The South Pole, Medevacs, and Media Mayhem

THE SOUTH POLE, MEDEVACS AND MEDIA MAYHEM

Text and photos by Glenn Grant

"There is no truth to the rumor that a virus has broken out down here."

That was Terry, the McMurdo NSF station manager. The town meeting was normally a place for department managers to exchange reports on their activities during the past week; rumor control like this was almost never needed. Yet here was the NSF manager dispelling rumors, albeit tongue-in-cheek. His opening comment was an indication as to how far the media hype had penetrated. I suspected he had been fielding phone calls from reporters ever since the medevac plans for South Pole and McMurdo Stations had been announced. To fly people out in the middle of the winter was highly unusual. To perform two flights at the same time, at two different stations, was unprecedented.

It began with a rumor that McMurdo was doing a medical evacuation. For weeks the official response was "No, we're not doing one, and we want you to be ready for it." Confusing? Not really. This is Antarctica, the land of extremes, where geographical superlatives, political contradictions and logistical nightmares are the normal course of business. Finally, just one day after the Raytheon McMurdo area manager had announced to the entire station that we were definitely not having a medevac, the tentative date for the medevac flight was released.

At first a Kiwi (New Zealand) C-130 Hercules was to be flown in to McMurdo. Then rumors of a South Pole medevac surfaced, and a Twin-Otter flight was added. Then it was canceled in favor of flying in three New York Air National Guard LC-130 Hercs, even though the South Pole was recording temperatures as low as -80F. The landing gear on LC-130 hydraulics tends to freeze up below –55F. The NYANG Hercs took off but never made it out of North America before the plans were changed again. Meanwhile, the ice-qualified flight crews who would be flying the Hercs to McMurdo and the Pole had been flown ahead to New Zealand via commercial airlines to make sure they were well-rested for the difficult Antarctic flights. They got a free trip to New Zealand out of the deal, even though they never went any farther south.

There was even some discussion about parachuting a surgical team into the Pole, but that idea was quickly squelched by someone with at least a modest amount of common sense.

Finally it came down to the Kiwi Herc going to McMurdo, and two commercial Twin-Otters flying in from Canada, through South America, for the South Pole medevac. One of the Twin Otters held back at Rothera, a British base on the Antarctic Peninsula, as a backup plane just in case the one going to the Pole ran into trouble.

According to one media report, the South Pole flight was a "milk run." No, no, no. Maybe from a navigational standpoint: Just head south and look for the lights, you can't miss it. But friends who were there reported that simply lighting the burning barrels of kerosene for the runway markers was difficult enough. Propane heaters operating at full blast were used to keep the airplane warm after it landed, but some of the flight surfaces still froze up. I've met many of the Twin-Otter pilots and they take this sort of thing in stride. Still, if there had been an accident or mechanical failure, rescue was a long way off and by no means guaranteed.

REALITY BITES

In Antarctica, nothing goes as expected. Oh sure, you can say that about any place, anywhere in the world. But here it takes on a whole new meaning. Amid the swirling snow and ice are whole new paradigms of Things That Can Go Wrong.

Need an example? Okay, pretend you’re at the South Pole. It’s cold, damn cold. And it’s the middle of summer. It's been -20F for the past few days and people are talking about the heat wave. The altitude is 9300ft but today it feels like 11000ft because the persistent low pressure over the Polar Plateau is especially low this week. You recently arrived from McMurdo, where the sea level air is thick and chewy by comparison, and here you get out of breath just swallowing your food. It takes fifteen minutes to drag yourself out of bed and another half hour to put on four layers of clothes. You’re a tad grimy because you’ve already had your two allotted showers for the week and haven’t had time to do your one load of laundry. Your long underwear can remain standing when you take them off, which is almost never. But so far, so good. You’re feeling a bit smug because nothing has gone wrong yet and you might actually make it to breakfast this morning. Most mornings you oversleep because you worked late the night before and then woke up several times during the night gasping for breath.

You stumble out of your dark, snug Jamesway sleeping tent into the retina-burning polar daylight. Trudging across the snow to the restroom you realize that you've forgotten the large plastic vegetable oil bottle that now serves as your chamber pot. It's filled to overflowing, as usual, and desperately in need of emptying. But so is your bladder, so you dismiss the pee bottle problem until you realize you’ve also forgotten your water bottle. The humidity is so low that going a day without constantly drinking water will make you dangerously dehydrated. You turn around to retrieve both bottles.

