Bad day to be a UK TV broadcaster

[Nick]

I think some people use the term "halon" generically - that's my experience, at least. I'm familiar with Inergen systems where I work.

And although I can't go into any detail, we have had a large bunch of hard drive failures caused by the acoustic effects of a release. A similar incident in Sidney some years back was fairly widely reported:

https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/04/l...arm_disks/

As that link mentions, the type of release nozzles makes a difference - and the wrong type were used in our installation (allegedly!).

After our "event", it's definitely something we are aware of across the corporation. But of course, this was Red Bee's building...

Halon is something very specific and very nasty - it not only is an awful greenhouse gas, it works by rapidly displacing oxygen to extinguish any fire. "Halon" should NOT be used generically (like "Hoover" etc.).

Halon has the unfortunate side-effect of possibly killing or seriously injuring any animal life in the room, including humans. Many years ago (at Smith New Court - a once large City market maker and broker, now owned by Merrill Lynch) I was in their new data centre in Farringdon when some idiot working on the HVAC lit a blow-torch. Normally, if humans are in the room the Halon should have been disabled, but it wasn't. The alarm went off (30-seconds warning) and you've never seen a large room (size of three tennis courts) fully of very expensive equipment clear of people so quickly. The alarm was cancelled but the risk of either suffocation or serious physical injury due to the heavy floor tiles flying around is enormous.

Inergen does not kill people in the room and is kinder to the environment (has some CO2 in it) - it's normally vented from the ceiling rather than ceiling AND underfloor (underfloor is risky as the floor tiles can get thrown around and they are seriously damaging to anything that intersects with their flight path). It's a pretty explosive discharge - basically a series of huge red cylinders containing highly pressurised gas that have big solenoid valves on top that just open really fast and vent down a bunch of 1" to 2" pipes. An impressive sight. You have to have special automatic damper vents that open as the gas is discharged to relieve the pressure, else, to quote Michael Caine, you'll "blow the bloody doors off".

As I previously mentioned, the current trend is just to keep the level of oxygen in the room low enough to prevent fires establishing but high enough to keep people alive. Just stop the problem at source.