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A co-worker and I were discussing datacenter fire suppression systems, and I recall when I worked at Eglin an incident where a man was killed in a fire suppression discharge. This led me to wonder, since I'm in a lot of different datacenters a lot of the time, what should I do if there was a halon drop? Just hold my breath and run for it? Duck and cover, hold breath and close eyes for 10 seconds, wait for visibility to improve, then run? Just bend over and kiss it goodbye?
Some web searches did not reveal any writing on how to survive a fire suppression discharge. Anyone here actually been in one?
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I feel like I'm in a Toilet Bowl with a thumbtack in my forehead!!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by tynin on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:39PM
We had an FM200 discharge due to contractors working on a HVAC did something to cause them to trip. Now normally, we'd get a 60 second count down in the form of strobes and sirens of doom bellowing throughout the building. It let everyone know they had 1 minute to calmly get out, except for the poor folks working in the NOC who had to go investigate and hold a button if it was a false alarm. This time, we had no 60 second countdown. What we did have was what seemed like an Earth Shattering Kaboom. I was out on the datacenter floor, kicking some server back to life, when all of the canisters released in a slightly staggered, thoroughly terrifying pattern, all around. I later found out they have explosive caps that help expedite the dispersal of the gas into the overhead piping where it dumps out everywhere. After the kaboom, there was a high pitched roar of fast moving gas and the room quickly filled with a haze of white gas. I bolted out of the datacenter like a rabbit during the start of hunting season and was soon met by the nice people from our local fire station who checked me out. If I recall what they told me correctly, some people can have some skin irritation, others get headaches, but it is otherwise harmless. I suffered no issues from it and was in the room for far longer than I would have cared to be.
As an aside, at that same datacenter, about 4 years before the system accidentally went off, we had only just installed it. They put the 60 second abort buttons all over the place, because they really didn't want the system to go off as it is expensive to refill/cleanup. So a false alarm happens at 2am. The only people in the building is the NOC. And the NOC being perpetually understaffed only had 1 person on shift. The button the guy was near when the system went into count down mode didn't have a phone near it. And this was a time before cellphones were common. He stood out in the datacenter for about 5 hours holding that button till the day shifters got in.