Eyes on Earth Episode 89 - EROS Workers and Weather

[Sound of crunching snow]

SHERI LEVISAY

Aaron, are the roads always cleared before you come out here when you’re working?

AARON HENSLEY

Short answer. No. They can be quite a mess coming out on uncertain days before the, before and after the storm has hit.

SHERI

So you’re out here even before the plows are out.

AARON

Most occasions, yes, we will beat them out. Mostly because the team has to be here on site prior to the storm hitting. So we will try to get here before the heavy, heavy stuff hits. But that is not always the case. More often, when we’re relieving the staff that had been stuck there for a couple of days, you’ll come out through some questionable roads to, to get them back home.

SHERI

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Eyes on Earth. We’re a podcast that focuses on our ever changing planet and on the people here at EROS and across the globe who use remote sensing to monitor and study the health of Earth. My name is Sheri Levisay, and I’ll be hosting today’s episode. The Earth Resources Observation and Science Center is located about 10 miles north of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. To get there, you take two-lane country roads with few landmarks. Ice, snow and, above all, lack of visibility can make the trip hazardous during winter. So we’re talking to Joe Blahovec, chief of the Satellite and Ground Systems Operations Branch, and Aaron Hensley, who is the ground station shiftlead for KBR, to find out what it takes to maintain Landsat data processing when wintry weather, as well as extreme events in other seasons, threatens to keep the workforce at home.

Events like the recent pre-Christmas storm and the blizzard that dumped 12 inches of snow test the concept of essential employees. So, Aaron, what does it mean to be an essential employee or an emergency employee at EROS? What are the jobs that really need people on site?

AARON

For an essential employee, I guess I would say staff that need to be here outside of regular working hours or that need to be here to take care of assets in adverse conditions when regular staff goes home. The jobs locally, at least from my perspective, I’m in the ground station, so we deal with Landsat particularly, that would be a lot of the satellite reception. So any of the data that comes to the ground or from the ground to the spacecraft, that is managed by us, so we need to be here pretty much around the clock to make sure that those things happen as they should, when they should, without fail.

SHERI

Do you have any idea about how many people are on the list of essential employees?

JOE BLAHOVEC

So security here is here onsite, 24/7. No exceptions. And of course, the Landsat ground station crew are here 24/7. No exceptions. 

AARON

On my team, there are six of us. We try to be considerate of people’s time. We don’t necessarily need to have two or three people to spend several days here. So if we know that adverse conditions are coming up, we will work with the team and dictate when the storm is going to hit, compared to who’s on shift and when. And we’ll try to keep that down to minimum staff, like one person may be here overnight or for a day or two to manage the assets while we’re there.

SHERI

Who makes the call about when to close the center? Is there a team, and do you have a rubric you follow? Joe, you want to take that one?

JOE

So the deputy center director, John Hahn, makes the final call, with information from Bruce Potter. The key decision points, whether it’s the facility roads, the weather, the weather forecasts and blizzards, anything blowing snow, visibility are typically: we close. But the decision is based on a safety judgment of people coming out here or not coming out here. And so at times, John, if he has, if he needs to or has the time to, he’ll confer with the senior leadership team to kind of make the final decision.

SHERI

How does leadership keep in contact with essential personnel during these kinds of weather events? So, the senior leadership is somewhere else and they need to keep tabs on what’s going on here? How do they do that, Joe?

JOE

So the main point of contact is a USGS emergency alert and response system. So that will send out text messages, voicemails or voice calls to the site personnel to let them know whether the site is open or closed. If it does close, it will give a status update when it’s back open again to tell people when they come in. Once the site is closed, everything is done by phone calls and text communications between the teams.

SHERI

What kind of resources do we keep here at EROS, say, if you’re going to stay overnight for a few days?

AARON

The facility’s been taking care of us in the past. We have access to a military-type cot and blankets and pillows. Having served for a few years, I don’t necessarily take use of those. So a lot of folks will bring out, like, an air mattress and blankets, something like sleeping bags, anything that would make them comfortable. Typically, this time of the year, you will see people packing up dry goods, anything that could be used to, you know, cleaning or, you know, food resources, anything that you can throw on a microwave and kind of heat up. So we have access to those things as well. So we will keep a lot of things on hand in the event that these things happen. So we’re pretty well prepared.

SHERI

Joe, do you have any knowledge about that? What leadership does or what you do to make sure people have what they need when they’re out here?

JOE

I make sure that my people go home. Except for Aaron’s people, they have to stay here. But I’ve heard the cots. I heard that we’ve had cots here, and we have usually well-stocked vending machines. But I don’t think they’d last three days.

