4 ms·
I'm curious why many of the doors have deadbolts. In an environment where you presumably know every single human on the site and there are probably no other hu
by dheera 4y ago
I'm curious why many of the doors have deadbolts.
In an environment where you presumably know every single human on the site and there are probably no other humans in any direction for 1000 km, is there a need for locks on anything other than bedrooms and bathrooms?
- _dain_ 4y ago> I'm curious why many of the doors have deadbolts. to keep the Thing out
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoPenguins. Penguins can't open deadbolts. (/s, obviously...)
- bell-cot 4y agoBut if you merely hide the key under the doormat, a Yeti can.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoMy wife points out that you can't hide it on top of the doorframe either, since the Yeti is taller than you...
- jamincan 4y agoMcMurdo is one of the major logistics hubs for the entire continent, this means that it has a relatively high population (~1000 in summer), but also that a lot of people pass through on their way to other parts of Antarctica. It's definitely not a situation where everyone knows everyone else.
- mastax 4y agoProbably just a more secure way to latch the door when there's lots of wind and snow attempting to push the door in. Also lots of standard doors come with deadbolts pre-installed or at least a deadbolt hole drilled through.
- petsfed 4y agoThe threat is not from strangers, but from fully vetted and trusted community members having some kind of psychological event that leads them to bad actions. The various entities working at McMurdo do pretty thorough pre-deployment psych evals to try to catch the kinds of people who would break vital equipment (think furnaces, or water-treatment equipment or high-cost/one-of-a-kind research equipment) or equipment necessary to fix vital equipment. But there's really no guarantee until you're out there that any given person is actually trustworthy. To say nothing of emergent psychological events that would drive a person to do such a thing. And anyway, the kind of person who wants to go to Antarctica frequently doesn't conform to our expectations of what a well-adjusted personality looks like. When your threat model is "trustworthy community members who occasionally and unpredictably become threats", you lock doors.
- rexarex 4y agoThey don’t do psych assessments anymore I believe
- bacon_waffle 4y agoI've been down with the USAP a couple times, most recently about a decade ago, and in that span the psych eval was required for winterover deployments but not summers. It was very questionable. I like to think that a spoof "How to Pass the Psych Eval" video we made one winter might've somehow contributed to that particular system being torn down a few years later, though I don't have firsthand experience with the system that replaced it. My understanding is that the new one involves more "team building" type stuff before deployment, which sounds like a step in the right direction. One issue is that by the time a person has gotten to that late stage in the hiring process, they are often deeply invested in deploying - having packed things in to storage, quit "real world" job, etc. and their nominal manager understands that. Another issue is that people behave differently in different environments, and Antarctica is quite unlike Denver.
- bizzyb 4y agocorrect, no psych evals for USAP participants.
- jccooper 4y agoMc Murdo is not the ISS. I think it's telling that it's referred to as a "town". Plenty of unauthorized personnel.