The pee bottle was sitting on the floor all night and has frozen up. No problem, you’ll take it back to the restroom and leave it on a shelf to defrost. This time you remember the water bottle, stuffing it inside your coat as you leave the dorm tent once again. The door to the tent does not close properly. In fact, it doesn’t latch at all because there is snow jammed into the frame. It must close or the interior of the Jamesway will go sub-zero in a very short time. That wouldn't bother you, but the other sleepers in the tent will put glycol in your bunny boots if they find out it was you who left the door open. You can’t brush the impacted snow out with your mittens. There’s a shovel outside, miraculously still not stolen after two days, but the edge isn’t pointy enough to remove the snow. You’ll need a screwdriver or a pocket knife. Your pocket knife is in your inner parka pocket; you’ve learned from experience to keep it warm -- you have to take off you mittens to open it, and the first time you tried this with a cold knife you frost-nipped your fingers. You clean out the snow and the door closes smoothly again, but after putting away the knife your coat catches itself in its zipper and now it won’t zip up fully. You tug at the zipper pull, but instead of coming free the frozen metal zipper thingamajig snaps off in your hand.

By now the twin necessities of staying warm and needing to piss are starting to conflict. Staying warm wins. You go back to your sleeping space and put on a different coat. Not as warm, but at least the zipper works. You head back to the restroom, picking up the frozen pee bottle on your way out the door. Halfway to the restroom you realize that you've left the water bottle in your other parka…

Sounds absurd, doesn't it? Like being trapped in some kind of dreadful nightmare. But this sort of thing goes on all the time. Seemingly simple tasks can become so parenthetical that it takes all day to get anything done. You want to do this, but first you need to do that, but before you can do that you need one of those, etc., etc. Follow the chain of etceteras to the end and you'll typically find that you need a part that was ordered two years ago and still hasn't arrived, or else you have several hundred in stock and none of them fit. Forget the cold, the isolation, the really nasty weather and the 12 year old hot dogs. This is the hell of Antarctica: Taking an hour to find a pen that works. Ordering 650 pounds of cube butter and eight months later receiving 65 10-lb cases, each containing 500 single-serving butter pats. Traveling 1200 miles across the Polar Plateau to install an important scientific instrument and forgetting to bring that one long, tiny screwdriver necessary to turn it on.

POLE VAULTING

People who have never worked in Antarctica sometimes have the impression that we can just run off to parts unknown whenever we feel like it, as if the pilots, airplanes and helicopters have nothing better to do than to sit around waiting to take us on boondoggles. If you want to give someone a good laugh, walk into the flight scheduler's office at McMurdo and request to be put on a plane to somewhere. Ask hard enough and they may put you on a flight home.

Of course, that doesn't stop people from trying to arrange trips anyway. The tough part is coming up with a reason why they need to send you someplace interesting. I've tried this many times and it never works. Well, almost never.

I wanted to go to the South Pole. The last time I was there it was loads of fun and I wanted more of the same. Besides, I was wintering, I deserved to go. A lot of wintering personnel at Mactown were allowed to go back to New Zealand or the States for a couple weeks of so-called preparatory leave. The Polies come to McMurdo for a week of R & R before their winter begins (that's a vacation?). So hey, hello, what about me?

A plan began to form. It went something like this: 1) One of the science technicians at the Pole was coming out to McMurdo for a week of fun and frolicking before his winter started. 2) I already knew how to operate most of the experiments under his care. 3) There was nobody at the pole who could adequately cover for him while he was gone. Bingo! Clearly, they needed me there. From this point it was just a matter of finding a graceful way to implant this idea in the minds of The-Powers-That-Be without being too pushy about it.

Experience must pay a few dividends because I was successful. With almost no advanced notice I was stuffed into the cargo hold of an LC-130 and flown to the South Pole for a week. My god, it worked.

