[AusNOG] Warrnambool Exchange Fire Investigation Report

Fri Apr 5 15:49:53 EST 2013

Disagree with adding suppression/gas systems all over the place.

I suspect a lesson-learnt should be to not mix network equipment rooms with general
office-type rooms in the same building, or at least the same air-circulation environment.

In general, there is very little to burn or cause fire to spread in a equipment
hosting environment - racks and concrete floors don't burn, cabling is often 'plenum
grade' which means difficult to get burning and won't keep burning when the heat is
removed. In a datacentre equipment room Its usually better to have no fire suppression
system, but lots of heat/smoke detection to get an alarm triggered, plus some portable
extinguishers near the door for people to use. A sprinkler system (even a dry-pipe
system) fired off because of some smoke from a blown power supply or fried
printed-circuit-board in a single rack would cause more damage to the rest of the
equipment in the room than if the rack was left to smoulder for a while.
I'm fine with the exchange equipment spaces having VESDA systems, and no suppression,
just like this Warrnambool exchange.

This fire started in or above an office room, filled with paper, boxes, wooden
furniture, etc - a very different type of fish from a suite of humming steel equipment
racks. The network damage was to melted cabling which was run over the office room,
plus smoke damage to the equipment hosting space as the A/C and open fire doors
allowed smoke through to the equipment spaces. While its not listed in the report,
I'll bet the VESDA system was only monitoring the equipment spaces, so by the time the
smoke drifted through to trigger it, the office room was already well ablaze.

In office spaces with lots of flammable material, absolutely have fire suppression. In
equipment rooms, don't.
And between the two - don't allow them to share air circulation systems, and keep the
bloody doors shut.

>
> Certainly the legislation doesn't compel telstra todo anything. 
>
>
> On Tue, Apr 2, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Matthew Moyle-Croft <mmc at mmc.com.au
> <mailto:mmc at mmc.com.au>> wrote:
>
>     It's more complex than that - a lot of POIs are, in fact, Telstra exchanges. So
>     we may in fact need Telstra to install fire suppression not NBNCo or we'll still
>     lose (one O) a POI in future ...
>
>     MMC
>
>
>
>     On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 4:34 PM, Jake Anderson <yahoo at vapourforge.com
>     <mailto:yahoo at vapourforge.com>> wrote:
>
>         I imagine with the benefit of hindsight they are now doing a cost/benefit on
>         each exchange and seeing if its worth putting in.
>         Its probably cheaper for them to loose service for a while and fix it rather
>         than put eleventy million halon systems in.
>
>         I do hope NBNco is doing a lessons learnt from this though, their
>         concentration feels like its going to be much higher, loosing a POI for a
>         couple of weeks would be a "bad thing".
>         I wonder at what point in the network it would be feasible to slap a
>         wireless/satellite/whatever on top of a box and replace the POI (at a
>         reduced rate) until the POI is back up.
>
>
>         On 02/04/13 02:29, Tom Storey wrote:
>>         No, but cant say I was particularly looking for them. I suppose I kind of
>>         assumed there might be something like a gas based system in there though. I
>>         mean, theres a lot of expensive gear, you'd think you'd want to avoid
>>         damaging it, and/or losing the building. Imagine if they had to rebuild,
>>         the outage would have lasted months, instead of the weeks they managed to
>>         restore service in.
>>
>>         Ignorance aside, and apart from the obvious "it would cost a shit load to
>>         add it to them all", are there any particular reasons why major regional
>>         exchanges wouldn't have fire suppression?
>>
>>         To me it seems that places like Warrnambool and sites with similar
>>         significance (the ones Telstra refer to as KTPs) could probably benefit
>>         from some kind of suppression. These events might be rare, but they have a
>>         big impact when they happen.
>>
>>
>>         On 31 March 2013 23:46, Mark Newton <newton at atdot.dotat.org
>>         <mailto:newton at atdot.dotat.org>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>             On 30/03/2013, at 6:19, Tom Storey <tom at snnap.net
>>             <mailto:tom at snnap.net>> wrote:
>>
>>>             Is it just me, or are there zero mentions of fire suppression systems?
>>>
>>             There were unlikely to be any. 
>>
>>             You've been in country telephone exchanges before. Do you recall ever
>>             seeing a sprinkler head?
>>
>>                 - mark
>>
>>
>>
>>
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