power conservation critical

The title of this blog is what is seen flashing on our weather condition scroll in most of the buildings on station: POWER CONSERVATION CRITICAL!

Yesterday and today are strange sort of days. It goes back two weeks when our #1 Generator failed. It was a big failure that will take a month or more to repair. Since then we have been operating on #2 Gen and generator named "Cat-in-the-Box." We also had a emergency contingency plan developed if one of these generators failed. Last week, #2 Gen failed. We had a power outage, our contingency plan worked, the problem was resolved in a few hours and we had two generators back. This week, we had preventative maintenance done on both of the running generators. The first scheduled maintenance went well for Cat-in-the-Box.

Yesterday, because #2 Gen has so much riding on it, most work stations and buildings were shut down to enable the work to be done without overstimulating the Cat-in-the-Box. Rather than going to work in the morning, I started at 9am with the espresso bar for those who needed a place to congregate. Then I had CDA (Community Dining Attendant) duty and then took the rest of the afternoon at a casual pace. Everything went well, until #2 Gen failed again late in the afternoon; after it had been up and running for two hours. Now we are in emergency energy mode.

Our weather condition scroll is flashing, our television channels have been reduced to a message about turning things off; including the television, and we have received at least a dozen e-mails about what to expect and what to do from the past week.

Last year, a friend of mine commented that I make up a lot of “worst case scenarios.” This winter, it seems that each time a worst case scenario contingency plan is put into place, we get an opportunity to try it out soon after! First with the snow and, now, a couple times for generator problems. I hope that we get a waiver on this year’s big MCI (Mass Casualty Incident) drill since we have dealt with a number of emergency situations already!

I am grateful to be in the dorm which services the galley and has its’ own generator. The two other dorms were reportedly quite cool when people arrived home yesterday evening. Folks are working to resolve this problem if it can be fixed. For the time being, the station runs on our back up generators and Cat-in-the-Box.