LUNAR May-Day Training

After another day with lots of noise and construction activity in my lab space, I spent a couple hours in the evening helping run the fire brigade members through practice should they become trapped or disabled while inside a structure. This May-Day training uses the acronym LUNAR (Location, Unit, Name, Assignment, & Resources) to help get one's thoughts in order so all the pertinent information can be relayed to back-up outside the scene to help effect the rescue. We actually had a great turn-out, given that we're missing a couple winter-over folks that are in McMurdo for R&R this week and the fact that with all the stuff going on with my alter-ego as science tech I didn't manage to get notices for the training made until yesterday afternoon.

While doing this training in the gymnasium we had to skirt around the big fabric wind deflector that all the hullabaloo and construction are attempting to install between the station's two pods. I guess it is made from the same fabric as the pseudo-mountain rooftop of the Denver International Airport, and is a beige color instead of the gun-metal blue of the rest of the station's siding. The construction folks have the fabric laid out flat to try and get all the wrinkles out before they install it.

I'm a bit tired this morning after staying up late watching the Fellowship of the Ring. It's very cool to know I'm headed back to the lush, green land where that was all filmed in only 10 or so short months. Seeing the verdant landscape, especially in the Shire and along the Anduin River, really were striking in contrast to how inhospitable my current environs are. Liquid water flowing across a landscape with rock, soil, vegetation, and critters is about as far from what is here on the Antarctic Plateau as you can get.