The science tech at the Pole had warned me that there would be a lot of work. That didn’t register. I knew the experiments, I could do anything. As we flew over the Trans-Antarctic mountains I sat in the cockpit of the Herc, two cameras dangling from my neck, chatting with the flight crew and snapping pictures until I ran out of film and digital memory. Working was the last thing on my mind.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR

Big mistake. Well maybe not a mistake per se, but what I got was not exactly what I had in mind. They, the powers, the grantees, the system, the program, were working the daylights out of the South Pole science tech. In a place that gets 24 hours of sun, that’s a lot of daylight.

I wasn't alone. The crew at the South Pole has to be the hardest working bunch of people I have ever met. The season is short and the hours are long. For most there are no weekends, and precious few hours off. Fourteen and sixteen hour days are common. Some people give up entirely and “free-cycle,” sleeping, waking and eating to their own body rhythms, and working during all the spaces in between. In a place where the only distinguishing feature between day and night is the meal times, free-cycling comes naturally. So long as you are still getting your job done, it’s accepted. Call it a kind of free-format flex time.

My job at McMurdo had been averaging ten or twelve hours a day, which was part of the reason I was eager to escape it for a week of sun and fun on the bottom of the planet. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect a free ride. On the contrary, I knew it would be work, but hoped it would be less than what I was enduring back at McMurdo. Wrong. In the few years since I had last been at the Pole, the Cusp Lab science tech had somehow become the beakers’ whipping boy. Dana, the tech leaving on vacation, showed me the ropes over the course of a day and then happily skipped aboard an LC-130 bound for Mactown. “Good luck,” he said, and the plane lifted off in a cloud of snow and jet exhaust.

Good luck, indeed. In general, I’ve found that the harder I work the luckier I get. By that criteria I was very lucky at the Pole. I came for a bit of sightseeing and an escape from the grind of my job at McMurdo, and during my week there I managed to evade work for only a few brief hours, most of which were spent sleeping.

But before I get too cynical here let’s put things in perspective. Of the 15000 or so tourists who visit Antarctica each year, plus another 20000 who fly over the coastline for just a quick look, only about 50 actually set foot at the South Pole. Two or three thousand scientists and support workers pass through McMurdo every summer and maybe 300 of them visit the Pole. Those that don’t have the chance would gladly walk barefoot through penguin poop to do so. Besides working at the Pole, the only other way to see it is to fly in as a tourist or ski there, both at astronomical cost. A turn-around tourist flight to the Pole runs over $25000US, not including the required flight to South America, appropriate expedition clothing, and those little warmed hand towels distributed by a smiling flight attendant with tongs.

And for all that, there’s nothing to see there. It’s flat, white, and desolate as an empty plate. Scott wasn’t kidding when he said “Great God, this is an awful place.” The attraction, of course, is the novelty of standing on the bottom of the world. At least, that’s what draws most tourists and first-timers. When you’ve been everywhere else, seen and done every last cruise, tour, resort and safari, and you still have money running out your surgically altered nose, why not see the literal last place on earth? You only have to spend an hour there, and it makes wonderful conversation at those little dinner parties three months later. Between the shrimp crepe hors d'oeuvres and listening to that boring woman from the wretched yacht next door prattle on about the darling yak herders in Mongolia, you can casually mention that you happened to visit the South Pole recently, but it was nothing really.

So there are a kind of bragging rights that are conveyed by going to the South Pole, even if all it takes is money. For those of us who know we will probably never have the financial wherewithal to book such trips for ourselves (I hope I’m wrong about that), working there is our only option. And as it turns out, it’s a much more rewarding experience that way.

THE BEER CAN

Once the novelty has worn off – for some of us it never does – people start to find other reasons why they like working at the Pole. For some it is the extremeness of it all. Others thrive on the work and hustle during the summer. Many winter-overs tend to focus on the community, the sense of being in it together. Some just do it for the money, although to me that seems like a rough way to make a living. It could be argued that the scientists do it just for the science, but that is not always the truth: They find the same excitement as the support staff; if they were really doing it just for the science they would have a graduate student slave go there instead.

Regardless of motivations, it is undeniably a unique environment. Those who return year after year express a love for the Pole, including the physical, mechanical and social challenges. I saw all these things. But as a transient, I only connected with the community in a marginal sort of way. My home was back in McMurdo, although I could feel the social dynamics flowing around me during my short week there. If I had stayed any longer I would have melded into my own niche.

