This week at Casey: 16 March 2018

A quiet week with the winter team settling into life alone on the ice.

We've had a bit of a rest and reset with a couple of late starts, but then an intense ‘spring’ (or is that winter?) clean to get the station spic and span and reduced in size to support just 26 instead of the large summer numbers. West wing and east wing rooms all closed up; excess linen, crockery and cutlery all packed away until next summer; a good scrub of the mess and kitchen inside and out; and then the mess was reset to a big ‘family’ table instead of the rows and rows to support 100+ at a sitting.

The Restaurant at the End of the World opened its doors for the first sitting of the season on Saturday. An acclaimed food reviewer and blogger was lucky enough to secure a reservation and will be publishing a full review in next weeks Station News. Suffice to say, a delicious meal was presented by Dom and enjoyed very much by all. The evening was topped off by clear skies allowing for some spectacular aurora viewing and despite the cold temperatures of −20°C, with wind chill −29°C, intrepid photographers persisted and some great shots resulted.

The refurbishment of the Red Shed (living quarters) has continued at a great pace. We are now living amongst renovations. However, we have made spaces where we can still get away from the renos and it’s fantastic to see the progress as we return from work and see what changes have been made in just a day. The big effort of the week has been the ‘dock-doors', with a hole cut into the outer-shell of the red shed and then the end of a shipping container inserted to create the doors; an ingenious solution providing easy access for getting project items into and out of the building. Great work from such a small team.

Otherwise, we continue on with life on station, establishing work and social routines to take us through the next 7.5 months, winterising vehicles and buildings, training those last arrivals on station, and looking forward to what winter will bring.

By Rebecca, Station Leader.

Today the Casey Station Water and Sewage Department has come together to give the wonderful readers a brief insight into Casey’s world of maintenance plumbing. We have had a very busy season so far and have achieved many of our goals as well as doing our normal daily duties.

As a part of our daily jobs, we pump water from the melt lake (situated behind the station) into the holding tanks in the tank house (we are an imaginative bunch). Obviously the amount varies depending on the usage on station. It’s sometimes up to and above 15,000 litres per day during the very high occupation levels we occasionally see here at Casey. Thankfully that doesn’t happen too often.

Next, we will endeavor to go to our happy place (the waste water treatment facility). There we clean and maintain our wonderful machine and cross our fingers and toes and everything else we can think of that it doesn’t have a breakdown. Of course that doesn’t always work (see pics).

Now as part of the Water and Sewage Department we also have the waste management facility (Warren) where we manage all our waste. Unfortunately not everything burns, (contrary to popular belief) and we have discovered some very bizarre and peculiar items.

Once these few little jobs are completed then we set out to complete the rest of the day fixing all the little hiccups along the way, such as the occasional tap or sewage pump failure, or filling the workshop water tank, because the other trades do like their coffee and get really upset and cranky when they don’t get any.

Thank you for reading and have a nice day.

By Scott (Scotty) Beardsley, Casey Water Board.