Date: 18 Jun 90 17:22:51 GMT
From: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (Gene Spafford)
Subject: Water problems

Story 1.
I don't have a newspaper citation for this story -- I heard it on the
phone last night while talking with a friend in Atlanta.

It appears that in north Fulton County, Atlanta, a water main broke
inside one of the pumping stations.  The resulting flood damaged 4 of
the main pumps and they had to be taken offline.  The area was without
normal water pressure for a few days, and some places were completely
without water.

The Risk?  Well, the computer center where they have the machines
running the Avail ATM network for Atlanta was in that area.  And they
evidently depend on the public water system for cooling (either the
building or the machines themselves -- it wasn't clear to my friend
from the news reports).  The center had to be shut down until normal
water service was restored, thus "un-Availing" ATM customers
throughout the Atlanta area.

Story 2.

At 4am on the 7th of this month, a 14" water main broke in one of the
service tunnels here on campus.  Unfortunately, it broke in a tunnel
connected to the campus computing center (conveniently located in the
basement of one of the buildings).  What happened next was nasty.
In the words of George Goble of our ECN staff:

> I heard there was eventually 2-3' of water down there, about 500,000 Gal,
> more than the city swimming pool. Gives a new meaning to "floating point
> overflow", and "source pool", etc.  Water came in so fast, it went up at
> 1-2" per min, and the mech equipment room (with 100HP motors for air
> handling, etc) became submerged while in operation.. no more motors!
> 480V running around everywhere, 12KV in the (flooded) tunnels!
>
> There were reports of Macintoshes and PC's starting to submerge, and
> water blowing out the fans, and fire/smoke coming out the power supplies.
> Floor tiles were floating down the hallway, until they bumped into
> something, releasing trapped air, and sank.  There was a pallet or
> two of water softener salt stored in the basement also, I heard some
> PC's had only the plastic remaining, as the salt/corrision had eaten
> away the metal.  Early on, someone said they saw an elevator which
> had stopped at the basement, go up one floor, open its doors, and
> 3' of water poured out on ground floor.

The service tunnels out of that building were also flooded, and helped
carry the water into the basements of nearby buildings.  That's good,
in one sense, or the water would have gotten much deeper in the
computing center.

Then, to make the whole situation even better, the folks who were
pumping stuff out used gasoline powered pumps that filled the entire
Math/Science building with carbon monoxide leading the police to
cordon off the building and prevent anyone from getting to their
offices.  This included the Math & Stat departments, the math sciences
library, and the Dean and his staff.

Amazingly enough, some of the networks and machines were up and in
normal operation by the end of the weekend.  This was good, because
the networks coming into campus are routed through that complex.

Luckily, our CS computer room is on the 2nd floor of another building,
and our ECN computer center is across campus.  Other sites, similarly
isolated were also unscathed.


Morals:
1.  Basements are not the best place to keep your computers
2.  Depending on outside water (or lack thereof) to keep your machines
running can be a mistake.
3.  If you do pipeline processing, be sure to check for overflow!

Gene Spafford
NSF/Purdue/U of Florida  Software Engineering Research Center,
Dept. of Computer Sciences, Purdue University, W. Lafayette IN 47907-2004
Internet:  spaf@cs.purdue.edu	uucp:	...!{decwrl,gatech,ucbvax}!purdue!spaf