HR on 'The Ice': in the extreme conditions of Antarctica, there is no place for weak HR practices

HR Magazine, June, 2004 by Ann Pomeroy

Dr. Ron Shemenski, former doctor at South Pole Station, had to attend survival school (known as "Happy Campers School") and still remembers the first day his group met.

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"We sat around in a circle and were asked where we were from. 'I've got a storage shed in Spokane,' said one. 'I've got a storage shed in Atlanta,' said another." Since many people travel extensively when they are off The Ice, he says, home for them may be wherever they are at the moment.

Network administrator Dennis Hoffman is an exception to this rule: He spends the winter at McMurdo planning renovations for his house back in Arizona. Then he goes home and gets the contractors in. For him, it's the best of both worlds. "It works out to be about six [months] on and six [months] off [work]," he says. "Most people work 50 weeks to get two off."

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Doctors who rely on "handholding" and referring their patients to specialists won't be successful in Antarctica, says Dr. Kathleen Hales.

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For Hales, though, who is spending her first winter at McMurdo Station, this is an opportunity to challenge herself. "If you're going to be here," she says, "winter is the time to be here. That's when it's most different from what you know at home."

Hales is familiar with remote locations. She gave up a rural family practice six years ago and began taking temporary assignments in different communities. In addition to living in Central America, she spent four years in Barrow, Alaska, which, she says, is about the same latitude north as McMurdo is south.

Serving McMurdo's small, fixed winter population is similar to being a doctor in a small town, says Hales, and she thrives on the intellectual and professional challenges of being isolated from the rest of the world. "The medicine is the same," she says, "so I like the challenge of a new environment."

One of the challenges of being at McMurdo is that the fastest possible ambulance time is seven to 10 days--rather than the three to five minutes many doctors in the States face.

McMurdo is a great place, she says. The accommodations and the food are better than she expected--"but it's not Pole." Deploring the fact that, except for the manned space program, there is not much opportunity today to "launch into the unknown," Hales says longingly, "I'd love to do Pole. Pole is the end of the earth."

Dr. Ron Shemenski, now the polar program's medical director, first went to Pole as the station's doctor--and would like to go back. But because he had to be evacuated in 2001 after suffering a gall bladder attack, he is now medically ineligible to return to the base. "If they won't let me go back to Antarctica," he says, "I hear they are going to Mars!"

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When Dennis Hoffman first came to McMurdo Station, in 1985 at age 27, "it was the wild, wild west," he says. "There was no e-mail, TV was rudimentary, and communications were sparse and limited. People really had to get along then."