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Stroke Victim Stranded At South Pole Base
Hugh Pickens writes "Renee-Nicole Douceur, the winter manager at the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole, was sitting at her desk on August 27 when she suffered a stroke. 'I looked at the screen and was like, "Oh my God, half the screen is missing."' But both the National Science Foundation and contractor Raytheon say it would be too dangerous to send a rescue plane to the South Pole now, since Douceur's condition is not life-threatening. Douceur's niece Sydney Raines has set up a Web site that urges people to call officials at Raytheon and the National Science Foundation. However, temperatures must be higher than -50 degrees F for most planes to land at Amundsen-Scott or the fuel will turn to jelly. While that threshold has been crossed at the South Pole recently, the temperature still regularly dips to 70 degrees below zero. 'It's like no other airfield in the U.S.,' says Ronnie Smith, a former Air Force navigator who has flown there about 300 times. A pilot landing a plane there in winter, when it is dark 24 hours a day, would be flying blind 'because you can't install lights under the ice.' The most famous instance of a person being airlifted from the South Pole for medical reasons was that involving Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald, a doctor who diagnosed and treated her own breast cancer. Using only ice and a local anesthetic, she performed her own biopsy with the help of a resident welder. When she departed on October 16, 1999, it was the earliest in the Antarctic spring that a plane had taken off."
Not only is the condition not life threatening at the moment, the rescue wouldn't achieve much since by the time the victim could be transported out of there, any damage would've been done already. Not to mention that putting her into an unpressurized plane (if it's too cold for the C130) could be dangerous by itself.
She had the stroke a month and a half ago. The next scheduled flight is one week away. Maybe this would have been newsworthy on September 10th, but at this point, if she's functional, she can last another week.
Honestly, how bad would she (and her family back home) feel if they send a "rescue flight" tomorrow, and it crashes on attempted landing, killing the crew? Or how bad would her family feel if it landed successfully, managed to take off again, but then the engines die halfway to the coast due to jelled fuel, killing the crew AND her?
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Raines has set up a Web site that urges people to call officials at Raytheon and the National Science Foundation.
With the purpose of what? Endangering more lives? This isn't a rational plea for help, it's irrational panic.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The South pole isn't apart of the US.
Yes it is.
That's precisely why she didn't insist that they fly before it was technically possible. Today we have all kinds of wonderful things like heated fuel tanks and satellite imagery which collectively make an extraction not only possible, but feasible.
What is supposed to separate us from the "lower" animals is stuff like compassion. Except, as it turns out, they have plenty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Having been the guy who's made the call to not fly a rescue mission, I sympathise. However, killing 3 people (or 7 in my case) to potentially save 1 person is a hell of a call to make. My personal risk tolerance is about E-2. However, when the risk is killing the entire crew, it drops, precipitously. Not only do you risk killing the crew, but you also lose capacity to support other rescue missions. Killing a crew to rescue someone who's stable is not a good idea. I've burried too many friends for those types of missions.
As for the medical attendant, well, again, consider the risk. That's a 3rd person to kill on the flight, and substantially limits the fuel I can carry, the choice of aircraft I have, and makes the high altitude takeoff more dangerous, particularly with a light aircraft.