Krissie's Blog - 13

Oct 25, 09:25 PM

At the South Pole, community support is a part of life. Aside from one’s job, there are other responsibilities that require participation, especially in the winter.

Each person is required to join an Emergency Response Team in the winter. In the summer it’s voluntary. There are four teams. Each team has a Team Lead. The team leads report to the On Scene Commander, who leads the Team Lead huddle on-site of the emergency. The OSC reports to the Incident Commander, who is the Winter Site Manager. He goes to Comms in an emergency, monitors the radio traffic, and directs the overall action of the emergency response.

Each team meets, at the very least, once a month to train, entertain different scenarios, and improve the procedures for emergency response. A couple of the teams have weekly meetings. All teams are involved in one monthly drill. (Photo by Jeremy Johnson)

Team 1 is the “hasty team,” or first responders, to all alarms, and they take charge of an accident scene. They will verify whether it is a false alarm or a real threat. They set up a perimeter only allowing essential crew through.

Team 2 is the fire team. Most of them went through fire training in Denver last September or have some previous volunteer firefighting experience. I was supposed to go to the fire training school, but they didn’t have a plane ticket for me. Hmph. See how fun that looks?!

Since they have SCBA tanks and protective clothing, they are the ones who enter areas that have abnormal oxygen levels or spills, and of course they can enter into fire scenes. Because water is so scarce, and the temperatures are too cold to spray water effectively outside, they carry fire extinguishers into a fire scene. Their main focus would be to find potential victims, rather than try to extinguish an out of control fire. (The doctors prefer we use the term “patients.”)

Team 2 has nifty gadgets.

Team 3 is a support team, largely supporting Team 2. As soon as the alarm sounds, team members start filling thermoses full of water for the firefighters, collecting fire extinguishers and placing them at the Destination Zulu door, and getting vehicles ready to transport supplies (in the summer) or patients. Team 3 is divided into indoor people and outdoor people. For example, the outdoor people will be the ones on snowmobiles or in LMCs, and they will help the Trauma Team transport patients from the accident scene to the closest Station entrance. The indoor people will meet the outdoor people at the bottom of the stairs and help carry the patients all the way to the clinic. They are also in charge of setting up an overflow trauma center in the gym during a mass casualty incident. I was on Team 3 in the summer.

Team 4 is the Trauma Team, which is the team I am on now. In the summer there is a Trauma Team and an Advanced Trauma Team. This winter, all of us elected to be Advanced Trauma. When we get a call, we put on our ECW and head to the clinic. We wait for word on whether or not there are patients. If we find out there are patients, we head to the patient drop off point, which is a place that Team 2 has deemed safe for us to enter. For one patient there is a best buddy, scribe, and medic. The best buddy holds the patient’s head securely and asks him/her the 4 Alert & Oriented questions, if conscious. What is your name? What time of day is it? Where are you? What happened? The medic will do a quick assessment. It’s possible that we could show up to a person unconscious, not breathing, or without a pulse. We will then immediately start CPR. The scribe relays the medic’s gathered information to the clinic. We then package the patient, which means putting them on a backboard. Now imagine doing this in the dark of night, in -80°F temps, wind chill of around -130, and with 30 mph winds. Two drills ago that’s what we had to do. Tough stuff.

Once we get to the clinic with the patient, we take their vitals, start an IV, put a large heated air blanket over him/her, and do whatever else the doctors tell us to do. We might have to activate the Blood Bank. Everybody’s names are categorized by blood type in the Blood Bank binder. We would start calling in those people who match the patient, drawing blood, and doing the lab work to see if they are a blood match. The doctors will make a call on whether or not a medevac is needed. This is bad news during the winter, because it would take a plane one month to reach us. There are some injuries that cannot be treated here, because they require surgery, like a broken neck or femur. That person would be sedated or heavily medicated for that entire month. Bad news. This is a picture of Ross and Bill doing blood work. (Photo by Dr. Ella Derbyshire)

Team 4 has the most meetings of all the teams, meeting twice a week. Trauma Team meetings are about going through the steps of approaching, assessing, and packaging a patient. Our Advanced Trauma training is much more fun. We’ve covered and physically hands-on learned about AEDs, drawing blood, administering IVs, intubation, splinting, taking x-rays, ultrasound, doing a 12-lead EKG, taking vitals using a Propaq, using a sphygmometer and stethoscope to find blood pressure, using a stethoscope to listen to heart and breath sounds, setting up a respirator, and getting to use the defibrillator– very fun, by the way. I yelled, “Clear!” very loudly on my turn, just like on TV. This is a picture of us each taking a turn intubating.

