Antarctica holds roughly 75 per cent of the planet's fresh water, locked away as ice, yet the continent is technically classified as a desert, and that combination makes fire one of the most serious hazards facing the people who live and work there. The United States maintains the only full-time professional fire department on the continent, the Antarctic Fire Department, staffed year round to protect McMurdo Station, Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and the airfields that connect them to the outside world, in a place where the nearest outside help can be an eight-hour flight away, and where a single building fire could put an entire research station's mission at risk, keeping a dedicated fire service running through some of the harshest conditions on Earth is treated as an operational necessity rather than a precaution.
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