Two dead at U.S. Antarctic station
An accident of some kind has apparently killed two individuals at the U.S. McMurdo station in Antarctica yesterday.
The National Science Foundation says two technicians working on a fire-suppression system at an Antarctica scientific station were found unconscious and died.
The foundation said Wednesday the two had been working in a building at McMurdo Station, which is on Ross Island. It says they were found on the floor by a helicopter pilot who had landed after spotting what appeared to be smoke from the building.
Nothing more is as yet known.
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An accident of some kind has apparently killed two individuals at the U.S. McMurdo station in Antarctica yesterday.
The National Science Foundation says two technicians working on a fire-suppression system at an Antarctica scientific station were found unconscious and died.
The foundation said Wednesday the two had been working in a building at McMurdo Station, which is on Ross Island. It says they were found on the floor by a helicopter pilot who had landed after spotting what appeared to be smoke from the building.
Nothing more is as yet known.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
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3. A Paypal Donation:
5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
Hmmm, did they see a dog running around?
This unfortunately sounds like a malfunction or a misfiring of the system that they were installing, if I were to take a wild guess. Fire suppression systems starve fire of oxygen and any thing else that is enveloped by it.
????
Halon
Are there not far better alternates to halon?
I forget the product name (Novek?) but I remember a product that suppressed the fire but did not remove the all the O2. It was also nonconductive- you could submerse a laptop in it without fear of shorting it out.
Perhaps halon is required in the cold of Antarctica but the risks are well known and I think alternatives exist.
Wodun
good one.
Chris–
(thanks for that tidbit!)
here we go…. ( it’s a fluoroketone, “developed as a halon replacement and hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) alternative.” )
“3M Brand Novec 1230” Fire Protection Fluid
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/novec-us/applications/fire-suppression/
(with embedded video)
“Novec 1230 fluid extinguishes a fire before it starts by rapidly removing heat. In a typical total flooding system, the fluid is stored as a liquid in cylinders pressurized with nitrogen. Automatic detection sensors trigger release when the fire is at the incipient stage, extinguishing it in mere seconds. Novec 1230 fluid evaporates 50 times faster than water. In fact, you could soak a paperback book in a bath of Novec 1230 fluid and within a minute, pick it up and read where you left off.”
“The Thing” (1951)
-excerpt-
https://youtu.be/tp1UPGesJCE
1:46