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OK City Data Center Built To Withstand Winds Up To 310 MPH, Says Contractor
dcblogs writes "The area around and to the southwest of Oklahoma City, where more tornadoes were striking Friday night, 'has perhaps the greatest frequency of tornadoes in the U.S.,' said John Snow, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. About 95% of all tornadoes are below EF3 intensity, and only 0.1% achieve EF5, which is what hit Moore earlier this month. To build a data center capable of surviving an EF3, Perimeter Technology in Oklahoma City surrounded the raised floor portion of the data center with 8.5-in. reinforced concrete walls. The data center is in the middle of the building, and around it are offices protected by another 8.5-in. exterior wall. But there's another data center in Oklahoma City that may be able survive 310 MPH winds. The company, Devon Energy, isn't talking about its data center or even confirming that it has one capable of handling these winds. But a contractor has disclosed details."
At last you yankees finally got the tale of the three little pigs right.
Domes fit the bill for tornado/hurricane resistant structures. I will accept nothing less than that or an underground facility or both. Don't build in a flood zone either.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
This data center can survive 3100 mph winds.
Thomson Reuters' location in Eagan Minnesota has its largest data center housed in a concrete bunker designed to withstand any tornado and a direct airliner strike(is in a landing approach for MSP International. The buildings that house the people on the same campus aren't so lucky though. lol
"The company, Devon Energy, isn't talking about its data center or even confirming that it has one capable of handling these winds...."
I'm all for keeping things confidential to avoid disclosing vulnerabilities due to more traditional attacks, but this barely makes any sense whatsoever.
Why would you not want to advertise you have a data center with these capabilities, smack in the middle of tornado alley...
Due to a misunderstanding with European contractors, Oklahoma City's new data centre was only designed to handle very light breezes of up to 310 meters per hour (m/h), and collapsed moments after construction was completed. When asked how they could confuse "MPH" with "m/h", the response was "wast ist eine 'mile'?". Full story at 11...
You know nothing, Jon Snow.
On a more serious note, I'm not sure they should be worried about the wind. Is 8.5in of reinforced concrete really going to stop a station wagon full of tapes hurtling through the sky at 310mph?
Something tells me that their tornado budget would be better spent on insurance and remote data backups.
It's never just a game when you're winning. - George Carlin
Perhaps not as space efficient, but I'm thinking a dome-shaped building with strong anchoring would be excellent. The winds would just caress over it, with nothing to grab hold of.
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The thing withstands 310 MPH winds and it's just "OK"? Tough crowd...
Apparently John Snow DOES know something!
Why aren't the building codes in that area either requiring that or at least storm shelters? That school falling over was just bizarre. I am willing to bet that they have spent much time and money training for school shootings while ignoring the giant storms that rush by quite often.
... or maybe they could just build a regular data center somewhere else?
if you have ever seen tornado damage in person, you stop coming up with these stupid ideas about windproof houses etc.
would your building survive a nuclear bomb blast? no? then it probably wont survive a direct tornado hit.
otherwise therese basically no reason for hobbits to build that way
because the statistics dont justify it ??
more people die from drownings than tornados.
Sabre built a data center in tulsa that's tornado proof. to all outward appearances, it's an empty field surrounded by chain link fencing and razor wire. then they sold it to eds. *shakes head*
Hurricane season is coming.
Are we supposed to be impressed with 8.5 inches of concrete in the walls? In much of Europe, that's pretty close to normal residential construction, nothing special. Ok, maybe they are including more steel - I surely hope so - but it's still nothing special.
In Moore, the school where children were trapped under rubble and drowned because they couldn't escape the flooding: This school had no designated safe room from burst water mains. This is "tornado alley" we're talking about - the last time that Moore was flattened was just 15 years ago! What kind of idiot builds a school in that area that cannot stand up to tornados and has no shelter to retreat to? In this area, tinkertoy construction ought to be forbidden in government buildings, and utterly uninsurable in private ones.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Go google for FEMA P-361 or P-320 and you'll get all the data and construction drawings.
There are two aspects of design here: the first, particularly for smaller structures like safe rooms in houses, is resistance to projectiles. The standard projectile for testing is a 15 lb 2x4 going 100 mi/hr. Texas Tech has a cannon that shoots them for testing. They've done a lot of analysis and review of actual tornadoes and have determined that this is the appropriate projectile: resist that, and you'll resist almost anything else from storms bigger than any actual recorded. Big stuff goes slower, small stuff goes faster, but it's all about momentum and impact pressure, and just like medieval knights, a heavy long skinny thing going fast is an effective projectile.
the second aspect is the force of the wind pushing the wall over, which is a big deal for larger structures (think gymnasiums, auditoriums, etc.). There, you design for the 250/300/350 mi/hr wind or whatever. 250 mi/hr = 160 lb/square foot. Note that in states like California, you probably already have this for free, because you have to design for seismic loads, which are comparable.
