Total Chaos.. I worked for a company that had a remote site along the Gulf Coast. After a hurricane had came through, my colleague and I were asked to go to the site and determine why the site was offline. They had already restored power to the building but the network never recovered. The data center was in the middle of the building with a Cisco 6509 being used as the distribution switch. The power for the switch was set up as a pig tail for a Nema L6-30 locking plug; so the plug laid beside the rack on the ground. Turns out the hurricane had ripped part the roof off the building and the data center floor had been flooded with water. The Nema connection had been submerged at one point. We began removing all the line cards in the 6509 to reduce the weight of the chassis so we could take it out of the rack. The electrical shock that the chassis took was so hard that it had fused the supervisor card to the chassis. We had forcefully pull the card out. It was so bad that the connector between the card and the chassis was completely melted and scorched. A complete surprise that the entire thing didn't catch on fire. You'd think that was the end of the story.... a month later the custodial crew was cleaning the building during the day when an outlet they were using for a vacuum cleaner caught on fire. That outlet was in the hallway right outside the data center... next to where they stored all of the copy paper. The fire burnt up a few cases of copy paper and causes all sorts of smoke damage in the building. They determined the outlet had been faulty due to the recent water damage from the hurricane. None of the network equipment was damaged in the fire but everything (equipment, rack, walls, cables, everything) was covered in black soot from the smoke. It was impossible to clean it all out. From then on, you couldn't go into the data center without getting a least one small black stain on your shirt or pants. Fairly certain that building was cursed.
... View more
