Burnt Museum at the Timmelsjoch / Sölden opened again

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In one of the photos there's something on the ceiling that looks like it could be sprinkler pipework, although it's painted black. Sprinkler pipe systems should be painted red for identification purposes. That's a requirement in Australia anyway. I'd guess it applies in other countries too. Perhaps exemptions can be granted for architectural or aesthetic reasons.

I used to design fire sprinkler systems in a previous job. It feels like a lifetime ago but I think I still have a copy of the Australian Standard (AS2118) somewhere in my bookshelves. One thing that would often surprise clients is that PVC piping is permitted for sprinkler systems.
 
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Didnt know that. It always was an issue with office redesigns requiring sprinkler position changes. I only ever saw the effect of one accidental sprinkler discharge. It made a huge mess flooding a floor. That scared me enough to be extremely careful around them. That was one sprinkler head, you see in Movies some bloke with a cigarette lighter at one sprinkler and that sets all of them off on a floor, nope. Just like cars exploding in accidents only 100% less likely.BTW rebuilding the building is easy, rebuilding the bike exhibits is not so easy, I remember the National Bike Museum fire in Pommeyland and how hard replacing the bikes was there. Hope they have sprinklers in the new Laverda one.
 
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:cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry:

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Vince said:
you see in Movies some bloke with a cigarette lighter at one sprinkler and that sets all of them off on a floor, nope.
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Yeah, that's a dumb Hollywood fallacy. One or maybe two heads that are directly affected by the heat of a fire will go off and extinguish the fire before it spreads to involve the rest of the building, so there's no point in having them all go off. Systems in commercial buildings like offices and public spaces don't have sufficient water flow capability to feed more than a few sprinkler heads at the same time anyway. The number of heads that you have to provide flow for varies depending on the fire risk category of the building.

Having said that, there are such things as a deluge sprinkler systems where all of the sprinkler heads are controlled by a central valve and go off together, but they're only installed in extremely high hazard areas where a fire is likely to spread faster than a normal sprinkler system could keep up with. Places like fuel storage facilities, in which case the sprinklers will discharge foam rather than water. Those systems have massive water flow capability.
 
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I did a job a while ago on a State Government computer room extension, an incredibly stupid idea. There were massive plumbing and cabling intrusions plus a coffin ceiling and AC so this needed to be sealed as this room had a Halon Systeme. Right from the start, I know this would NEVER work but they insisted. The only possible way was to use Fire Resistant spray foam around these obstacles. Still makes me shudder to do what I did and end up failing the tests. That's one nightmare I wish I had avoided.
 
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Yeah, fire suppression and smoke control systems can get pretty complicated, especially when you have services going through multiple spaces and you still have to allow egress for people to escape.

Halon went out of fashion pretty quickly when it was found to be about 3,500 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, as well as a nasty ozone depleting chemical.

I think computer rooms have pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur too now that a mobile phone has a gazillion times the computing capacity of the average computer room 20 years ago. In the last computer room I had anything to do with, we installed a normal water sprinkler rather than Halon gas. Gas fire suppression was originally favoured for computer rooms because it was thought to do less damage to the computer system than water, but the more recent thinking is that if you have a fire in a computer room, the computer is fucked anyway so you may as well douse it with water.

I'm old enough to have been involved with both the design and installation of halon fire suppression systems, as well as the subsequent decommissioning after they were declared illegal. Disposal of the gas was a bit of a problem. The stuff could only be rendered environmentally inert by cracking the chemical compound apart at high temperature. We shipped container loads of the stuff offshore to be burnt in the middle of the ocean in a massive oil-fired incinerator on a ship that was appropriately called Vulcanus. The ship had previously been used to destroy heaps of "agent orange" left over after the Vietnam war.

I think there are better disposal technologies these days. I read something about plasma arc incineration a few years ago.
 
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On the contrary Cam, we are building Data Centres like there's no tomorrow. 6000m² of computer racking with a dozen 1500kVA UPS units and gas suppression fire system in Port Melbourne, a bigger facility in Tullamarine and just started another whopper in Footscray. All for the same client.
 
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