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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Fire, Water, Earth, Air (was) 100% humidity in the L.A. 9-1-1communications room
At 5:24 AM -0500 10/12/98, Sean Donelan wrote: >In the catagory of stuff happens: > >http://www.cnn.com/US/9810/12/la.911.ap/ > >Does your co-locate have a sump pump? >-- A good reminder. It's not that the National Fire Protection Association doesn't do a good job, but we need equal time for National XXX Protection Associations for other threats to facilities. I was about to say I can easily remember being burned by water even without Sean's example, although that metaphor is highly suspect. In facilities for which I've had design or operational responsibilities, I've never had a fire that caused any problems. Fire protection, on the other hand.... 1969...At a Navy site, there was a classified tape vault adjacent to the main computer room. It had a sprinkler inside, without a sprinkler alarm. As a true vault with a bank-vault sort of door, there was very little ventilation. There was no sprinkler alarm. Over a weekend, the sprinkler inside, which turned out to be defective, let go. Water rushed into a sealed space, compressing the air inside. On Monday, a sailor spun the combination, pulled the door handle... and was smashed into a wall as the door burst wide. Several broken ribs, a concussion where the back of his head hit the wall, but no permanent injuries. This was a mainframe computer room with a raised floor and emergency power off, so most water ran under the floor and just wet cables. Power was interrupted quickly. But it took several days to dry out and fix components fried by the power-off surge. The militarized computers weren't particularly bothered, but the IBM 7090 and UNIVAC 1108 were down for days. LESSONS LEARNED: Sprinkler alarms in sealed spaces. Raised floor does give some protection. 1970...building maintenance turned off the heat in the office building over a long weekend when the building was closed. Temperature dropped to about 10 degrees F. On Monday, as the heat was back on, sprinkler pipes that had frozen burst in several walls and ceilings. The most dramatic spot was the mall beauty shop...people with their heads in electric hair dryers were NOT amused as water cascaded over them. Luckily, no electrocutions. My computer room had a DEC PDP-11 (serial number 1117 -- my remembering the serial number almost 30 years later should give you a sense how many service calls I placed on it). No emergency power-off for the room. In what might have been a medal-winning act of heroism if this were a military site -- it was the clinical computer room for Georgetown University Hospital -- one of my colleagues, Scott Dyer, ran into ankle- deep water to pull electrical plugs before the rising water could get into the disk cabinet fans, succeeding with seconds to spare. The only cables actually submerged were RS-232, and where connectors were underwater, they were tightly screwed together and remained watertight. LESSONS LEARNED: Sprinkler systems need heated buildings in cold climates. Dry-pipe sprinkler systems, in which no water enters the piping until a sprinkler head actually releases, are preferred for equipment rooms. Emergency power off systems have their uses, although they can be expensive. Might make sense to tie underfloor water alarms to emergency power off 1975 or so...more than one occurrence. US Senate off-site computer room, where we had several computers for the Library of Congress. Senator took a nap on a hideaway office couch, while smoking. Couch caught on fire and other office furnishings lit off. Firefighters put a water stream on it and put it out. Office was on the 4th floor, computer room on 1st floor. Water runs downhill. Water gushed mostly down stairs; very little came through ceilings at first but water started dripping (and gushing on one occasion) much later than the initial flood. LESSONS LEARNED: After the first occurrence, the Senate people bolted rolls of plastic sheeting to the ceiling near the main computers. They stapled a thin wood strip to the end of the roll plastic, and attached a rope to the strip. This let an operator grab the rope and quickly pull protective plastic over the computers. Remember that if you cover the top, you have probably blocked cooling and need to power down FAST. If stairs enter the computer room (e.g., emergency exit), avoid putting equipment close to them. Water coming in is an issue -- and a burning computer could be an exit problem. Howard ------ PS -- purely bizarre water-related event from 1970. The local Rolm office, that sold ruggedized Nova computers, was in our building. We'd become friendly with the sales rep, who showed up one day, completely wiped out, his perfect suit spotted with water. He had been at the Pentagon, about to sign the contract for fire control computers for a new river patrol gunboat to be used in Southeast Asia, when an admiral stopped the discussion and asked him, "Does your computer float?" He had not the slightest idea, but went back to the office, found a demo computer and a janitor's sink, filled to sink , threw in the computer, and was able to report back, "yes, it floats." The admiral said "we can't have that. What if the gunboat sinks and the computer bobs to the surface? The Viet Cong could capture it!" Our Hero tried to explain that the computer wouldn't be terribly useful if the guns it controlled were at the bottom of the Mekong River, but to no avail. They had to come up with a ballasted, non-floating engineering change.
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