Disaster Zone

I slept the whole ride back to the Pole on Tuesday and woke up when the plane landed, only something was a bit different this time. When I walked through the door, the emergency lights were on, it smelled like smoke, the power was out, people were running around trying to talk over the alarm and I was sent to the power plant immediately to catch up on what was going on. Without getting into technical details, our exhaust heat exchanger on one of the generators exploded, blew out a 4" pipe spewing hot glycol over even hotter equipment, started smoking making the power plant a terrible haze of chemicals. Two people went down from inhalation and a few more got sick. It took a while to get the emergency power plant stabalized (one generator can't carry even a minimal station load, so they had to fire up both) and meanwhile everyone was cleaning up the power plant and trying to get the only available main generator cleaned off an running and also getting another one fixed which had been undergoing maintenance at the the time. Basically, we were all worried about 5 generators at once, and finally got stable power back around 4:00pm. Then we spent the next several hours refilling the glycol system (main heat source)which was what I was primarily working on from 5pm to midnight with the foremen. The power has failed before, but not to this extent and we had to cut back power for the major science groups until we knew we could handle the load, which turned out to be overnight in this case, which apparently hasn't ever happened as far as anyone remembered. What a day. Things have settled down besides a lot of debrief meetings. This has big implications for the winter season and there have been previous thoughts that this system isn't going to be up and running in time, so it will be interesting to see what happens.