Ever experienced a halon dump firsthand?

In My Humble Opinion
1

If so, I’d appreciate stories of what it was like.

The reasons why are tied to gaming-geekery. I’m doing preparation for possibly running a Feng Shui one-shot adventure; FS is a roleplaying game of action movies. Unlike more serious and/or tactically-oriented fare, it’s more concerned with absurd, but cool, action setpieces with enough plot to quickly move the characters between them.

One of these setpieces shall take place in a fairly typical large modern computer data center–an atypically well-armed one, though. Lots of heavy-duty servers, raised floors with dangerously-sharp-edged tiling hiding crawlspaces packed with messes of network cable below, overly-bright lighting, tape robots (they’re not as cool as the word “robot” might imply), monitors, terminals, etc. All of which will be tending to get shot up and otherwise exploding, in fairly gratuitous manner. This sort of thing is bound to set off the halon system common of such places.

I’d like to hear tales of what that’s like.

Also, speculation about just how pressurized those big metal cannisters of the stuff are, and just how entertaining them getting punctured during the course of gratuitous implausible action scenes might be.

2

And the award for most cryptically written OP goes to… Drastic! :smiley:

3

Oh, I can be far more cryptic than that. But ::sigh:: I’ll aim for less. :slight_smile:

Roleplaying games themselves will be non-cryptic to a great many Dopers. To the many others to whom they are, I’ve no idea how to make them less so. Just one of those things. They’re a common pastime amongst subsets of the geek population. Guilty as charged.

“Halon” is a term applied to a variety of fire-suppression systems that use chemicals instead of water. In a data center, there’s an enormous amount of electrical wiring running every which way, and of course electronic equipment–that’s not the kind of place you want to be setting off a traditional sprinkler system and spraying water everywhere. Using halon instead just might mean not all of the expensive equipment inside is going to be wrecked.

In theory, the exact stuff they use isn’t harmful to people–at least, supposed to be a lot less harmful than sucking in lungfuls of toxic oily smoke from burning plastic and such is. Or a lot less harmful than being electrocuted from sprays of water hitting electrical fires. These things are relative, I imagine.

The only firsthand account of what being in a room when a halon system went off is like, came from a former cow orker who was…not the most reliable of sources. To hear him tell it, the nozzles made a sound like multiple shotguns spaced over the ceiling going off; they discharged with such force that if you were to have been standing under one it would probably kill you (he liked to exaggerate things–that reliability problem); and the air instantly went opaque from it. Also that he had a splitting headache for a couple days afterwards.

4

Yup. Happened when they were ‘testing it’. At the time I’d been below the tiles looking for a connection or something and the sucker blew. Very loud, but it just sounded like one big shot not a whole bunch. I skinned my shin getting outa below the floor and skeedaddled out the door.

When we went back to look, pieces of paper (the old green bar) were plastered to the ceiling. Not too much of a mess, other than that, but then there wasn’t a real fire.

Scared the shit out of most people there tho! We were all kidding outselves about who was the least scared (coolest) and there was lotsa macho posturing, but in reality all those in the machine room were ‘frazzled’ for a few days.

Hope this helps. :smiley:

5

I took a halon dump this afternoon. Cleared out the whole bathroom.

6

“Can’t light a match” is very different than “don’t light a match!”

Philo, firstly, thanks. Secondly, what did it look like? I’ve always pictured something like fire extinguisher foam spray, only a lot of it very quickly. Any truth to the air-opaqueness thing? Or was it a matter of being far too focused on the exit to have noticed? Absolutely understandable if so, my immediate what-if policy at my first data center employment was, “get the hell out and let the leads breathe it” :slight_smile:

7

Haven’t you people seen Terminator 2? That big vaporous THING that happened inside the computer building at the end when they blew the safe was supposed to be a halon dump.

8

IIRC there was no ‘smoke’ or anything. Things were clearly visible, but that was when I went back in (about a half hour later). More of a smell, but then I don’t really remember what it smelled like. Mostly I remember getting a ladder and getting the pieces of paper off the ceiling. If you can imagine it, we had acoustic tile, and some came loose (actually blew up into the ‘attic’ and some stayed in place. Some pieces of paper also lodged themselves in the little acoustic holes so that the tile had to be removed and ‘cleaned’ out.

It’s been about 10 years ago, so you know, the mind goes, that kinda thing. :smiley:

9

Both a full Halon dump, and a full CO[sub]2[/sub] dump.

The Halon cylinders were, IIRC, under 2300lbf of pressure, and the bank held 40 bottles (this was ship-board, fireroom suppressant system). When it went, well, everyone’s ears popped almost instantly, and the sound was unreal. Take a water hose and stick it in your ear, then turn it on full blast, and you’ll get a small idea. You couldn’t think clearly, and the one over-riding thought was: Gemme outta here! Dust and loose materials were blown about in astounding quantities, and one guy caught a loose clipboard across the back of his head, causing the only real injury. We bagged-ass outta there, and then reentered the space in Scot Airpacks. No fire, just a faulty thermal link.

The CO[sub]2[/sub] bank was in the Rubber and Plastics shop (My shop, at the time!). We had encountered heavy swells, and the ship’s course took her parallel to the trough. We started taking heavy rolls, and a deep-freezer containing our dangerously volitile chemicals sheared it’s mounts and came down, hard. Electrical lines were severed and sparking, and the 100-pound doors shot off like tiddly-winks. The Hell’s-Brew of chemicals that formed when the contents of the freezer spilled stripped the deck to bright-polished steel in less time than it takes to read this sentance. We bagged-ass out of that space, too, and I maunally tripped the CO[sub]2[/sub] dump on the way out.

The CO[sub]2[/sub] dump is very similar to the Halon, but you get clouds of icy vapor, and visiblity goes to hell for a bit. It gets pretty damn cold for a short while, but that passes pretty fast.

We reentered the space in Scot Airpacks (no OBAs in that atmosphere*!) and wetsuits after securing electrical power, and commenced the clean-up. Some of the contents of the freezer had flash-points well below room temperature, and the helo deck refuelling pipes ran though our shop, frighteningly close to the spill. Had that mess lit off, we’d have been fighting for the ship’s life.