Scotland!

The blustery weather of yesterday takes me back to a time that I visited the enchanting country of Scotland. It seems that it was only a week or so ago that I was preambling along the rolling green hills of bonny Scotland, an overcast sky painted in every shade of gray, and a pureness of air cycling through my lungs. It really is a beautiful country with wonderful people.

I went to Scotland for work to attend a school there that is designed to help train people for survival situations off-shore. Aberdeen is an international hub for the European oil industry, and it is located on the north shores of Scotland. There you will find a booming economy central to supporting the drilling of oil in the North Sea. Because of this propensity for the industry, many of the most sought out training facilities are established there. The school that I went to was designed specifically for off-shore survival.

The three days of intense training that I went through were basically broken up into three categories. 1) First Aid, 2) Fire Fighting, 3) H.U.E.T. or Helicopter Underwater Escape Training. I'll write more on the third one in my next post.

With the first aid training, it wasn't your basic, run-of-the-mill CPR certification. By re-creating scenarios that have happened in the past, we would be presented with a situation and asked how to proceed. An example might be:

You have just evacuated a rig. You and 28 other people have successfully deployed an emergency raft designed only for 20 people. You are floating in the North Sea, where the June temperature of the water is 15 Celsius (59 Fahrenheit), and it is November. 3 people are unconscious. 1 person has a compound fracture of the leg. 2 more people are bleeding uncontrollably, and 1 person has gone into shock. Your supplies consist of food and water rations for 20 people for 3 days, you have a VERY limited first aid kit, 1 knife, two oars, 6 flares, and a bailing bucket. You are several hundred miles from any land. What do you do?

We would then proceed to figure out the best possible solutions. Sometimes we were asked why we did certain things first and postponed first aid to others. The whole idea was to help us get our minds wrapped around the idea that, A) 911 wasn't always going to be there for us, and B) sometimes, you had to make tough decisions.

It was very eye opening.

We also had the opportunity to learn basic fire fighting. Again, being out on a rig, you don't always have many of the things that we take for granted around here, such as if the structure you are currently in starts on fire...you can't always run outside and get away. So...what do you do?

We learned about the different types of fires that are possible, and which methods work best to extinguish them. It wasn't all book work and PowerPoints either. They had a very elaborate fire yard to help us with practical application.

We also learned different means of escaping a smoke filled room.

When we weren't in classes, we spent most of our time out and about seeing the sites. Now, Aberdeen is not well-known for its tourism, so catering to that crowd is held at a minimum. However, we were still able to see many wonderful things.
Downtown Aberdeen:

The architecture:

Random Cool Buildings:

But I think one of the best parts was their polite way of telling you what the speed limit was:

How courteous of them!