Extreme engineering: PDC engineers go where few Engineers have gone before.

• Author: Colby, Nicole Bonham
• Position: Cover story

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Consider this: You live and work in the driest, coldest place on earth--a remote frozen desert at the center of a largely uninhabited continent. You live with a couple dozen other strangers (who quickly become like friends and family) in a clutch of structures atop thousands of feet of ice. To walk outside uncovered, you risk intense frostbite and injury. The cold is such that it can shatter steel on the coldest of days. If from Alaska, you are as far away from home as is geographically possible on this earth. If it's winter, it's the clearest dark possible outside. And then someone hands you a fresh, green slip of mint or a glistening green head of broccoli or a red tomato. Alaska-based PDC Inc. Engineers was a proud member of an innovative team of design professionals, led by the architectural firm Ferraro Choi Associates, that worked for the National Science Foundation that brought to this icy continent what workers in the South Pole or "Polies" call "freshies"--fresh fruit and vegetables.

PDC COVERS THE GLOBE

From the top of the world to the bottom--that's an accurate description of the work environment for PDC. In recent years, its work in extreme southern latitudes helped to make possible the First Annual South Pole Food Growth Chamber Farmers Market at the new Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica in August--spring in the southern hemisphere. The chamber was made possible through new systems and innovations designed into the construction of the new South Pole station, by Antarctic standards a massive-scale project, for which PDC provided the engineering--primarily mechanical, electrical and utility systems. The station has been called an "engineering marvel."

"We are not food-growth chamber experts, but our expertise does lay in developing facilities systems and engineering solutions that support and integrate clients and users needs and requirements into the underlying facilities systems," says PDC President Steven Theno, PE.

The National Science Foundation dedicated the new scientific station at South Pole in January 2008. The Amundsen Scott South Pole Station was designed under the leadership of Ferraro Choi Associates, architects for the National Science Foundation. The U.S. Navy, Pacific Division, served as contract manager, and a number of Alaska architectural and engineering firms work at the new station including Kumin Associates, RSA Engineering and BBFM that provided structural engineering...