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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

You ask the fire marshal what was burning, about an hour or so after you've Big Red Button'ed the server room.

This story is giving the Japanese engineer in me apoplexy.

Acting quick and getting a fire under control often makes the difference between an emergency and a disaster. But only after you've made sure the building is being evacuated, and the fire department has been alerted.

Don't be afraid to call the emergency number. They'll know what to do and walk you through it.

Under no circumstance should you enter a room filled with smoke. Smoke inhalation is incredibly dangerous.

Smoke from electronics, especially.

Speaking of consumer electronics:

When I went to the Midwest Reprap festival, for some reason power was being a bit flakey. The guy who's sitting across me had 2 printers using ATX power supplies.

Suddenly, the PSU sparks out and then outgasses a stream of smoke pillar 4 foot in diameter for the next 2-3 minutes. Near the top of the building perhaps 3 stories up, it looks like a mini-Hiroshima with mushroom cloud going.

And that was from a dinky ATX PSU.

Heh, they once shipped 110v PSUs to us 220v users... I had to build systems at the time, the first one I plugged in made an awesome explosion :P

My first (indeed, only) experience with the smell of burnt human flesh and hair was when a friend of mine flipped the switch on a PSU to 110v when it plugged in to 220v. He was fine, but the PSU didn't make it. RIP.

Speaking of consumer electrics: around here universities have obsolete views of how students work, limited budget, and old buildings. This results in a shortage of wall plugs, and the smartest folks bring powerstrips, plug them into wall sockets, then into other power strips, and recursively until there's enough plugs for everyone's laptop. Cables turn seriously damn hot, and a burnt plastic smell crosses the room. Authority reaction: ban powerstrips because someone might trip on them.

Luckily energy management outpaced student equipment rate, and laptops now last a good part of the day without needing a plug.

> Under no circumstance should you enter a room filled with smoke

The article says "smell", not "smoke", but I don't think inhaling it was a good idea in any event.

The post also says it was making them light headed...

Most likely it's just hyperventilation caused by walking around sniffing the air looking for the source of the smell. Although I wouldn't doubt the smell was toxic.

I've never seen hyperventilation caused by 'sniffing'. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's impossible, but you'd have to be sniffing far more aggressively than I've ever seen someone sniff before...

I've experienced light-headedness from aggressive sniffing. And it wasn't glue ;-).

Under no circumstance should you enter a room filled with smoke. Smoke inhalation is incredibly dangerous.

To re-iterate, a lot (most?) of the people who die in fires actually die from smoke inhalation than from getting burned by the fire/flames.

Hi. I have worked in a burn unit. Inhalational injury is usually not the cause of death. In fact of the people I saw only one who died of bronchoscopy-confirmed inhalational injury. And he was an obese smoker with minimal residual lung volume to begin with.

Also, in the Navy, where halon is also in heavy distribution, for fuel fires (nothing scarier than a fuel fire on a ship at sea), the training still includes that the person who smells smoke needs to find the fire, or at least some legit smoke before exiting the space. Most watch standees now have radios, which makes the decision of when to call a lot easier.

This seems to imply that most people who die are burn victims? (It feels like this is a stupid question, but I'm not sure of the answer so eh. Asking anyways.)

Would people at risk of a inhalation injury actually pass through you often? You're in a burn unit, so I'd assume that means you mostly get burn victims, and inhalation injuries would be pointed somewhere else?

> imply that most people who die are burn victims

Inhalation injury is a subset of burn trauma. The flow control is "Ambulance inbound from fire" -> ER calls trauma alert -> trauma team meets the ambulance(s) at the ER door. Those with inhalation injury are sorted from there.

Sorry, but this is selection bias. You won't even see all the people who die of smoke inhalation without any burns.

In this case, a mid-size city, the burn unit was also the trauma ICU. On the trauma team, we responded to all trauma calls at the ER door. It just so happened that all burns in the area also came to us, and thus passed through our trauma/burn unit. So, I doubt there was much selection bias in this case.

Waste of money.

What you really do is you evacuate the room and then release the CO2/other fire suppression system which shouldn't require you to shut anything down.

Then you went to the room and check whatever equipment isn't functioning -- if you smell a fire again you might have to press the big red button, but there is no reason to panic just because of a fire, so long as you can put it out.

You want to be able to EPO without agent (e.g. if someone's being electrocuted; especially with something like Halon 1301, you want to be able to remain in the room to give medical aid), but I've never heard of room-scale agent dump without EPO (either interlocked or as a checklist procedure).

The problem with that is that you only get one shot with the agent (although everywhere I've seen has a gas/clean agent with dry-pipe water as the true final protective measure). If there's electricity still going in, and you use your one shot with the facility clean agent, you might not actually put out the fire, or it could re-ignite, and then you either have no fire protection or only water. The cost of filling a datacenter with water, especially one important to have gas and water backup in the first place, is huge, even relative to an EPO pull.

You may want to call the fire department anyway.

If it's an "OK situation" they will be able to talk you through what needs to be checked, and they'll likely know it better than you if you don't have a proper in-case-of checklist prepared before hand.

If the smell turns into something worse, then you'll get them faster on-site.

Is that a Fukushima reference or something?

No. I previously worked at a Japanese megacorp and have a deep appreciation for the engineering culture in this neck of the woods (in a way I do not for, say, the culture of working at megacorps). I had a badge which would get me into the server room. I had to pass a 10 question test to be given the badge. Question #1 was, essentially, "What do you do if you think there is a fire?" The answer is beyond dispute: you execute the prepared emergency plan. (Rough order without spilling any beans: Big Red Button, evacuate, call fire department, call the numbers listed for emergency contacts.)

You do not try to debug the fire. There are people who are good at not dying while trying to do that. You are not one of them.

You do not try to avoid Big Red Buttoning because your bosses are idiots and they might come down on your hard for it: while your bosses are probably idiots, the first thing they'll tell you about Big Red Buttons is that nobody has ever gotten fired for pressing the Big Red Button, because everyone agrees that Big Red Buttons exist to get pushed and you never want to not have it pushed because someone was worried about getting fired. Big Red Buttons are costly affairs, sure. That's why we have redundant systems, insurance, and other various things that suggest we're responsible professionals.

I was a bit appalled by the ludicrous approach toward safety. I would rather get fired over a crusted fuse than live with being responsible for a death. This whole "debug the fire" thing really smacks of 80s era business dick wagging.

What happens if someone tries to prosecute you for "intentionally" causing millions of dollars of damage?

Not quite the same, but I know of an employment dispute that was brought to a head by a staff member quenching and MRI scanner by pressing the big red button.

While I'm not a lawyer, I'd be surprised if trying to report a possible fire couldn't be be considered a "just cause", the lack of which is a key element in tort law everywhere.

> the first thing they'll tell you about Big Red Buttons is that nobody has ever gotten fired for pressing the Big Red Button, because everyone agrees that Big Red Buttons exist to get pushed and you never want to not have it pushed because someone was worried about getting fired.

I'm pretty sure that axiom is not present in all companies and cultures. Hence, the debate.

Where did 'fire' come from? The smell of heat-damaged electronics, with no smoke, nothing visibly wrong, is most certainly not a strong indication of fire.

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