Home stretch

Home stretch

So things are getting interesting. I am still having a great time and seeing new things but there have been some issues with work. Last shift our chief along with some Lt's and firefighters resigned and at this time are on a 747 back to LA. It was for good reason due to issues with raytheon but its made things rough around here. There will be nobody coming to replace any of them so we find ourselves having to step up and make this place run for the next 2 months. Im not going to bring the blog down by getting into it but we dont have a chief and are losing firefighters each day. Other than that the weather has been great and it looks like it will be a white christmas. Things have been busy and ive been out at the runway alot so thats abuot all i have for now. Hope everyone has a good christmas and new years and ill post so more when something interesting happens.
heres a photo of the department right before everyone left who resigned, we had a little say goodbye thing.

Pressure Ridges

At our new runway (Willy Field) its snow and not ice so the planes use there skies now instead of wheels.




So things are moving along. Were all moved into the new runway and operations are going as normal once again. Its actually a much better location than the sea ice runway with a better view. Im pretty sure making the drive out there in the morning is possibly the best morning commute I could ask for. It takes about 45 minutes to get there but its ok.



The sea ice is melting pretty quickly. I was down at the old runway the other day and there were some definate wet spots over the sea. The weather has been really warm this past week so thats been nice. Things are starting to become routine so im putting together a forcable entry class to teach in a couple weeks which has taken some time up.

I was lucky enough yesterday to go on a pressure ridge tour which was pretty cool. The pressure ridges are the area where the sea ice, ice shelf and land converge, and work somewhat like plate tectonics. This action creates big cracks and holes and moves the ice formations about 3 feet per day.
In the next picture you can see the pressure ridges from far away on one of the roads leading to the kiwi (new zealand) base. To the left is the ice shelf and to the right is the sea ice that has actual seawater about 10 feet under it.

The Big Move

Everything seems to be going along alright at this point. We just finished moving the ice runway from its old location in front of mcmurdo to about 19 miles away on the ice shelf. THis is something that is done every year because the runway and "ice town" that I always write about is on top of "sea ice" which is frozen ocean. at this point in the year that sea ice is about 1 to 6 feet deep and is melting away so it cannot support the wait of the C-17s anymore. In about 2 weeks the old location will be water. It was a very complex operation to move. All of the buildings at the ice town are built on skies, incliding our station 2. It was about 20 hours of towing those buildings across the ice to the new location. We now are operating an airfield that is on "shelf ice" which is about 200 feet of ice and then 3 thousand feet of water under that. It never melts and can support as much weight as we need too. My shift fell on a day where we were actually moving the town so we were without a station for about 16 hours. I got stuck driving PH-2 from the old runway to the new one wich took about 3 hours but was an awesome trip. PH-2 is one of the very very large yellow fire trucks on the big tank wheels. It is very slow so I was quickly left in the dust. Once you get about 3 miles out you cannot see anything but ice so its very beautiful. Long story short it ended up breaking down on me about 10 miles out but thats a story ill finish when I get home. So now that the airfield move is done things are slowly returning to normal again. Other than that everything is same old same old.
I dont have any new pictures from the move but here are some from this past week:
The bird is called a Skua. they are just like seagulls but the adults have about a 5 to 6 foot wingspan and are very mean. They odd birds and constantly knock trays out of peoples hands if there is food.

This is one of the A- stars after doing a drop, flying over Mt. erebus. You can see the gasses coming up since it is an active volcano. The other helicopter that is on the ground is one of the 212's which is the other helo we use here.