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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

If a fire supression kicks in or the fire department shows up with their hoses, would they still say the fire destroyed it or just say destroyed due to fire and water damage?

Also, fire suppression system do fail. There was an infamous incident in LA for one of the studios. They built a warehouse to be a tape vault with tapes going back to the 80s. A fire started, but the suppression system failed because there was not enough pressure in the system. Total loss. Got to keep your safety equipment properly tested!

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It wasn’t just “tapes going back to the 80s.” Those were just the media Universal initially admitted to losing. No, that building was the mother lode. It had film archives going back over 50 years, and worst of all — unreleased audio tape masters for thousands upon thousands of recording artists. The amount of “remastered” album potential that fire destroyed is probably in the billions of dollars, let alone the historical loss of all those recordings by historical persons that will never be heard due to a failure of a fire prevention system. Fascinating case study in why you should never put all your eggs in one basket.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Universal_Studios_fire

In 1996 Surinam lost many of their government archives after a fire burned the building down.

I can find surprisingly few English-language resources for this (only Dutch ones); guess it's a combination of a small country + before the internet really took off.

This is why I'm such a fan of digitizing. If you have 1 film master you effectively have none. Do some 8K or 16K scans of that master and effectively manage the resulting data and you're effectively 100% immune from future loss in perpetuity.

Losing parts of history like that is tragic.

There's a problem with testing sprinklers: engaging them can be damaging to contents and even structures. So, we're talking about completely emptying the facility, then taking it offline to dry for a time. I've never heard about this being done to anything that was already operational (but I wasn't researching this either).

Isn't something like Halon used in data centers for that reason? That can probably be tested without damaging infrastructure.

Halon is pretty much banned for years now, other agents have been introduced. Sadly, making an actual full test of a gaseous extinguishing system (such as FM200 or Novec 1230) can be prohibitively expensive (mainly costs of the "reloading" of the system with new gas). Those are just mostly tested for correct pressure in tanks and if the detection electronics are working fine, making an actual dump would be very impractical (evacuation of personnel, ventilating the room afterwards etc.)

Good point. But, apart from cost of the gas, mentioned by sibling comment, that also isn't disruption-free. Gas-based systems are by definition (they displace oxygen) dangerous to humans. But yeah, not being able to run maintenance is orders of magnitude less problematic.

There are methodds of testing the water pressure in the pipes without actually engaging the sprinkler heads. It is part of the normal checks done during the maintenence/inspection a business is supposed to have done. In fact, one place I was in had sensors, and would sound the actual fire alarm if the pressure fell below tolerance at any time. The lack of pressure in the Universal vault was 100% unexcusable.

It’s common for sprinklers in parking garages in cold climates to be “dry” where there’s a bubble of air that needs to run through first before water shoots out from a non-freezeable source.

Want to test the system? Just turn off that water valve, hook up your air compressor and pressure test to your heart’s content.

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