Busy day, Busy night

Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked. It's been 4 days since my last post.

No offense to those of you of the Catholic faith. I got 3 hours of sleep last night, and I'm a bit punchy.

But, you may ask, why only 3 hours of sleep? You were at Station 2, the slowest station in the whole world! And you would be correct. Except for yesterday.

Yesterday, we had 3 calls, and a penguin alert. The first 2 calls were nothing, one was an active spill that was so active, by the time we got toned out, it was done being active, and there was nothing we could do about it. The second was an automatic fire alarm at the LDB site (mentioned in my last post) that was caused by a bunch of scientists BBQing inside the shed. (Just goes to show that advanced degrees don't necessarily bestow common sense on anyone.) We got canceled from the auto alarm as well, but several of us tooled out there in a truck just to check things out.

The penguin alert came not long after dinner. Someone popped their head in the station and alerted us that there was a penguin down near the cargo line, at the end of town. Just hanging out there, she said. Some of us wandered down there to take a look anyway. Sadly, the little guy wasn't looking too good. Just laying in a tire rut looking worn out. He didn't even turn his head to look at the group of gawkers coming to stare at him and take pictures. His little eyes could barely stay open. Definitely not a well penguin. I didn't even take pictures of him. He seemed like he was dying, and it just seemed wrong to bother him. I stayed long enough to make sure no one really harassed him, and then everyone got bored and wandered back. This morning 2 of the big-wigs on station came to the station looking for a shovel. They had a plastic bag with them, and they took him somewhere for a proper burial or something. He died overnight, snuggled up against the cargo dunnage.

Early this morning, about 0130, I was woken up by people going in and out of the station. I hadn't been sleeping well anyway, and there was a lot of radio traffic (the radio was turned up pretty high). Seems that an LC-130 on it's way back from the Pole lost it's number 2 engine (as in it stopped working, not that it disappeared) and had to declare an in-flight emergency (known as an IFE).

Now, as has been explained to me several times by several different people, Hercs can take a lot of abuse and not crash, or break up on landing. Not only that, but the pilots have a check-list they use when something goes wrong, and many times this checklist says to 'declare an IFE.' With 4 engines, having one conk out on you isn't a huge deal...it really just makes the flight longer because that non-working prop creates a lot of drag on the plane. Considering that they declared the IFE about 3 hours from Willy Field, and it takes about 3.5 hours to fly from Pole on 4 engines, I'd have to say it wasn't that serious an issue for them.

So they called in as originally going to Pegasus, so Station 1 (in town) grabbed a crew and all the Renegade trucks from Station 2 and headed out to Pegasus. That left us with the giant crappy trucks that don't move more than 10 mph (if that).

Long story short (I know, too late), they ended up landing at Willy Field after all. It was very very strange to see the plane fly over with one prop not moving at all with the blades feathered (turned perpendicular to the wing to create less drag). It just didn't look right.

So, a bit of excitement in an otherwise boring time. Tomorrow I'm in town, Saturday I go to Pegasus for the flight (which will hopefully have some mail for me on it), Sunday when I cover for Jared I'm at Station 2, and Monday for my own shift I'm at 2 as well. Whee...

In other news, on Sunday we had to do a standby in the Power Plant. They have a huge set of generators and engines that they have been working on for years as a backup to the power and water plants. This is all so that they can take the water plant off-line this winter to do some work on it (I believe they are expanding the capacity). So lately they have been working on the fire system in the backup room, and installed some infrared sensors. They put shrouds over them so that they wouldn't be tripped by stuff like sunlight, but they wanted to test the shrouds to make sure they hadn't built them too restricting. To test this, they light a pan of diesel and gasoline in various places under and around the sensor to make sure it's working and isn't too sensitive or not sensitive enough. Because they're dealing with live-fire, they had to call the fire dept to come do a stand-by. So we rolled out there, had to gear up, pack up, stretch and charge a hoseline, AND stand inside with a fire extinguisher. All for a fire that was in a 1 ft by 1ft pan with about 4 inches of fuel in it (that would have gotten knocked over by the extinguisher, let alone the hoseline.

Still, it gave us something to do on a normally quiet Sunday.

Also, B shift finally has a captain again!!! Lt Bragg was promoted to captain yesterday. I doubt it'll make much difference now (only 6 weeks to go) but at least it gives our shift a voice again. Not that the other captain was throwing us under the bus, but there were some communication break-downs, and hopefully now there won't be.

And that's all for now. The ice breaker should be in tomorrow. Later today I'm braving the cold and extreme wind to walk down to Hut Point and see how far in they are.

So I leave you with this question we were pondering this morning on the way back to town. If it's so dry in Antarctica, and we get a fair number of storms, why is there no lightening? I plan to ask the meteorologists, as soon as I can find one...