turn, since I stayed the last time.

So yeah. I'm going home, and then I'll upload pictures and put them up tomorrow or Wednesday. The only problem with being on for Station 2 and not going is that it'll be another week or so before I get to go again.