On Thu, 30 March 2000, Nathan Stratton wrote:
> Sometimes there are not a lot of options. I work as a fire fighter and
> built one of my datacenters on the 5th floor because I had no options. I
> did make sure that it was marked out correctly because I know what it is
> like going through a building on fire. So far I have never worked a CO
> fire, but I am sure it is a mess.
Bellcore had some good videotape of CO fires.
But I wonder, do people talk to their insurance companies about the actual
level of risk? If you look worldwide, it turns out the risk from fire in
a datacenter is about the same as the risk of a terrorist attack. It sounds
awful, until you look a little further and find out the occurance of either
risk is very small. Factory Mutual labels risks less than 1 incident per
1,000,000 sq/ft of insured space as "low-risk." Fires in telecommunication
and data centers are even rarer than 1 incident per 1,000,000 sq/ft.
For the bored, the fires in telecommunications centers were extinguished
by the following, in order:
1) extinguished by employees (49%)
2) extinguished by firefighters (45%)
3) extinguished by automatic fire suppression systems (6%)
There are other risks which are more likely in telecommunications and data
centers.
