Reply to post: What is that horn for?

Military techie mangled minicomputer under nose of scary sergeant

JC runner
Facepalm

What is that horn for?

I was working a really important site. Names changed. So I decided to drive into work that day. There was a shuttle we normally took, but I wasn't in the mood. So as I turned off onto the site road I notice my Cassette player was not playing the normal static it would get as I closed in on the site. Weird I thought. Anyway, sign in and head to the office. There was a long hallway you walked down to the security door that lead to the floor. Entered the code and open the door to be meet by silence. Did I mention this was a full computer floor with the accompanying devices and Mainframe CPUs (4)? So this noticeable silence was not a good thing.

The off going crew is in a huddle looking perplexed. So I inquire what is going on just as my boss walks in. Floor is down cause there was a activation of the Halon. Okay.. so what activated the halon? A electrical filter at the other end of the floor had started smoking and set the smoke alarm off. Okay so why is the floor down? Well, while they were investigating the cause of fire alarm, the smoke reached a second smoke sensor zone. The system was setup so a single smoke alarm would not cause the Halon system to dump, but two smoke detections in different zones and you would get a dump.. Well since they knew the cause of the smoke why did someone not hit the halon abort button? (there was a horn that you could not mistake that went off and you had 10 seconds) Well it seems while they were assessing the situation, the second zone got triggered. They heard the horn and not knowing what it was, until the halon dumped, forgot about the abort button ( there were 4 entrances to the floor, all of them had Halon abort and emergency power off buttons, the big red kind and were clearly labeled.) However we never practiced for such an occurrence. You were just told about it.

So I ask what it looked like, They said when they saw the orange mist coming from the nozzles in the ceiling, they all ran. At this point I notice the foot print in the middle of one of the off going guys shirt.. What happened there I inquired? Well, it seems when everyone saw the orange mist, they immediately headed for the exit. The guy fell. The folks behind him did not stop. Nobody thought to hit the emergency power down button. Okay so why is the floor down now? Well they started getting errors on the system, and decided to shut down everything to vacuum up the now dumped halon. They only thing on was one of the main system ( it was a dual redundant system ), as it had been restarted after they cleaned it out. But they could not get the Disk drives to read the packs... We decided to go to dinner ( there was a cafeteria on site because we were in the middle of nowhere) and fouled and fixed the disk problem after we ate. Seems the drives did not like Halon in their electronics and it threw the calibration off. Mohawk 2700s if you are curious.

There were 4 big bottles (for the celling nozzles) and 2 smaller bottles (for the under floor). I think I was told it was $40K (1980 dollars) to refill them. I think it took us about a week to clean up all of those little pellets.

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