December 14-15, 2010... Happy Campers

Finally I got some peaceful time to write more. This post is probably going to be a little bigger because by far what I am going to update you with is the highlight of our stay.

On Tuesday December 14, 18 people including three of us gathered for a Field Safety Training Program (FSTP). They call it "happy campers" here for either because some people do get happy at the end of the camping or the training is so excruciating that they try to make you feel good by giving this program a happier name... :P Well, for me to start with it was not so happy experience but later it was.. :)

We were on a very tight schedule from the minute the program started. We first had a classroom training on risk management as camping on the ice in the middle of no where involves great risk. Negligence or poor handling of risky issues from your side may get your life as well as lives of people around you in danger. We then learnt about some medical issues encountered because of high wind, cold, sun etc. Sunburns are most common, in fact, with the Antarctic ozone hole, UVA and UVB radiations are extremely strong. There are direct UV radiations as well as those reflected from snow. Sunblock is a must to avoid any sunburns, skin cancer etc. The other issue is snow blindness. If you take out your sunglasses/ goggles you are sure to get a temporary or longer lasting blindness caused by snow. When we were flying to McMurdo, I briefly experienced it while looking out of the flight. This is similar to when you look at the sun for sometime, later when you close your eyes, you can still see a sort of negative image of the sun. This itself is annoying. The aftereffects of snow blindness are almost the same but just replace the sun's small disc by an extended white sheet all over your view. The next things we were told about were frostsnips and frostbites (due to cold winds on exposed body parts) and hypothermia (drop in body temperature). These can get pretty dangerous at high altitudes if neglected in primary stages. Let me not scare you all anymore. However, I can assure you is that we were made aware of these issues and asked to take enough precautions to avoid them.

So, with this knowledge, we all were taken to a remote location for camping on the ice. It was not too far away from McMurdo. Even the Kiwi base (NZ station) was in our visibility. There was some traffic around as well, since we were also close by the balloon launching (BLAST - an astronomy program) facility. Anyhow, the idea was still to simulate the field experience. So, Megan and Julian our instructors planned our training such that they will let us know what all to do and then will leave us on our own on the ice for the night. We had a beautiful view of Mount Erbus (an active volcano) and Mount Terror. The site was on sea ice (McMurdo is itself a part of Ross island), but we were not directly on the sea ice. We were on a glacier. There were interesting structures close by called pressure ridges where a part of sea ice tries to push the glacier in other direction. In fact, this region has some thin ice and seals can make their way out on the open. We saw a couple of them very far away probably sun bathing.. :D

We reached this place where we were taught how to work with special stoves, how to put up tents etc. We then built a 'snow wall' to protect our small tents called Mountaineering tents from the wind. We set up our kitchen which was mostly making hot water only.. :) All the food was either dehydrated where you simply add hot water and let it stay warm inside your jacket for 10 minutes or so to cook or it was just nuts, chocolates and energy bars. The drinks were hot water or hot chocolate. As the day passed, the sun and a lot of physical work were making us too warm. People started to enjoy their "beach vacation" by building fun structures like a dining room for all 18, snow trenches to sleep in for the night. 8 snow trenches which resembled small tombs gave that area a look of a graveyard. We knew that the place where we will be going to field camp is going to be nowhere closer to this one. It will be all flat, with no direction bearing (compass doesn't work near South Pole effectively), windy, cold (25 to 30 degree below what we were experiencing here) and at least 3000 m above this sea level. So, this indeed was just a beach vacation.

We did have unlimited supply of water. Just scoop fresh snow nearby and add it to the pot to boil.

The next day morning, we were taken back to an on-the-field classroom which was a small hut- a little permanent structure compared to the tents. We were taught how to use VHF, HF radios, their protocols etc. HF radio had variable frequencies (by varying the length of the dipole antenna) from 4.77 MHz to 11.33 MHz. The protocols were way easier than that HAM radio protocols. I am not sure if you can use these radios for hamming though.. Anyway, we setup and made test calls with HF.

After this we had a real life scenario training. They gave us a situation: "Your flight has crashed while going to remote place. The plane is burnt. You manage to just get one survival bag and HF radio. You are 9 people and one of you has a broken leg. There is a condition 1 storm coming from the horizon. (Condition 1 is the worst condition: windy, stormy, white everywhere, you loose all orientation, while Condition 3 is the best condition with clear weather.) How will you handle this situation?" We had to use our classroom knowledge from our risk management class. Set up HF antenna quickly to request help. In the mean time, set up the tent, secure it with snow wall, boil hot water, tend to the injured person etc.. We actually did this all as if we were in that situation really... We were later told that this is probably one of the worst case situation thrown at us. This part of the training was good. We used every bit of knowledge gathered during the whole camping time.

The second scenario was "We are inside a tent. One of us went out to use the toilet and never came back in 20 minutes. It is condition 1 outside. How would you go an rescue that person before he/she gets hypothermic." Well, we failed this test. We spent too much time planning and probably had lost that person by then. Finally when we got out making a human chain with the help of a rope and with buckets on our heads to simulate the stormy condition where we can't see/ hear anything and have no bearing, we were all so disoriented that we had to break the chain and come back. The lesson learnt was: not to go out in stormy conditions!

We were so tired and exhausted with the two day continuous drills that by the time we got back to McMurdo we all were drained out. We still had to sit through a helicopter rescue video and learn things without dozing off.. :P The three of us: me, Joseph and Hyomin going to the actual field camp, had to still drag our humongous sleep kits to the cargo cage provided to us (will write about that in the next post) for our next big adventure. The day ended with a nice shower and an amazing meal which we really appreciated after that dehydrated dinner we had at the camp site.

At the end of the day though we were all happy campers!