Monday, April 30, 2007

Daylight at last!

After a hard week of feeling like a zombie, I'm glad to have rejoined the ranks of the living and be working days again. This is made a lot easier by being on Melt Tank digging duty, meaning a good bit of exercise after breakfast.


Filling the Melt Tank

The melt tank provides all our water. It's set in a tunnel complex buried under the snow with a half-meter diameter pipe into which we chuck snow to fill it. Once a week Andy or Matt build a large cone around the hole with a bulldozer. This makes life easier as we just have to chip away at the top and let gravity do the rest. With four people it takes about half an hour to fill.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice photo, looks like a NASA promo shot for the next mars landing.

How "dirty" is it out there? I doubt there are many muddy footprints around, and I presume you've got some cunning way of dealing with sewerage, what about engine oil and exhaust fumes?

Just wondering as you seem to just dig up a load of snow outside your backdoor and shovel it into your water tank.

Have a good un, Skinny

8:21 am GMT  
Blogger David Vaynor Evans said...

Hi Dave,

As you say, it's pretty clean down here and there's as much done as possible to keep it that way. All waste engine fluids are shipped out for recycling, as is all hard waste. Only biodegradable matter is burried.

Power is supplied by diesel generator sets, chosen for their reliability. Exhaust gasses are put through heat exchangers to provided water and space heating for the buildings so very little is wasted.

The only problem with polution to the snow with when penguins crap in by the tank! I've not seen it yet, but apparantly it does happen...

9:39 am GMT  

Post a Comment

<< Home