Episode 10 - Lessons from the Ice, Part I (Kate Koons)

And I asked for permission from the scientists that this actually happened to and And I asked them permission about three years ago if I could use this story as kind of a case study for when I brief science teams and field teams to go into the field, because it has a lot of really poignant things that we can fully speak to when prepping ourselves to go out into the field.

And it also happens to be a person that was my first field experience in Antarctica.

I spent about a month with this person and their partner and their team up on Mount Erebus, which is the world's southernmost active volcano, a pretty cool place to spend your first kind of field campaign in Antarctica.

mentors for me in many ways.

So I'm going to share their story.

And I guess I'll start by just maybe painting the picture here.

So when I was working as a contractor, I would go into the field with different groups and kind of do whatever they needed, help them set up camp.

Sometimes I would cook, sometimes I would carry gear.

Sometimes I was, you know, and all the while kind of looking out for the safety of a group.

But sometimes we would have also a mountaineer who specifically just did the technical stuff and I would be managing all the other things.

And so I would do that on a contract basis in between Noel's work and all the other things.

And when I was in that role, we did not have a field risk manager as a job.

I'm the only person who has held the job as field risk manager.

It was a new position in 2020.

But I want to be really clear that the functions of my job, it's not like they didn't exist, but they existed on multiple people's plates, if that makes sense.

So it wasn't one person's entire purview to look after.

How do we manage risk? And that's all you look at.

And so my role now, I don't supervise anybody.

I really kind of work with all of our teams across field.

And so that didn't really exist.

So so there were some things that we are now utilizing that I think set us up better.

With that said, I'm not sure that like this incident wouldn't have happened.

So I want to make sure that that's very clear.

That's not like something I did that has made things like infinitely safer.

But.