The one dump I was in was after a water alarm went off due to an A/C unit drain clogging and a puddle finally triggering the alarm.
Operator ran to the panel, did not know what to do so they decided to do SOMETHING, they pulled the manual release. I was the second one out after I got hit with liquid HALON. Thick hair saved me from frostbite. One nozzle broke off from the ceiling, dented a floor tile pretty well. I was the second one out as I had an operator impaled on my right arm as I pushed through the doors. We had training the next week on override procedures. Press and hold, call security, wait for instructions. So I asked, "where's the phone?" Manager looked at me like I was stupid and pointed to one wall. So, I asked, "where's the override?" and he angrily pointed at the button in front of him. On another wall, 20 feet away from the phone. It dawned on him as people started to laugh. I never saw the telephone people install a new phone so fast. 3rd shift was a one person show and the usual operator thanked me as she laughed. Next dump was on a Saturday at another site, I got paged, a water alarm, manual release, yada yada yada. Walked them through the power up over the phone as I gasped between laughs as I drove over. Any good Big Red Button stories? Hehehehe Seen my share of those. Had a customer VP say, "That button? It's not hooked up to anything." He pushed it and 30 spacecraft engineers on high end UNIX boxes started screaming as the room plunged into darkness. All I had said was, "can we get facilities to remove it when we have a scheduled building power outage?" He said yes. /ptd -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Leonard Woren Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 12:04 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: HALON et al On Wed, Jun 22, 2005 at 01:55:23PM -0500, Ned Hedrick ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > There is also a product called Inergen -- a mixture of 52% nitrogen, 40% > argon and 8% carbon dioxide -- that claims to be safe to the environment > and people. Except for those who need to breathe. The bottom line is that regardless of the chemical makeup, any gas used for computer room fire suppression is going to displace the oxygen that people need to breathe. What I was told by the experts way back when is that "if the Halon dumps, hold your breath and leave the room immediately." That's why the Halon alarm is loud enough to wake the dead in the next county. I heard it once and I was across the hall in my office. Fortunately that was only from a careless workman who had accidentally tripped the fire alarm and an alert operator ran over and held the override button to prevent the Halon from dumping. Saved us $30,000 in 1981. /Leonard ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
