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Chemical leak at Apple's NC Data Center
Around 2:00 PM EDT on Monday, Apple's Maiden, NC, data center suffered a chlorine leak that injured five people. It remains unclear whether the injured were Apple data center employees or construction workers.
Last week, a fire broke out among the solar panels atop the Mesa, AZ, sapphire manufacturing facility that Apple recently bought from GT Advanced. No injuries were reported.
The two events do not seem to be linked, except that Apple is having a bad run of luck with site safety.
Chlorine Gas Leak at Apple Data Center Puts 5 in Hospital
El Reg reports
Emergency crews received a call [June 1] about 2pm local time from the Apple facility on Startown Road, in Maiden, North Carolina. Local news helicopters captured footage of people being given medical attention and oxygen masks outside the facility.
The Catawba emergency services said initially two unknown chemicals were involved in the alert, later stating that it was a chlorine gas leak.
[...] It is speculated that the chlorine was a key component in the facility's water-cleaning facility, perhaps for its water-cooled components.
Original Submissions
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 02 2015, @08:14PM
But why would a data center have chlorine gas?
The story I've been reading is keeping nasties from growing in the water coolant system. I've worked at data centers and central offices that were not water cooled, and they were taking out the water cooled mainframes at my first job so I don't know much about data center coolant water treatment. Sounds possible although unlikely. Living east in a civilized area aka no shortage of water maybe they just flushed the mainframe system weekly before it became stagnant or used car anti-freeze or something.
Chlorine can cause some corrosion, I'm surprised they use it in such massive bulk, enough to sicken all those people. I had assumed water cooled plants were like tropical fish reef tanks and its all UV sterilizers and ozone bubblers, those are mostly harmless, at least WRT corrosion. I guess if you keep the Cl ion concentration reasonably low like tap water...
As for water based machine tool coolant, that stuff gets unimaginably disgusting if it aerobically ferments, but just put an aquarium bubbler in the tank to oxygenate it and its all good, or at least not as gross. Theoretically the coolant has anti-rust additives such that oxygenated coolant won't rust the machines, in theory anyway.
Being in a desert, and desert people being all proud that their golf courses being watered by slightly refined sewage (instead of the electrolytes plants crave) I wonder if the urinals drain directly into the coolant tanks thus requiring a little more chlorine for sanitation than you'd expect at a normal plant. That would explain a lot.
Something to think about is our water utility has chlorinated our drinking water for an eternity, decades at least, and they never seem to kill anyone, presumably because they know what they're doing or some architectural thing like the plant being in the open air instead of a closet. Or, maybe, the only way so many people got sick was something ridiculous the engineers/architects couldn't plan for, like suicidal employee. Would not be surprised if theres more to the story. I mean, its not like the experiment from Half Life, people pretty much know how to handle this stuff and design plants using the stuff, so its going to be hard to identify as an unexpected accident, although I guess its possible, maybe massive equipment failure or something. I mean, you westerners do chlorinate what little water you have, don't you? So its not like nobody in AZ knows how to handle the stuff.
Also I'm really disappointed in the community, when there's a report of a faulty chlorine tank, there should be a press release that obviously the user is just holding it wrong and there's nothing wrong with the design and they're just using it wrong, there's nothing wrong with the iChlorine iTank.