Building Cited for Housing Fuel Tanks Catches Fire [NYT]

Mon Mar 10 10:00:01 UTC 2003

> > An electrical fire broke out in the basement of an office tower
> > in TriBeCa yesterday, four months after building inspectors said
> > they had discovered illegal diesel fuel tanks installed on the
> > upper floors of the tower.

> basement.  roof.  what is it i am not getting here?  osama bin
> elevator?  the ratcheting (rat sh<bleep>ing?) up of the american
> press hysteria?

Diesel fuel from a leaky roof tank will eventually drip down to the 
basement.

Heat from a basement fire will eventually rise up to the roof and cause 
diesel fuel tanks to explode.

In any case, this problem should be solved by the city government in a 
large city. It is a fact that large cities are large telecomm hubs. It is 
a fact that large telecomm hubs need guaranteed power supplies. It is a 
fact that the individual players in telecomm want to be located near each 
other in large cities (same building, same block). The solution to this 
whole mess is for the city government to run a special power utility that 
operates a pair of safe and highly secure diesel power generating plants 
which provide dual entrance service to telecomm hotels in a specific area 
of the city. That way folks can install equipment with no batteries and no 
generators because they are getting triply redundant and diverse power 
(utility, and 2 city diesel generation plants).

We eliminate the dangers of hydrogen fumes and exploding batteries and 
flammable diesel.

BTW, has anyone done any studies of heat generation in routers and 
switches to identify which bits of the hardware generate the most heat 
(i.e. consume the most power) and which functions generate the most heat? 
Maybe there are opportunities for dramatically reducing power consumption 
by changing the way we configure our networks.

--Michael Dillon