ART OF ADAPTATION

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 40, 19 January 1943, Page 3

ART OF ADAPTATION

Official War Correspondent N.Z.E.F. An Advanced Pacific Base, Dec. IG. Determined to make the best, of unattractive surroundings and difficult living conditions, a Royal New Zealand Air Force unit operating out of this Pacific base is by sheer hard work and ingenuity turning its station into a model example of adaptation to isolated, semi-tropic is land life. With its own piped water supply, messing, administration and recreation buildings, hot showers, gravel pathways and even vegetable gardens, the camp is the best II have seen for hundreds of miles. It is probably »t.lie healthiest, too, for such successful emphasis j has been placed on sanitation thai j to-day there is not a sick man i,n the camp. The comfortable station hospital lies empty. A recital of the features of the camp, however, is misleading, quarters at a permanent station in New Zealand are luxurious by comparison, and not one of the facilities here is to be taken for granted. Water supply, for instance, is 110 simple question of connecting up with a main; it is a matter of endless care, in maintaining a source of supply and in. purifying and distributing it. But it is by local standards that the station may be judged excellent, and it is hard work and enthusiasm that have made it excellent. After spending a few months in a bivouac camp, the unit, chose, for its more permanent home an area of light bush alongside a stream» With prefabricated materials, a construction unit put up the buKdings, and the airmen have added tents with wooden floors, roads, tracks and clearings. Water is pumped from the stream into reservoir tanks, and from there it flows through a network of pipes to the cookhouse, hot and cold showers and laundry. Consumption has to be -carefully controlled, since, in

dry weather the stream may stop running altogether. It was a mere series of motionless pools when I saw it, and the natural swimming hole was an unpleasant-looking., oily | green. But there are alternative j sources of supply, and tlie swimming pool still serves a useful pur-' pose as the reservoir for an ingenious: fire lighting system, in which b.v means of a booster pump and valves the water can be. sent to the hydrants through Lhe ordinary supply pipes. Sanitation is almost a fetish here, and the results justify it. Water for drinking is thoroughly treated. Drainage, one of the biggest problems. lias been tackled with remarkable success by the use of deep soak age pits. Food scraps are drained on Avire baskets, stored in llyproofed, tins and disposed of as pig feed. Empty tins arc burnt clean and buried in the soakage pits. There are easily-cleaned and drained concrete floorings in the cookhouse and showers. One of the. most important results of ail these precautions is that flies have been kept down to an absolute minimum. Mosquitoes are fought in their breeding places by a medical officer who is loaned part-time by an army unit. Personal hygiene is insisted upon with similarly successful results. For example, as the men go to their meals along a concrete pathway they stop to dip their plates and utensils in hot, antiseptic -water and wash their hands in a mild disinfectant. After eating, they wash the dishes in a tub of boiling water and rinse them in another. Dysentery and similar complaints have consequently disappeared from the camp. Another menace in these areas, tlie infection known as "Athlete's fool," is being eombatted by regular foot inspections and early treatment. Daily shows are an indispensable. aid against outbreaks of sores caused apparently by the infection of cuts.