This next picture is of Team 4 during an actual incident, not a drill. The alarm sounded around 1:30 AM, right as I was about 10 feet from my bedroom door and 5 minutes from sleep. It was a school night, so most people were woken up by the alarm. This picture was taken around 3:30 AM, and we still did not have any patients at that point. We were sitting and listening to the radio traffic. You can see that people are very excited to be there. I’m holding up a 4 for Team 4: a perfect example of how something at 3:30 AM seemed funny but, in the light of day, was not. I ended up going to bed at 5 AM. (Photo by Dr. Ella Derbyshire)

My winter Senior Meteorologist started a new Search and Rescue Team. The first scenario the team faced was finding me and Jeremy outside. The Met Dept. has a field of 50 stakes about a half-mile east of the Station. On the first day of every month, we have to go out and measure how much snow has accumulated around the stakes. This gives us the amount of monthly precipitation we receive, since we never record more than a trace amount in a day. The scenario was that I was doing our monthly snow stakes measurements, and I brought Jeremy with me to help. I got cold and headed in early to warm up, leaving Jeremy to finish the snow stake measurements. I got disoriented in the dark and was not seen after I left Jeremy. I also accidentally dropped my radio in the Beer Can on our way out, so I couldn’t hear any radio calls or call for help. Jeremy also got lost on his way back to the Station. We had checked out with the power plant, so they knew we were overdue to arrive back. That’s when the search started. They found my radio in the Beer Can, so they started the search from there. About an hour and a half later, Jeremy stumbled back into the Station. He became slightly combative when he learned that I never showed up. They took him to the clinic and warmed him up with blankets and warm saline bags. Since the last place I was seen was at the snow stake field, that’s where the search moved to. They found my body about 100 ft off of the flag line. I was packaged, put into an LMC, and driven back to the Station. I think I was the first person to die during a drill this winter. I was frozen solid, and I had broken in half. Even giving a movie chest thump and yelling, “LIIIIVVVE!!!” to myself did not save me.

Jeremy and I actually spent the duration of the drill safe and warm out at ARO, the Atmospheric Research Observatory, or NOAA’s building. We were watching a movie and listening to the radio traffic. It was quite amusing. ARO is about a third of a mile north of the Station, and we could see the SAR team looking for us. Normally all the windows are covered to protect the light sensitive experiments on the Station roof, but one of the first steps in the case of a missing person is to take all the window covers off, just in case they are turned around and need more lights to guide them home. To see the Station all lit up at night was very neat. There was kind of an “all this for us?” feeling. (Photo by Jeremy Johnson)

Okay, onto the next type of community support. Dish pit – the bane of my existence about every 2 months. For the three years I lived in Iowa, I did not have a dishwasher. Every day for three years I hated not having one. At our Midwinter festival somebody auctioned a “1 get out of dish pit day,” and it sold for $60. Some people don’t mind it, and others even like it…like Robert. He loves dish pit. It reminds him of when he used to work in a Chinese restaurant as a dish washer. Now he works in space weather down here as the Cusp Technician.

He’s using the “three sink sanitation method” right now. We also have a Hobart sanitizer. Anywho, dish pit day starts at 10 AM and lasts until 7:30 PM. For those of us who have other mandatory daily duties in our real job, it’s very tough. My time-critical Met duties all coincided with the busiest times of day in dish pit, so I would run behind unless I asked someone to help me out. Given my stance on washing dishes, I felt badly asking someone else to help me with this special torture.

Dish pit duty requires a person to wash all the dishes of the community and whatever the chefs dirty cooking for 43 people. In between meals that person wipes down the galley’s dining tables, cleans the drink bar, refills the juice machines and water tank, and makes sure there are enough dishes, cups, and silverware for the meals. Other duties include vacuuming the galley, tidying the lounge area, cleaning the microwave bar, and taking out all of the trash around the galley. This could be as many about 8 large trashcans and 3 small ones. If the juice or milk runs out, he/she makes more. It’s a fulltime job. In the summer there is a staff of people who do this job, but in the winter, we go through the community alphabetically.

Another community service is House Mouse. There is no official janitorial staff here, unlike at McMurdo. In the summer the galley staff takes on some of the duties, like mopping the main hallway. Common spaces are cleaned by different departments. In the summer the Met Dept. cleaned the B3 Lounge, the B1 Lounge, and the Quiet Reading Room on Thursdays. The bathrooms are cleaned by its users once a week. If I remember correctly, I would clean my Summer Camp bathroom around 3:30 PM every Monday.

In the winter, we were assigned to one of 11 House Mouse teams, with about 4 people on each team. We would meet every Monday at 4 PM. Each team cleaned a section of the Station, sweeping and mopping sections of the main hallway, vacuuming the berthing wing hallways, and cleaning bathrooms, lounges, and common rooms. The chefs always cleaned the galley. This is a picture of Jeremy and Jonathon cleaning the upstairs A3 hallway.

A couple of other community support tasks are volunteering in the greenhouse, working in the store, decorating for formal dinners, and organizing events, like concerts.

The biggest thing that has happened around here is that we got our first passenger flight in last Monday (11/19). It was nice to see some familiar faces, but I think the majority of us were more interested in the fresh fruit that was on board. There was an impromptu fruit party in the galley as soon as the fruit came in. There were bananas, a few oranges, kiwis, plums, limes, and nectarines. A few people brought special fruit through. There was 1 pear and 1 avocado. The summer people were told to stay away from the fruit, since we hadn’t eaten fresh fruit in 9 months. It was all super delicious. Here’s a picture of our fruit party. You’ll notice the two guys on the right are simply smelling the fruit.

The weather has been bad either here or at McMurdo, so we haven’t had a second flight make it in yet, even though they try every day. I’m not excited for the summer masses to arrive, but we are running out of fruit again.

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