October 30, 1996

Field Safety Training Course (Happy Camper School), near Scott Base. "Rescuing" Dr. Brown.

It was a long night and sleeping was difficult; the trick was to get situated in the snow tomb with a good breathing hole poking out of the mummy sleeping bag. If it was not open enough, I felt confined and not able to breathe. On the other hand, if my face was exposed for too long, I ran the risk of freezing my nose and lips. Otherwise, my body kept warm. Through the night, the silence was remarkable. The only sound I could hear was the pulse in my neck against the frozen outside of my sleeping bag. There was no wind and no ambient noise to speak of. In the early morning hours, as people began to stir, I could hear their feet creaking in the snow; the sound transferred through the walls of my tomb. It was clear and crisp, defined yet somehow disembodied from the source--I could hear footsteps, but it was hard to tell where they were.

Although the sun never set, evenings are considerably colder and the night was fortunately very still, with very few clouds. It was cold alright. A thoughtful early riser had put up water for boiling and I ate some oatmeal and drank a few cups of hot water to get jump started. Then we struck camp and packed up. We still had a day of training ahead of us: HF and VHF radio setup and use; a timed emergency camp setup procedure; and a mock search and rescue operation and a lecture on risk assessment.

The protocol for a remote field camp put-in is as follows...upon landing on a glacier or snow field or sea ice, the Herc engines are never cut off, in the event that they can't start up again. So, a team will have about a half and hour to off load their cargo, setup a tent/shelter, start a stove and boil water, and establish radio communication with McMurdo Station, or a relay via another site to McMurdo. The last element is key, and entire projects have been flown back because communications could not be setup. We divided into two groups and went through radio setup and check-in with MacOps and tried to reach South Pole Station. We then went through a mock plane crash scenario: setting up a camp site, with a person who was going into shock from hypothermia. After some kidding around and more than a few morbid comments, we managed to run the exercise in just over 15 minutes. It was a good deal colder than the day before, but the running around rejuvenated us.

The last exercise of the day involved searching for a lost person. Bill, whose humour and years of experience kept our tired crew in good spirits, outlined the situation we faced. "You're up at Siple Dome, and the fog has closed in--white out conditions with visibility down to a few feet. The wind is howling and Jamesway is shaking like it is going to come apart at the seams. There is a new "beaker" in town, just arrived...Dr. Brown. You're huddled around the heater, when someone asks, 'Where is Dr. Brown?' Someone says they saw Dr. Brown head for the outhouse almost two hours ago. What do you do?"

"Rescuing" Dr. Brown.

"Rescuing" Dr. Brown.

Bill gave us a few minutes to come up with a plan, and then disappeared in his role as the wayward and lost "beaker"-- Dr. Brown. In order to simulate white out conditions, we all donned big plastic buckets over our heads or covered our eyes. An essential aspect of conducting a search is to not get lost and disoriented yourself. We proposed forming a human chain, attached by rope with the intention of making sweeps out from the Jamesway--easier said than done. The first attempt was confused, as people turned in on the rope; when told to sweep left they went to their left and having turned around, they stumbled over one another. We regrouped and tried again, with a slower, more purposeful strategy. Dr. Brown was found, but he was further out than we thought, and we had to extend the human chain and pass the rope out further, so as not to get turned away from the building. The next challenge was that Dr. Brown had lost consciousness and was half-buried in a snow drift--Bill made us work for this one! We now had a critical hypothermia victim on our hands. The task was to get him back to the shelter for treatment. One of the things we learned early on was to handle hypothermia cases with extreme care; any shock or jolt can lead to heart failure. The biggest of the Navy crew tried to lift him in a fireman's carry (wrong move, as the pounding of the victim's chest against the rescuer's back amounted to a coronary event). Several people then tried dragging Dr. Brown--and Bill goes limp pretty well--back to the Jamesway. We eventually got him in, but succeeded in giving him numerous cardiac events in the process! It was a good exercise, and Bill had a lot of helpful observations from his own Search and Rescue work in the critique session that followed.

We packed up and rumbled back in the tracked vehicle, which was a lot quieter on the return route than outbound; there were a lot of sunburned, sleeping faces. Happy, but tired, campers back at the FSTP Building, we received our graduation patches--a comical scene with a person probing a crevasse with a Herc right behind them.