Submitted by Laurie Connell
It is time to ship cargo!
Even tough we have a few months to go before we leave for Antarctica it
is time for us to ship our cargo so that it will be there for us when we
arrive. This is a critical part of the
planning process with many steps. Each
piece of cargo has to have a complete inventory, size (cube) and weight. It is shipped from Maine to Port Hueneme, CA
so that it can be put into the cargo stream.
We call Port Hueneme PH for short- one of the very many acronyms we use
while working with the Antarctic program.
In PH each cargo crate is given a transport control number (TCN)- this
is just like what companies like Fed Ex use to track their shipments.
From PH the cargo travels to the Antarctic Gateway of
Christchurch New Zealand.
From there it is loaded onto military cargo planes and flown
down to McMurdo Station on large pallets.
When we pack we have to be careful that we do not use any
shipping “peanuts”. These polystyrene
packing materials are banned under the Antarctic Conservation act! I prepare a detailed inventory list of each
item in each crate- this one has ascent boots, extra arm coats and cameras for
our Mount Erebus volcanic caves work.
Then each box gets labeled with stickers that tell the cargo
handlers if they can freeze or not- as you can see all of ours are DNF- that
means Do Not Freeze. I have packed
things with batteries in these crates and freezing is bad for them.
Then each crate is banded and shipped out!
