11 December 2009 Shower Day!

Water is one of the most essential chemicals to life on Earth.  Water is a precious resource, and we tend to take it for granted in the US.  We enjoy clean drinking water straight from the faucet, take long hot showers, flush our toilets, water our lawns, wash our cars (and watch it flow down the street into our rivers and streams...).  Not to mention all the water used for industrial and agricultural processes!

Here at the south pole, water is a precious resource to a much higher degree.  But wait, aren't we sitting on top of 2 miles of frozen water?  Yes!  But, the key word there is "frozen".  You can't drink ice, you can't shower in it, you can't cook with it.  To use it, you must generate heat to melt it.  Which uses another precious commodity here: fuel.

Fuel at the South Pole is valued, according to most estimates I've heard, at about $30 a gallon.  JP8 jet fuel is used to fly down the C-130s that keep the place well stocked, and the leftover fuel is drained from their tanks leaving them enough to fly back to McMurdo Station.  So, every gallon of fuel is flown in.  That ain't cheap!

To create liquid water, the station must melt the ice.  To get hot water, they use even more fuel.  Because of this, water conservation is taken very seriously here.

So: shower day!  Polies are allowed two showers a week, at two minutes each.  Four minutes a week of hot water!  They facilitate this by putting in shower heads with a little valve so you can soak yourself, turn off the water, soap up, then turn the water back on to rinse.  It's not bad once you get used to it!  There are no "official" shower times and no one really polices you, it's on the honor system but if you flaunt the policy you'll definitely be mocked and possibly even reprimanded.

And with only two showers a week - doesn't everyone reek?  Well, to some extent you get used to a general funkiness.  But really, it is so cold and dry here, you don't build up much of a stench that you would under normal circumstances.  The bacteria that make your armpits stink thrive in warm moist areas (like your armpits...) but in the low humidity here, they don't do so well.

Two exceptions to water conservation: drinking, and hand-washing.  We are encouraged to drink lots of water to stay hydrated - the altitude and low humidity make it easy to get dehydrated, which causes many problems.  And we are encouraged to wash hands frequently (though with conservation in mind, we turn the water off while soaping up our hands) - to avoid the spread of diseases (especially "the crud" - a general category of viral cold- and flu-like symptoms) in such a small enclosed community.

When I get back to the US, I am going to try to stick to the two-minute shower idea to help conserve water.  If my shower runs 5 gallons a minute, and I take a two-minute shower each day instead of ten (or more!), I could save 40 gallons a day, 280 gallons of water a week!  That doesn't even include the gas I save by not heating up as much water.  I encourage you to get your family to try it out at home too!