In the one dump we had at the hospital where I used to work, the operators were in an old-style computer room, down near the tape drives, about 100 ft from the primary entrance. There was a ceiling mounted discharge nozzle between their location and the door. When the alarm went off, apparently only one operator was in the room, and he didn't know what the sound meant. After a few seconds, he realized what was happening, and headed for the door. The nozzle discharged, caught him square in the face, and IIRC knocked him off his feet. The fire department showed up because of the alarm, and gave him oxygen. Apparently he suffered no lasting effects, although we had him checked out pretty carefully.
Since the equipment was rigged to drop power on a discharge, everything shut down hard, but we had no problems bringing it back up. No special cleaning was done. > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Behalf Of Leonard Woren > Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 3:04 PM > To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU > Subject: Re: [IBM-MAIN] 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. > > -------------------------------------------------------- If you are not an intended recipient of this e-mail, please notify the sender, delete it and do not read, act upon, print, disclose, copy, retain or redistribute it. Click here for important additional terms relating to this e-mail. http://www.ml.com/email_terms/ -------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
