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| January 2010 |
Insight/Opinion |
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Diesel mechanics in the Antarctic
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 Johan Nortje goes in search of the extreme cold.
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Rewind to 1980: Nelson Mandela was in jail, PW Botha was prime minister and diesel mechanic Johan Nortje was about to live his dream. He was to spend a year at the South African base in the Antarctic.
“Antarctic has always intrigued me,” Nortje said.
But Nortje’s wife Susan discovered she was pregnant and asked Nortje to stay behind. Sadly, the baby was stillborn but three others followed.
As the decades passed, Nortje travelled the world. As a highly skilled artisan, his abilities were in demand around the globe, taking him to Iraq, Malawi, Angola, Nigeria and Mali. With a worldwide shortage of diesel mechanics, he could have gone anywhere but Nortje never gave up on his fascination for the southern polar regions.
“I had the extreme heat of Baghdad, now I wanted the extreme cold, ” he said.
Life sometimes does throw second chances. Move forward 29 years.
“I was waiting for an opportunity to come along. By chance, five or six months
ago, I was paging through one of our local newspapers, the Rustenburg Herald.
That’s when I applied again,’’ he said.
On Wednesday 9 December an older, greyer Nortje was among the 2010 overwintering
crew who departed Cape Town aboard South Africa’s ice-strengthened polar
research vessel, the thirty-two-year-old SA Agulhas.
It’s a far cry from the platinum mines of Rustenburg in the North West province
to reaching the Antarctic coastline somewhere around Christmas day, but
Johannesburg-born Nortje is impatient to get going.
“Believe me, I cannot wait. I was hoping we would be down there already, that the next three months were past so the 10 of us rookies could get on with our jobs,” he said.
Nortje’s personal circumstances are also different now.
“My youngest son, also Johan, is 21 and apprenticed to be an auto electrician. The others — Pienkie and Cicilia — are grown up now, married and with children,” said the 52-year-old.
Diesel mechanics play a critical role in ensuring that the weathermen, radar researchers and other scientists survive sub-zero temperatures for 15 months — or longer, if storms or pack ice block the annual voyage of the relief vessel.
Unfortunately, the diesel generators also mean that the South African base is
part of the country’s excessive contribution to polluting the atmosphere with
climate change gases, under negotiation at the other end of the world in Denmark
at the same time as the ship plows through the southern ocean.
But Nortje defends the generators: “If it was not for diesel mechanics, nobody
would be able to go to the Antarctic. The ship needs a diesel mechanic to get
going. The base has three generators and we maintain the skidoos used by the
meteorologists and the scientists.”
Nortje and diesel mechanic Marlon Manko from Cape Town will be maintaining a variety of bulldozers and five Challenger caterpillars which have to pull tonnes of food, fuel and equipment 160 kilometers away to the South African base on top of the rocky Vesleskarvet outcrop. All the machinery runs on polar diesel designed to withstand low temperatures. The diesel is pumped from the Agulhas into massive 50 000-litre containers on sledges perched on the ice shelf towering over the research ship.
All these machines are our lifeline,” Nortje said. “One scrapes ice away from the base camp. Another is equipped to pick up ice so we can melt it for water. There’s plenty of ice but no fresh water in the Antarctic. We must make our own.”
On arrival, while tons of supplies are brought to the base and the previous year's intake prepares for their return, Nortje and Manko will be briefed by returning diesel mechanics Charl van Aardt and Noel Green, a former SANDF warrant officer at the army battle school in Lohathla. Green seems to be addicted to the southern ocean, with two overwintering expeditions on Marion Island, one on Gough Island and three on the vast Antarctic continent.
But they probably didn’t get much work done on January 27. It’s Green’s birthday and tradition dictates that he takes his sixth snow bath — one bath that won’t require any effort from the diesel generators.
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