The McMurdo Incinerator

This building is located along the road to the ice pier and Hut Point. It and the oil-fired waste incinerator inside were completed by NMCB-71 during the 1971-72 season as an attempt to, well, get rid of trash and garbage in means other than open burning or dumping on the sea ice in front of the station. There were no studies done, and this was before the days of environmental impact statements... it turns out that the Navy was putting up a similar installation at Point Barrow so they bought two (!). Once it was brought on line it was discovered that the waste generated locally (lots of food waste) was too wet and took a significant amount of fuel to burn the garbage. Also the building was poorly designed, the door of the incinerator was small and it was not very efficient to operate, or so I was told when I was at McM in 1972. So it never was. Below, a photo of the structure being erected (these 2 photos are from the DF-72 NMCB-71 cruisebook).

Jump ahead just a few years...in the early 1990s NSF was being hammered to reduce the open burning and other waste stockpiling at the "Fortress Rocks Landfill" so they with ASA devised a couple of incinerator projects. The permanent one was to be in an existing building up the hill from Building 155...in the meantime an "interim" incinerator would be installed in this structure. The interim incinerator was completed and tested, but it never was put into service because of an environmental lawsuit...and ultimately the Madrid protocol. It turned out that shipping the stuff out was cheaper than building and operating an incinerator anyway.

The structure, which has been expanded a bit since 1972, is otherwise known as Building 183. It currently is used for storage and rigging of airdrop parachutes. I had a look around the outside of the building in November 2008 but I didn't have a working camera. So...below is a 2007 photo courtesy of Alan Light.