STOP..... Tanker Time!

Today our crew went to a fuels briefing for Tanker Offload.  I capitalized the event because vessel season (for a couple three weeks starting in mid- to late-January, where various ships come into Winter Quarters Bay and remind us that McMurdo is, indeed, an oceanfront town) is the most exciting time of the season.  It's probably the most stressful time, and it's at the end of the season, so everyone's chomping at the bit to go home.

Tanker Offload is the name we give to the 4 or 5 days of setting up hoses, pipelines, and valves to offload a BUNCH (5 million gallons) of fuel from the fuel tanker ship into our bulk tanks on station.  People are working on offload 24 hours a day from before the boat gets here until after it leaves.  The GA's are, like always, the temp workers, and Alex Morris (the station Fuels Supervisor) will be taking 3 of us for the dayshift and 3 for nights.  They are 12-hr days, beginning at 0545 (that's 5:45am for you civilians) and ending at 1745 (5:45pm).  Read = time of massive exhaustion.  It looks like if I'm here for tanker (and there's a chance that I won't be because I'm going to WAIS divide next week), I may end up on the night shift, which means I get two days off to "transition to nights" and some time to transition back.  We'll see.

The GA's will have 3 jobs during tanker offload: walking the line, dipping tanks, and manning the pier valves.  Walking the line is exactly what it sounds like - we walk alongside the hard fuel lines for about 1.2 miles (each way) from the tanker at the ice pier to the bulk tanks at the top of the hill overlooking town.  And then we walk down again. FOR 12 HOURS.  My iPod will be getting charged a lot if I end up being a linewalker.

Dipping the tank is how we measure how much fuel is in a fuel tank; we use a special tape measure with a weighted bar and thermometer at the bottom, drop it to exactly the bottom of the tank, then read the tape like you'd read an oil dipstick in a car.  This seems simple, but does take some finesse.  Firstly, the tape is flexible, so if you don't pay attention to exactly when the weight just kisses the bottom of the tank (and for a Madagascar 2 reference, "just a little kiss, like you're kissing your sister"), it will fold down and ruin your reading.  And, a fuel-soaked tape and a dry tape look very similar, and if you don't have a guess within a few inches of where the transition from shiny black tape to slightly less shiny black tape is, and you don't have a very clear, sunny day but not too sunny and no wind, it's easy to miss.  We are in Antarctica, so you can imagine the chances of a perfect day.

The last task is manning the pier valves.  There are 6 valves (if I remember correctly) on hard metal fuel lines at the pier.  During tanker, we'll run soft hose from those valves onto the boat.  If you're lucky, you will watch the valves for 12 hours and nothing will happen.  If you're unlucky, something will happen and you will have a spill or leak on your hands.  It's one of those low-probability but high-consequence situations where it really is worth having someone there if something goes awry, because there's about 800 gallons of fuel per minute going through those lines.

Fuel tanker will be exciting, I think, despite the horrendous hours, monotonous tasks, and immense responsibility.  Plus we get to carry radios and say things like "Roger that" and "over."  Isn't that enough?