A big part of my job is sorting the trash here on station and then getting it ready to be sent back to recycling centers in the US. But another very important part of my job is spill cleanup. Sometimes there are oil spills from the vehicles we use down here; vehicles as small as trucks all the way to really big ones like airplanes! There are also chemical spills sometimes from experiments the scientists are doing. We try to keep Antarctica really clean so that the research scientists do isn’t affected by pollution. Even a spill as small as a little gas leaking out of a car, something that wouldn’t be a big deal at home, needs to be cleaned up right away down here!
Oil spills are pretty easy to clean up – we wear gloves, and sometimes face masks, and shovel the dirty snow into barrels. But chemical spills can be dangerous if we don’t use the right equipment. Before we all came down to Antarctica we had to go to a town in Texas called Corpus Christi to train on how to clean up chemicals.
If something is hazardous it means it is dangerous. HAZMAT stands for HAZardous MATerial, so our training was called HAZMAT training. We had to learn how to tell different chemicals apart and we had to learn how to use our special protective gear.
There are SCBA face masks. SCBA stands for Self Contained Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA stands for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. With SCUBA gear you can go underwater). These are full face masks that connect to an oxygen tank. That way, if there are fumes or gases coming off the chemical, we will have clean air to breathe while we clean it up.
We also had to wear special protective suits, called "Level A" suits. Level A means they are the highest type of protection. They cover us up completely – even our feet, hands and whole head. This is so that if there is a chemical in the air, or a liquid we need to walk through, it won't touch our skin. They are hard to move in because they are so bulky, so we had to practice walking and picking things up in them. They look pretty funny!
The week we trained in Texas was also a good time to meet the crew I work with. We went to class every day, but we also did fun things like go to the beach together.
So far there haven’t been any chemical spills down here, but there have been oil spills. Whenever a spill occurs, even if it is the middle of the night, we get a call and have to go clean it up. I don’t mind though, because I know that what I am doing helps keep Antarctica clean and safe for science!
No comments:
Post a Comment