Two events this week have brought home to me how precarious our existence on this tiny island in the middle of the Southern Ocean actually is. The Government of South Georgia, a few years ago, built a dam on Gull Lake, across the cove from the Base, and installed a hydroelectric plant. This was done to not only reduce the environmental impact of the Base but also to save money in the long term by requiring less diesel. This is not the first dam on the island. There is one above KEP which is no longer in use and which is crumbling and there is another in Bore Valley where we get our water from.
The plant had been working fine until last year, when the lights started dimming, and they continue to dim sporadically now. It was thought that it was the height of water in the lake but it is now known that there is a faulty spear valve (whatever that is) which keeps sticking. We have had a couple of power outages every so often but it was on Sunday night that we had a big one. This went on for so long that all the back up batteries died which meant a loss of network and the boilers also dropped in temperature so much that it took longer than normal to bring them back on line. This was all at 0200 so when alarms finally started going off (strangely until Monday morning there was no alarm for a power down, only for when systems start going down) a couple of us had to get up to deal with turning the hydro back on and checking the systems. I was up because my room is closest to the summary alarm panel in the bar which went off.
Discussing all this with the government officers one of them told me that the second winter the base was run by the military the precariousness of life was brought rapidly home to them when a small stone about 4cm across got stuck in the pipe up at the Bore Valley dam. This caused the pipe to block and begin to freeze. As soon as they realised what was going on the whole garrison had to go up and dig the pipe out by hand to clear the blockage. If they had left it for another 6 hours the pipe would have completely frozen and they would have had to have been withdrawn from the island for the winter. It was a slightly sobering moment as I got back into bed with the light just beginning to show over the eastern mountains and to think how much we rely on a few small things being just right.
The other event that brought home the fragility of the human body was on Friday. There is a government habitat restoration survey team on the island at the moment, doing baseline surveys all over the local and outlying areas before the rat eradication teams come. We had to take them out to Carlita Bay on the Busen Peninsula close to the Neumayer Glacier. This trip required two boats, the Jet boat to carry the passengers (pax) and cargo and the RIB to which we would transfer the pax and cargo for a beach landing. We were then going to do a familiarisation tour around one side of Cumberland West Bay for me to see where things were.
Half way to Carlita Matt turned to pick up the radio to call in an ‘ops normal’ and with that slight movement completely threw his back out. He was in such excruciating agony that he couldn’t move and had to lie down on the floor of the cabin. We gave him painkillers and made him as comfortable as possible but had to complete the drop off so I made sure he was able to continue and we carried on. Very luckily I had the RIB with its cox and crew as a back up and so was able to complete the transfer safely but it was quite tricky keeping the launch safely in the middle of the bay out of the way of the ice, helping transfer cargo and pax, helping Matt take off his boatsuit to remove a painful piece of padding and then put him back in it and deal with all the comms at the same time. Half way through I paused and thanked the gods that I already knew how to drive a jet boat (some boatys have to learn on the job) and that dealing with a crisis on a boat is what I have been trained to do for 9 years with the RNLI.
My favourite moment of the day was when Matt, lying on the floor, asked me “are we near the entrance yet?” and I had to reply: “Matt, I have never been here before, I have no idea” at which point we both fell into a fit of giggles. He is recovering and will have full range of movement soon but it again drove home how fragile the body is, one wrong move and you are completely incapacitated. I did think for a moment “what on earth are we doing out here when something could go so dramatically wrong so easily”; the next moment an albatross dipped low past the window and the thought was pushed from my mind.
Life and death are ever present here. I walked to Penguin River today with the three chaps from the Museum, Darren, Gemma and Thomas, and as we were returning along the beach we suddenly realised the agitated female Furry in front of us was giving birth. We stopped and watched as this black, slimy torpedo slipped out from between her rear flippers and she calmly turned round from nipping at the male who was annoying her and gently licked the pup’s face. We all held our breath for a long 30 seconds until finally a tiny flipper flailed out and hit its mother in the flank. A minute after that it was standing and butting its mother for milk. These little things are born with a skinful of attitude. I met one on the track the other day, not 30 minutes old, which greeted me with a growl and a baring of teeth. The effect was ruined by the fluffy pelt sticking up on its head like a Mohican and the sweetness of the growl but the message was clearly there.
Walking further along from where we had just seen a life start, I realised that sticking out of the soil the tussock mounds are made from were old discarded whale bones, from the days when they were towed out into the cove and just abandoned to the vagaries of the currents. Standing on a tussock half made out of a whale vertebra, watching a pup, sheltering in the tussock, growl at the end of your walking pole, does make one think about the circularity of life and the ease with which nature creates life from death.
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