It is impossible to be at the South Pole without influencing the community to some extent, or being influenced by it. The day after I arrived a pair of Danish explorers arrived on skis. They were upset when they found they had just missed the weekly tourist flight, which meant they would have to hang around for a week twiddling their thumbs while they waited for the next flight home. The South Pole manager realized their predicament and offered them work. As payment they received hot showers, meals and the use of the restroom facilities. Assistance to private expeditions is officially discouraged, but in a place so short-handed it is ridiculous to have able-bodied people just sitting around. They ended up tagging T-shirts at Polemart, the station store, and by the end of the week they had become part of the station’s social structure. When the Adventure Network tourist flight finally arrived to pick them up, they didn’t want to leave.

This kind of adaptation to the station environment is surprisingly common. What I find even more interesting is the change in attitude of the people who visit the Pole. Many arrive with preconceived notions, many of them negative, about the place and the people who work there. The world outside apparently has a lot of assumptions about what goes on at the South Pole, many of them incorrect. By the time they leave, however, most visitors come away amazed by the people who work there. This is the tragedy of short, turn-around tourist flights: They never see what it takes to make the place operate.

I was fascinated by it all. How does it work? Who makes it work? Why are things done this way and not that way? The only way to figure it out was to wander around and see it for myself. Stop people and ask questions. Barge in and see what’s happening. Basically make a nuisance of myself. Not that there was much else to do except work.

You find out some really quirky things when you start wandering around. Take fuel, for instance. When the temperature drops below about –50F, gasoline starts having issues with the whole idea of combustion. Diesel isn’t much better, and turns into a kind of paraffin mush. So for subfreezing weather a cold-tolerant kind of diesel jet fuel called JP-8 is the normal choice. At the South Pole, however, the temperatures are so extreme that JP-8 will freeze up. To keep the generators and airplanes running they use a special kind of JP-8 called AN-8 that has a lot of extra anti-gelling additives. The US Antarctic Program is the only customer in the world for AN-8, and every batch has to be brewed up specially at a refinery somewhere. Surprisingly, this year’s supply of AN-8 was purchased for considerably less per gallon than the price of JP-8, from a refinery in Greece. Economics moves in mysterious ways.

Many of the LC-130 flights to the Pole each year are simply tanker flights, hauling in the fuel necessary to keep the station alive during the nine months when it will be virtually unreachable because of darkness and cold temperatures. The fuel is stored in large tanks under a separate metal archway near the dome. The arch is buried under an insulating layer of snow, keeping the fuel at the toasty average annual temperature of about –50F (-45C).

This year, almost all of the flights not hauling fuel were bringing in supplies for the construction of the new South Pole station. Years of drifting snow have buried the old dome to the point that it now sits in its own, deep pit. The buildings underneath the dome are showing signs of age as well, and the dorms, with rooms barely big enough to hold a small bed, are musty and worn from years of intensive use.

Stacked around the inside perimeter of the dome are the frozen food supplies; cases of frozen meat, milk and Fruitloops all stacked on the hard packed snow. Since the dome is unheated, the cooks have to plan meals days in advance to make sure the food is defrosted in time.

Just outside the dome is the entrance to the fuel arch and the South Pole medical facility, or Club Med. Office supplies are stored on the roof of the medical building, which is covered in a spongy tundra of mattresses to soften the footsteps of pen and pencil shoppers. For the record, paper supplies survive cold temperatures unscathed but pens do not, which partially explains why it’s so hard to find one that works.

The new station, when it is finally completed, should be much more functional than the old one. But that’s about all I can say for it. I admit I am a fan of the dome, which I think has much more character. The new station has all the charm of an oil platform (some have also compared it to an airport terminal). Still, it promises to be a comfy place, and it is clear that the dome has outlived itself.

One of the most bizarre features of the new station is a cylindrical stairwell attached to the outside, with a kind of cargo elevator up the middle. For some reason, out of character with the rest of the station, they have decided to sheathe the outside in shinny metal. The effect is similar to a giant aluminum can, and in fact the crew has dubbed it “the beer can.” To drive the point home, spoofed photos were posted around the station showing a giant can of beer attached to the outside of the building.

