Friday 13 August 2004
Extreme Antarctic plumbing
Once you've been living down here a while it's very easy to start taking things for granted. I'm not just talking about the lifestyle or the unique surroundings but also the simple home comforts that we all expect to have like electricity, heat and water. You forget that how harsh the environment really is when you only have to go outside for brief journeys between buildings. When it comes down to it it's a pretty impressive feat that such a small group of people can live in such comfort in a temperatures down to -50C, isolated from supplies and support for nine months of the year.
We've had a cold spell recently and the temperature dropped to -46C which was the lowest so far this year. In the morning a few of us were sitting around having breakfast when we heard a loud bang and the rush of water from further up the corridor. We rushed over to find sewage spraying at high pressure from a pipe in the ceiling of the laundry room! We ran up and down the corridor madly trying the find Nigel our plumber - not really knowing what else to do. By the time we'd found him the pressure had dropped but the whole laundry room was a complete mess - the walls, the washers and dryers, the ceiling, everything was covered. I was on cleaning duty that day so I helped out pumping the liquid off the floor and wiping down the walls as best we could while Nigel looked into the problem.
The rest of that day was a long one for Nigel, Graeme, Tommo and Graham. They found that the initial build up of pressure was caused by a frozen pipe underneath the platform, but the resulting stationary water lead to several more freezes at cold points within the ceiling cavities. As the day progressed they kept having to release the pressure on those sealed sections of pipe, resulting in more unpleasant showers of waste around the base - poor Nigel even got a mouthful at one point while working on a section in the corridor ceiling panels. The pipes leading up from the melt tank froze as well so for a while we had no fresh water supply either.
The tech services guys did a great job and got to the bottom of the problem and over the rest of the week things slowly returned to normal. We had a proper clean up of the laundry room with Craig and Ed very decently taking on the dirty part of the job. The final cause seemed to be cold air finding its way inside the building's outer layer creating a wind chill which proved too much for the heating elements on the pipes to deal with. We've had some more cold temperatures since then without further problems so hopefully it's sorted out now.
Posted by simon at 9:20 AM