Battery-related fire damages energy centre at Vodacom data centre in Dar es Salaam
2013Published 12 Oct 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
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Companies named in this entry: Vodacom
What happened
In August 2013 a battery-related fire damaged the energy centre of the Kwale data centre in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The energy centre is the part of the facility that houses the power equipment supporting the network, while the rest of the site, the white floor area, holds the network equipment. The Kwale data centre houses Vodacom Tanzania's main switching centre in the capital. Vodacom Tanzania subsequently ordered a replacement energy centre made of two separate, standalone prefabricated modules from Flexenclosure.
The new energy centre will be divided into separate rooms and fire zones to isolate potential single points of failure, and a DCIM system will be used for remote management. The source gives no detail on the cause of the fire beyond it being battery-related, and does not report the effect on services, downtime or losses.
Contributing factors
The source states the fire was battery-related. No further cause is reported. The article does not describe the design of the damaged energy centre.
Lessons learned
- Divide energy centres and battery rooms into separate fire zones so that a single fire is less likely to disable the whole facility.
- Design power plant redundancy so that a failure in one room does not necessarily interrupt customer services.
- Remote management systems such as DCIM allow power equipment to be monitored and controlled from a distance.
More lessons on design, standards and commissioning, detection and monitoring, from every incident on the register.
Source
Other entries that name Salaam
Published 2026-10-12. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
