Battery cabinet fire in hospital server room in Cairns

What happened

On Tuesday 21 November 2017 a faulty battery in the IT room of a health centre in Cairns, Queensland, set off a small fire. Emergency services were called at around 10am. The fire is believed to have been caused by a short circuit in a battery cabinet in the server room that supports IT systems for the Cairns and Hinterland hospitals and the wider health service. The fire caused two hospitals and several of the city's health service systems to fail.

The system used for admissions and discharges and the hospital switch operator stopped working, and the health service deployed additional resources to make up for the disruption. The outage was reported as less significant than an earlier 2017 failure of the hospital's electronic medical system, which lasted several days.

Contributing factors

A short circuit in a battery cabinet in the server room is believed to have caused the fire. The source does not describe the cabinet make, battery chemistry, protection devices or maintenance history.

Lessons learned

1. Battery cabinets in server rooms that support clinical systems need thermal monitoring, short-circuit protection and regular inspection, because a single cabinet fault can disable several services at once.
2. Critical administrative and switching systems should have tested failover paths so that a loss of one server room does not interrupt admissions and discharges.
3. Operators should plan for the staff and manual workarounds needed when IT systems fail, since the recovery effort fell on the health service and not only on the technology.

More lessons on detection and monitoring, from every incident on the register.

Source

datacenterdynamics.com