Two sick workers evacuated from a remote US research station near the South Pole reached Chile on Wednesday after a risky rescue mission carried out in the dead of Antarctica’s winter, US officials said.
A Twin Otter turboprop plane flew in dark and cold conditions to pick up the workers from the Amundsen-Scott station, about 250m from the geographic South Pole, said Peter West, a spokesman for the US National Science Foundation.
After a stop at a British station on the edge of Antarctica lasting several hours, another Twin Otter flew the two workers to Puntas Arenas, Chile’s southernmost city, the foundation later said in a statement posted on its Facebook page.
Photo: AP
The plane landed at about 9:40pm on Wednesday.
The plane’s crew and a medical team had made the 10-hour journey to the South Pole from the British Antarctic Survey’s Rothera research station about 2,200km away in the middle of the continent’s 24-hour winter on Tuesday night to reach the patients, who could not be treated on site.
The foundation — the US research agency that operates the Amundsen-Scott Station — organized the rescue mission last week given the condition of the first patient, which was not disclosed for privacy reasons.
“It was really an emergency,” West said.
It later became apparent that the second worker also needed to be evacuated.
The sick workers — employees of the US company Lockheed Martin who worked on base logistics and were not identified — were then to be transferred to a hospital in South America, West said, without giving further details.
The Amundsen-Scott base was home to 48 people — 39 men and nine women — who work on-site throughout the austral winter, which spans February through October.
Near the world’s southernmost point, workers spend the period withstanding nearly complete darkness and dramatically low temperatures — on Tuesday, the thermometer dropped to minus-60?C.
It was only the third time that an emergency rescue operation has been launched in the middle of winter.
In 2001, the only doctor at the Amundsen-Scott station was suffering from a life-threatening pancreatic condition and required urgent evacuation. A second medical evacuation was carried out that year.
In 1999, the US station’s doctor, Jerri Nielsen, who was self-treating her own breast cancer, required medical evacuation, but weather conditions were more favorable, as the mission took place in the spring.
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