UNIS Safety Course

Every January UNIS puts on a week long safety course for all of the new students. There is also usually a group of new staff or staff who haven't taken the week long course, or for those who want to repeat it.

Oskar is usually a part of this course every year because he teaches the avalanche safety part. This year I also got to be a part of the course, however I was a participant!

I've taken some of the safety courses at UNIS but never the week long one. I've only had rifle training and polar bear safety as well as polar circle boat safety (you jump in the water in a survival suit and then swim out of the water, nothing too big). 

The week long course has several topics: first aid, avalanche safety, glacier safety, sea ice, emergency camp, navigation and communication, and rifle training and polar bear safety.  There is then an optional snow scooter course, which I obviously took. Talk about awesome HSE training!

All of the topics had a theoretical part and a practical part. Then on Saturday, we were all up on the moraine and the Longyear glacier putting our skills to the test. My team was not so successful in the avalanche test, we were only able to save one person out of four. Really puts things in perspective, how important it is to make sure you go out with people who know how to save you!

I didn't take my camera with me, so I don't really have any photos to share, except when we had the practical part of sea ice training. We had to jump in the water and then swim and pull our selves out onto the ice. Apparently someone was taking photos ( I didn't notice) and they put them up on the 'all staff shared network' at UNIS so that everyone can see them!

It was a great week of work!

These are the band wagon things that we took to the hole in the ice, and where we had to walk back to after getting out of the water. It was a cold walk back. 

The hole was actually cut in our drinking water lake because there is no ice on the fjord. So it wasn't salt water. That was nice :)

We did a practice situation and one of us had to 'fall' in the wart and then get saved. 

Our victim just hanging out in the water.

Him being saved and then stripped of wet clothes and wrapped up nicely.

And this is me having no problems getting out of the freezing water! I even took my mitten off to grab for my ice spikes!