SHERI

So siting the center in South Dakota means dealing with extremes throughout the year. There’s blizzards, lightning, hail, tornadoes, flooding. What other weather events have you experienced through the years, Aaron?

AARON

You know, previously, going back to when the ground station was new, this was prior to the dome domes being put over the top of the dishes, South Dakota is very well known for high winds. So you would always have to store the antenna, like what we’d call a birdbath scenario, straight up and down, just so that the wind would not have an impact on those big parabolic dishes when it was coming across the plains. So winds have always been a big thing from the ground station perspective. Anything that’s, you know, coming out of the sky, if it’s moisture, it can have a real impact on data reception. So we keep our eyes to the Weather Channel pretty close just to make sure that we know what’s coming, and you’ll see how it may have an adverse impact on our daily work.

SHERI

Who’s the person who clears off the snow from the radome? If there’s snow on there, how does that work?

AARON

If you go out to the radome, you will notice that there are ropes that go from the very top of the radome down to the bottom. So you have to be careful because you’re going to bang that rope on that radome. And of course, you don’t want to drag the snow back down on your head, but we do use that to actually keep that clear. Typically, the radomes are heated, you know, they are temperature controlled. So they don’t necessarily store all the big snow like you’d see on the roof of a house. And of course, they look like a large soccer ball, so they will slide off. But we do have access to the ropes, and whoever’s on site, whether it’s my team or the engineers, you know, if we can get out there to monitor it, see if it’s a problem, and then we can take care of it with that.

SHERI

It seems like one of the more challenging situations for EROS in general would be power outages, which could happen any time of year. How does that affect workers and equipment? Aaron?

AARON

Technology has changed. In the day, that was, that was a very big worry. Our UPS systems have been updated, so we do on occasion see power outages. It has much less impact today than it did even 5, 10 years ago. In the past, it was a matter of getting the entirety of the computer room shut down because we just didn’t have the coolers and the chilling units. So things get very hot very quickly and that’s very damaging for the RF equipment that we work with. So it was a time constraint, really. You had to get that equipment off and managed so that it didn’t burn itself up. Today, the UPS works so much better. I know there is some time constraints with that, you won’t run for days and days that way. But today we don’t have to worry so much about getting equipment off, but it is something that we monitor. If the UPS starts to go bad, then we’d have to resort back to those things. But it’s, we are far more functional today in that respect than we were.

SHERI

Explain to me what UPS stands for.

AARON

Universal Power System. So when, when you go off the grid, I believe they’re large diesel generated backup systems is what they are, and they will fire up and function and give us power in the time that we need it, where we’re not actually functioning off the grid.

SHERI

COVID changed the employee presence at the center in unexpected ways. Now a majority of people, of people work at home for at least part of the week. And when hazardous weather has threatened, most people don’t get a snow day. How has that changed the hazardous weather decision-making process? Joe, you want to go first on this one?

JOE

So the decision-making process really hasn’t changed. It’s still about all about safety and the safety of employees. So for severe weather events, we still have the same protocols and conditions. However, for certain things like something that’s coming up tomorrow where the forecast is ever changing, you know, today it’s 2 inches, tomorrow, it’s 5 inches, you know, those type of events. Now we have the ability to do what we call maximum telework days. So most of the non-essential people can stay home in the comforts of their house and log in and continue to be productive from home and not have to bear the weather and drive out here, depending on the road conditions. There are still a few people who have to come out here.

AARON

COVID had such a big impact with that, you know, for safety measures, you know, you’re used to walking around a facility and just seeing several people and the faces of the people you work with. And admittedly, from my perspective, I’d like to see you all come back because I never see anybody. It’s so, it’s so different now than it was. And it probably will stay that way. But from a ground station perspective, it didn’t change a lot. We did adjust because we have overlapping, overlapping shifts. So we just kind of, we dialed in our times where we actually had connection to one another. You know, there wasn’t so much, you know, communication between each other and time around one another. So we just in the interest of safety, we, we kind of kept our space, let, let oncoming shifts know what’s going on. And then we went on about our day and kind of kept the distance and things have changed so we can do a little telework in the office. So if we have more than one schedule, typically one will work from home and one will work in the office just in that same interest. The dynamic has changed. I’m sure we could all get back together again. But you know, some people do enjoy working from home, too.

SHERI

I’d like to thank Aaron and Joe for talking about how essential workers at EROS help ensure South Dakota’s winter weather doesn’t cause a break in Landsat’s 50 year record of remote observation of Earth. And thank you, listeners, for joining us on Eyes on Earth. You can find all our shows on the USGS EROS website. You can also follow EROS on Facebook or Twitter to find the latest episode or to subscribe on Apple or Google Podcasts.

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