The Great Water Crisis of 2014

The past few weeks have brought a flurry of activity to the station as we suffered a failure of our primary water system. As I've previously mentioned, we get our water from a pump that goes into a rodwell. Basically we shoot enough hot water down into a hole in the ice to maintain a pool of liquid water, which we pump back up to use. However, a few weeks ago this pump died. Because of this, we switched to a Snow Melter for our water supply. This means someone has out with a loader/tractor and retrieve snow to dump in the snow melter. While all of this was getting running, we were on conservative water ratios, so no showers or laundry. Now we are limited to one laundry or 2-minute shower a week (as opposed to the normal two showers and one laundry load).

I don't want to spend too much of the post assigning blame, but the general consensus is that the various temperatures on the control computer have been maladjusted by He Who Shall Not Be Named the entire season, to the dismay of all the utilities technicians on station. The temperature controls may have been maladjusted to the point where the water pump in the rodwell finally failed. Not only has this caused tons of extra work for people on station, but it also is likely costing the antarctic program hundreds of thousands in dollars. There were also repairs to the rodwell system done over last summer's season that weren't optimal, which also contributed to the failure.

Overall, I'd say one of the most surprising things I've found working at the South Pole is failures such as these. Some of the processes, e.g. hiring, psych evaluation procedures, internet controls etc. are really illogical. We have a procedure for dealing with instances like this, the logic column:

When you hear about something illogical done in the antarctic program, you bang your head on the logic column.

That being said, most of the people working here on station are great, and most of the people in Denver are too.


Other Logical Inconsistencies:

• [redacted]
• The world experts in ice drilling were required to fix the rodwell last Summer. They offered to come back to help fix our current rodwell problems but USAP has declined in favor of trying the same techniques that didn't work last summer.

Next Week in Pole: Ebola!