My third summer in Adelaide
Posted on Wednesday 28th January 2009
But I still haven’t become used to the heat. Celebrating Christmas when it’s around 30 degrees doesn’t feel right and the dry oppressive heat will take more acclimatisation before I feel comfortable during summer.
The impetus for this posting is the abrupt and intense heatwave that has descended on Adelaide. Today the temperature in the city peaked at 45.7 Celsius (that’s 114.3 in old money) in the middle of the afternoon. At almost 7 degrees above core body temperature, and that’s in the shade too. Unsurprisingly this doesn’t feel good and we have been staying inside with the air-conditioning running as much as possible.
Another inconvenience is that the helicopter we use for retrievals is unable to lift off from the RAH helipad if the ambient temperature is greater than 35 degrees. I don’t fully understand the mechanics behind this, but either way, we have no choice but to accept the judgement of the pilots. It means we have to be stationed at the helicopter base at the airport rather than at our retrieval base in the hospital. This is quite a hassle as we are out of our familiar environment and have to get to and from the airport at the beginning and end of our shifts. Hopefully this will cease being a problem when we are based at the airport permanently from March onwards after the transition to the new Statewide Service …. more about that later.
34 degrees today? Jeez, I can’t handle the heat in Scotland, let alone anywhere else. The problem here is the lack of natural light; have been bough one of those SAD lights and am now waiting to see if that has an effect!