DOCTOR, HEAL THYSELF

A few years ago Dr. Jerri Nielsen, the South Pole winter-over doctor, discovered she had breast cancer. Personal medical problems in the Antarctic program are seldom discussed with the media, but in this case it became a high-profile event. The story had all the right elements of a first-rate tragedy: A doctor at the South Pole self-diagnoses herself, directs her own biopsies, confirms malignancy, and there’s no way off the station. It’s the middle of winter and the next flight is months away.

Naturally, the media went berserk.

A lot of fuss was made over sending in the Herc’s early, and how dangerous it was, etc. But in the end the first flight arrived at about the normal time anyway. Dr. Nielsen was flown back to the States incognito, treated for breast cancer, and that was that – until the book came out and the movie rights were sold. Going public may be tacky, but I don’t blame her. Heck, if you have to get cancer you might as well make a profit from it. Anything to help pay the medical bills.

I talked a bit with Dr. Betty Carlisle, the McMurdo doctor this past summer, about the Jerri Nielsen crisis. Doc Betty had worked at the Pole, but was summering at McMurdo to get the full Antarctic experience. She didn’t seem enamored with Mactown, and was unimpressed by the whole Nielsen affair. Doc Betty loved her winter at the Pole and couldn’t wait to go back. Her son was an alternate for the science technician position at Palmer Station, a job I had held twice. Ironically, about a month later the Palmer science tech quit outright and Dr. Carlisle’s son was hired to replace him. And then three months later, after the polar sunset and in the middle of the winter, Dr. Carlisle was flown to the South Pole to replace another ailing doctor. All this happened shortly after my visit to the Pole.

This is a good point to stop and put in a word about the doctors at Antarctic stations. They’re pivotal. Although there may be several EMTs, nurse practitioners and wilderness first-responders, most stations have only one doctor. Their importance to the community cannot be overestimated. You have to have one, but you hope they are the least-busy crewmember. At the same time, they are often outspoken, confrontational, or flamboyant in one way or another. The combination of responsibility, intellect and desire for adventure seems to warp them in strange and interesting ways. Above all else, they are never boring.

It was for this reason that I made a point of visiting the South Pole doctor even though there was nothing wrong with me (no snide remarks, please). Figuring that the front entrance near the sign saying South Pole Medical was probably the best way to enter, I did so, stomping my bunny boots to remove the snow – and found myself directly in the examination room. There behind one of the tables was Dr. Ron Shemenski, fortunately without a patient.

“THIS IS NOT THE ENTRANCE,” he said. “You should enter at the side over there,” gesturing to the other end of the building with an angry frown.

And hello to you too, doctor. “You should put a sign outside telling people to use the other door.”

“Well, hmm, yes. But for general appointments you need to come in around the other side.” The glare was still there, but the tone had softened.

“Okay. Next time I will.” Time for some diplomacy. “Sorry about that. I’m not here for anything, I just thought I’d drop in and introduce myself.”

Ron turned out to be a very interesting guy, as I expected. Among his many adventures, one included crashing a stunt plane upside down in a river. We were getting along pretty good by the time I left. Four months later, in the bitter cold and darkness of the South Pole winter, he would be medevac’d out due to gallstones and replaced by Doc Betty.

THE HYPE

While the medical evacuation for Dr. Shemenski was being organized, across the continent at McMurdo several other personnel were being readied for another medevac flight. By coincidence, both flights occurred within a week of each other. Besides the four medevac patients at McMurdo, seven others also returned to New Zealand on the same flight. Some went for family emergencies, one was fired, and others simply took the opportunity to bail out for their own reasons. None of this would have affected me very much except that one of the medical emergencies, in fact the most urgent one, was my supervisor, and one of the other-reason defectors was the lab manager working for me. He said it wasn’t anything personal.

So all totaled, 11 people left McMurdo and one person left the South Pole. No one came in except Dr. Carlisle, who got her wish and is now the South Pole doctor again.

Viewed from the outside, it appeared that some kind of mass exodus was occurring in the middle of the Antarctic winter. The NSF, normally tight-lipped about anything other than the science occurring on the Ice, was especially so out of concern for the privacy of the medevac patients. Raytheon, the prime contractor for the US Antarctic Program, handled many of the media inquiries, but the company was equally constrained. This is where things started getting out of hand, although nobody was at fault except the media hounds who live for rumors.

