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Concerns Over A Fire In A French Data Centre Prompts Concerns Over Fire Precautions In UK's Telephone Exchanges At the last North West BT Unions Health & Safety Co-ord meeting held on the 23rd March, Colin Johnstone Health & Safety Co-ordinator from Prospect union who sits on the committee; raised a news item which reported on a fire in a French telephone exchange which then prompted a discussion about the condition of the BT Estate of Telephone Exchanges where Openreach engineers work in maintenance of the equipment within. Here, Colin reports briefly on the issue: In Strasbourg, France, The OVHcloud data-centre was destroyed in a fire last year. OVHcloud operates 15 data-centres in Europe, with four in Strasbourg and a fifth being built. The data-centre had no automatic fire extinguisher system nor an electrical cut-off mechanism, said the Bas-Rhin fire service in it's report on the fire and the actions required by them to put out the fire. According to the fire service's report, the fire occurred at 0046 on March 10, 2021 and destroyed SBG2, a five-story data-centre occupying 500m2. Servers in adjacent buildings SBG1 were also damaged in the incident while SBG3 and SBG4 remained operational.
Apparently, the fire started in an electrical inverter on the first floor of the five-floor SBG2 structure. The cause of the fire has not been officially declared by OVHcloudas of yet. The Bas-Rhin report describes several issues that contributed to the destruction caused by the blaze, including the presence of toxic fumes from lead batteries, a wooden ceiling rated to resist fire for only an hour, and two inner courtyards that acted as "fire chimneys." The French-language IT website called Journal du Net obtained the Bas-Rhin report via one of their journalists was subsequently published on The Register website. The fire department's report tells of the arriving firefighters being met with "electric arcs of more than one meter around the exterior door of the energy room" where the fire is believed to have originated. The report, as algorithmically translated (using software) says, "The technicians of ES (Electricité de Strasbourg) met difficulties in cutting off the electricity in the room." ES personnel arrived on-scene about 0120 and didn't manage to cut the power until about 0329. Using a thermal camera the fire crew were able to determine the temperature in the ground floor room measured 400 degrees Celsius! Ending this report Colin writes: "We need to learn from this to check that BT sites are secure and electrical cut-off is available via a safe fire path." Source: The Register
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Firefighters were immediately on the scene but could not control the fire in SBG2 because of what they were faced with, the report states.