The Carnage Continues...

Current Conditions
Temperature: -13F
Wind Chill: -29F

Black Island is about 20 miles southwest of McMurdo. On it is the hub for all of our off-continent communications. Needless to say, it's important. If something should go wrong, it is easy to fly there in a helicopter, but that's not an option in the winter, so there is also a road over the sea ice. The sea ice is constantly in motion and under various pressures, so it is not always a nice flat driving surface. Weather, tides, glaciers, landmasses and other influences create widely varying and constantly changing terrain. The road to Black Island must be examined and maintained at the beginning of each winter.

We got word in town on Monday that, while maintaining the road, a dozer had punched through the ice and fallen into a meltpool. This is an area on the surface of the ice that has melted and formed a sort of lake. When the surface of a meltpool freezes over it is called a 'lens', and can be very difficult to discern. Inside this lens was 4 or 5 feet of water. Just for an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a picture of a small meltpool in the pressure ridges near Scott Base:

It stands to reason that only after I wrote this post did I get the real story about the dozer, so I've made some amendments. Rumor had this lens a quarter mile across, but it was really only 40 or 50 feet in diameter. A quick dozer anatomy; the blade is the plow in the front, and the ripper is like a large vertical fork in the back, used to break up ice. The walls of the meltpool were too steep for the dozer to crawl out, so the operator pushed the blade and ripper down as far as they would go, lifting the vehicle up off of its tracks and mostly out of the water. A second dozer was attempting to break up one side of the lens to drain the water, when it too punched through and got stuck.

A team was quickly assembled to go out and pull both dozers out of the meltpool. It consisted primarily of mechanics and fleet operators, but several SAR (Search and Rescue) team members went along as well, just in case. Two SAR members, Kish and Talie, were left in town to gather emergency equipment and then drive it out to the site, well behind the initial response team.

It had just gotten dark when Kish and Talie left town in a Hagglund. The weather was good for much of the drive out toward Black Island. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, as it always seems to happen, the weather turned. At first they could still drive from flag to flag, but soon the view became a total whiteout.

SAR members are trained to operate in these conditions, and the Hagglund is equipped with both GPS and radar. The GPS is great for knowing your location, destination, and heading, but it is not precise enough to be able to stay on the road by. The radar provides this capability by revealing the location of flags in the immediate vicinity. In a controlled scenario, the SAR team practices driving using just these instruments with the windows blacked out, so they are comfortable trusting their technological tools.

Kish and Talie's radar was not operating properly. They soon lost the flag line. At this point they referred to the GPS system, which suggested that they had gotten considerably off course. They corrected and veered back toward the road, or so they thought. The terrain got worse. It undulated with sudden drop offs. They came to a sudden stop to avoid driving straight over a 5 foot ledge. They turned and followed alongside the ledge in an effort to circumnavigate it. The ledge was corniced, though, and they were too close. The cornice gave, the Hagglund fell onto it's side:

Uninjured, but shaken, Kish and Talie radioed there situation and coordinates to town. They were blinded by lack of light and blowing snow, lost, and now immobile. They thought they weren't far from the road, though, and that the returning Fleet Ops vehicles might see them. Regardless, they began setting up camp, carefully. Kish crawled across the side of the Hagglund in Condition 1 winds to access the survival gear in the rear of the vehicle. They were unsure of the stability of the ice around them. They probed the area and felt comfortable walking behind the Hagglund to retrieve the gear, but preferred to set up camp on the higher ground, even though it was exposed to the wind. They managed to build a snow block wall and get the tent up during occasional lulls in the storm. Just as they finished, the wind turned 180 degrees on them and they had to build another wall on the other side. At about 2am, they finally bedded down for a cold, restless night.

In the light of morning, they realized they were considerably off course and found out later they were following the GPS coordinates of an old, obsolete road to Black Island. This meant they were in uncharted territory somewhere between the old road and the new road. The new route had not been uploaded into the GPS unit.

Frustrated and tired, they spent the morning unloading the Hagglund and checking in with Mac Ops hourly. They were picked up and brought back to town just in time for lunch, and we're all glad to have them back.

A picture of the Hagglund recovery:

To tie up the other loose ends, the second dozer was easily pulled out of the meltpool. The first dozer had somehow closed a fuel line valve, and wouldn't start. They couldn't pull it out propped up on its appendages, as it was. After determining the problem, it was no trouble to start it up, lower it onto its tracks, and pull it out. For the time being, they've abandoned the road work in order to prepare the runway for the final flight.