McMurdo Area Power and Water

Here in McMurdo we have a Water Plant, and Power Plant, and a Waste Water Plant. These are all currently in a state of change. Currently the setup for the town has three separate facilities each with their own separate functions. The new plan will still have three buildings but the Power Plant will serve as a backup Water Plant and vice versa. This will act as a redundancy plan in case of a loss of one of the buildings.

The water plant has 3 Reverse Osmosis water treatment systems. Each RO system can purify about 28 gallons of water per minute. Also the plant holds about 100,000 gallons of reserve capacity for fire fighting operations. This season we are working with only 2 RO units. The new configuration of the Water Plant will have 2 RO units and 100,000 gallons of water storage as well as 2 diesel generators and a power plant switchboard.



These are the RO units. What you see here is two complete units. The basic theory of a RO unit is that water is forced through a membrane at very high pressures and the membrane filters out the bad stuff. There is allot more to it than that, but that is what I learned on my 10 minute tour of the plant.

The Power Plant currently has 6 generators ranging from 750 to 850 kW. These generators were built in 1979 and went online in the early ‘80’s.



You can see from the status board here that each has allot of hours on them. All six are in the 100,000 hour range at this point and they are old technology at this point and parts are hard to get for them. They all get maintenance every 500 hours of operation. And every 10,000 hours each engine gets an entire top end rebuild, which involves the fuel system, cylinder heads, turbochargers. And then every 20,000 hours they all get an entire engine teardown. This season engine #4 is offline for a 20,000 service.



The Power Plant operates 3 generators at a time with the remaining 3 in reserve. Once in a great while the station needs a 4th generator to keep up with demand but it is rare. The controls for the power plant also are early ‘80’s vintage. This bank of controls is the heart of the power side of the generators. Please pay no attention to the legs under the desk. That operator has been there since the mid ‘90’s.



This is control monitor display. It shows what 3 engines are running, which cooling fans are
running at anytime, and other key real time information.



Here are some photos of the engine rebuild process. Each CAT engine produces around 1200hp and runs at a consistent 1200 RPM.



Here is the 16 cylinder engine block with the world famous Matt Strine posing next to his handy work.



Here is the turbocharges. There are two for each engine.



The camshaft valley.



Here is Al the power plant manager posing with the oil pan for the engine.





Some used pistons and cylinder heads.



And here is Matt and Mick. The mechanic and the electrician at the plant. Mick is the electrician, he is the one who doesn't look like he just put his finger in the electrical outlet. That is why he is the electrician.

Happy Holidays.
R.J.