Some background first. The National Science Foundation is usually the sole source for news about USAP. Because reporters cannot simply “show up” in Antarctica without an invitation and the support of the program, that puts the NSF in the unique position of having almost total spin control over media coverage. Few other government entities enjoy such control, with the possible exception of secret organizations such as the NSA or NRO, so-called black agencies. The NSF’s approach is typically to highlight the successes and the science, downplaying or even omitting any mention of negative events. There’s nothing particularly mysterious or secret about it, it’s simply a hardball approach to promoting themselves. This is an endless source of frustration and annoyance to the people who work on the Ice, but it does tend to insure continued funding whenever congress starts looking at budgets.

Where this spin control starts losing its balance is when something very public, very dramatic, that doesn’t have anything at all to do with science, starts happening in Antarctica. Like two medevacs at the same time.

The news reports were all very amusing at this end. Even when the NSF and Raytheon provided all the information they knew, the media would still speculate, lose facts, or seemingly invent information. The worst of these stories were propagated by the paranormal media mongers, especially Art Bell on his radio program. The speculation he put forth was so strange and hysterical that MPEG versions of his radio show circulated around the station for weeks. For some reason he couldn’t believe that people might get sick or want to leave, and his explanations included everything from a nuclear accident to killer viruses. Within a few days he had his audiences convinced that “black ops” conspiracies were in full swing in Antarctica. It didn’t help that the main employer, Raytheon, was also a defense contractor. During this time, Art Bell was constantly plugging 70South.com, a quasi-news service about Antarctica operated by enterprising web page designer Brendon Grunewald. Either by mistake or on purpose, about a hundred web surfers went to 60South instead. I figure that anyone who listens to Art Bell and believes him wouldn’t have the patience to actually read any of my articles, so it’s not too surprising that I didn’t receive any feedback.

I thought about writing to Art Bell and “correcting” him on several points (particularly the need for salt at the South Pole, which he theorized were code words for a nuclear accident), but then decided it wouldn’t do any good. Unknown to me, a good friend had corresponded with him about this very thing. Meg doesn’t mince words, and she said it better than I ever could. Her initial letter to Art:

I have never heard such outrageous bull as I heard on your show about Antarctica. I am down at McMurdo and happen to know all 11 people who left on the medevac. The reason that their medical conditions were not publicized is that their privacy is being protected. It is none of your damn business what their physical problems may be. They left for a variety of reasons, some medical, some personal. For you and your cohorts to take bits of information and construct paranoid conspiracy fantasies and then broadcast them to the public is worse than irresponsible, it is unethical. And it is unduly worrying those of our family and friends who are naive and trusting enough to believe you.

Did it ever occur to you that the email comment about the new Pole Doc stuffing her pockets with salt was a joke? Yes, they are low on salt at Pole, because the people who do ordering for down here are less than perfect. Here at McMurdo, they forgot to order chicken, popcorn, and flour tortillas. What kind of conspiracy theory are you going to make out of that? Don't you feel the tiniest bit absurd? We certainly think you are. Your broadcasts are passed around as a joke down here. And this isn't by management or your "Raytheon Black Ops" folks. We are just average people, making a living in an unusual place.

You will say whatever you want, with no consequences for all of the lies you tell. That is an unfortunate result of the free speech we hold so dear in our country. Just know that there are many of us out here who know the truth.

P.S. I doubt very much if you have the nerve to read this, in it's entirety, on your program.

And Art Bell’s response:

Look, Perhaps you are correct, however since we were given info on 1st and 2nd Doc's problems do you think it strange for everyone to wonder when sooooo many are brought out and conditions are listed for (2) as critical with NO reason given? Perhaps you would like to clear this up and I would be GLAD to read it on the air. Secrets breed theorys. [sic]

Art

As it turned out, he did read her letter on the air. I don’t expect it changed the attitudes of the hard-core conspiracy theorists, but at least a blow was struck for common sense. The truth is down here, but nobody seems to believe it. Part of me wants to urge them to come down and see for themselves -- I came down here, so it can’t be that hard -- but the greater part of me resists inviting a bunch of loonies to the Ice.

We’ve got enough already.

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