Where do you go to the bathroom? That’s a pretty good question. It depends a lot where you are. If you are in the confines of McMurdo there are lot’s of buildings with bathrooms just like being back home, though not all. Where I work at the carp shop there is no running water. We have the next step down a heated building with a “U” barrel (urine). We are pretty lucky to have heat in there as other places have none. The U barrels are collected through the season and shipped home for disposal. Some of the buildings have unheated u barrels which can get pretty cold. If you are out on a hike they designate “pee” sites by marking with a yellow flag. The idea is that it’s all in one place and there isn’t a lot of yellow snow.
For years the sewage from town was just dumped into the ocean. The National Science Foundation took over from the Navy a couple of years ago and has been on a program to clean everything up. This year we are building a sewage plant that will remove all the solid waste to be shipped back to the states and all the liquid waste will be treated with UV light to kill anything that remains. NSF has been pretty diligent about the environment. Every last piece of garbage is sorted into recycling categories and shipped back to the states for processing. That’s a big jump from the old days when it was just dumped. They’ve also been going around to the old stations and digging up all the old dump sites and bringing the trash back for processing. It’s kinda neat to be a part of the process.
mike