Alrighty, I know this is my third post in like an hour, but I've gotta say this paraphrased conversation was the highlight of my day. This morning (really afternoon, but as Molly observed it's always mornining in McMurdo!) Bodie, Tonya, and I were having our little morning meeting before Tonya and I headed out to the fuel pits. Bodie was going over the (real) morning's safety topic - thermal expansion in fuel pipelines.

Pretty much anywhere else in the world, all the valves on fuel pipelines are built with pressure bypass setups so that any excessive pressure bypasses closed valves and gets vented out to a tank or another fuel line. Whenever fuels engineers from outside come down here and see our system, they're always a combonation of being scared and amazed that we work with what we've got, and don't have all that many problems with it. McMurdo only has one of those pressure bypass valves - it's on the mogas line. The kicker is that one pressure bypass valve, on the mogas line, was installed backwards, so it's not really functional anyhow.