As to the school that was destroyed. It was built a long time ago. Retrofits of big structures are expensive. It takes a series of disasters to motivate compliance. In California, the Long Beach quake of 33 resulted in the Field Act (no unreinforced masonry in schools) but still, Sylmar in the 71 resulted in several catastrophic failures of things like hospitals. So the laws were updated to apply to more things. Loma Prieta and Whittier prompted even more.. in fact, I think Whittier is when they really started cracking down on reinforcing masonry, and not allowing existing structures to be grandfathered. Northridge in 94 also resulted in some changes, particularly for things like bolting houses to foundations.
But the point here is that it took 80 years from the first laws about earthquake resistance to the present day, where most stuff is just built to take it. A Civil Engineer being interviewed in Joplin MO commented that making a new hospital tornado resistant only added about 3% to the cost. Doing it as a retrofit is a lot more expensive. Consider an elementary school with 500 students: their annual budget is around $3.7M (http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/11f33pub.pdf, $7600/student) A very tiny fraction of that is available for construction projects, I'd be surprised if it's 1%. You're not going to retrofit a school built in the 60s out of concrete blocks and no rebar for $40k, or even $400k. FEMA estimates that a single family shelter would cost about $5000 to build. Building something to hold 500 students plus 60 staff is a big project: at 5 square feet/person, that's several thousand square feet, and you need to have enough doors for getting those 600 people in and out. And that's 3000 square feet that has to be kept fairly open: no using it for storage. (multipurpose rooms and cafeterias are popular). The other problem is that safe rooms are, by nature, kind of depressing places to be in: they have no windows and limited doors.
Even before this latest rash of storms, it was common to find insurance companies not writing new policies in OK. Premiums are noticeably more then elsewhere for single family homes.
Underground housing has many benefits besides protection from severe winds, chiefly protection against temperature changes. Underground houses don't ever get too hot or cold. Maybe the Shire gets excessively hot in the summer and the Hobbits, not having invented air conditioning, prefer to stay cool. Of course, underground housing like that does require extra labor to build; maybe the Hobbits used some slave labor force to build them.
It might be able to withstand the wind, but what about flying cows and other debris carried by the wind?
they live in a green hillside around a lake.
they built a house using their bare hands during the great depression. and they had a storm cellar. not enough spare income from their website gigs to build 8 inch concrete walls i guess.
but hey, thanks for the judgemental lecture. very helpful.
more people die of drowning during tornado wetaher than die of tornados.
ergo we should spend more money on preventing flood deaths than tornado deaths.
i was thinking of moving to Oklahoma. maybe have a two story house with a basement. until I saw the television footage of the severe storms on the cable news network. just saying.
hopefully the data center has a huge generator in case the power goes out for a week.
Design builder here with tornado and snow load experience, SO that tilt-up concrete structure with flat roof can NOT withstand an uplift load on 10,000 sq. ft. of roof structure. That's the primary design flaw on first principles. Exterior mechanicals, chillers, solar arrays and electrical gear only survive IF nothing crashes into them during a category EF5 tornado.
What are the chances?
"In Oklahoma, storm chases YOU".
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
Look, 310mph winds aren't that big a deal - airplanes go faster than that all the time and they are fragile. It's about what's *in* the wind that's also travelling at 310mph, like wood beams, rocks, bricks, and cars. Can their building survive that? No. An F5 tornado is not survivable above ground, period. It's not the wind; it's the debris.
Oklahoma is one of the parts of the country with a populace that believes in low government regulation, and strict housing codes would go against that. Besides, the torando destroyed less than 2% of the houses in the Oklahoma city area. I bet most houses reach 30 or 40 years without tornado trouble. It might be cheaper just to build to lower quality standards, and buy insurance.
Ok, maybe I'm missing the point, but isn't it a lot easier to build stuff to survive a hurricane or tornado if it's underground? That would be my assumption based on the notion of a storm cellar or other type of "bunker" being constructed underground. So, why not just build datacenters 10-20 feet underground? Essentially you would treat it like a basement, but without a building on top of it. I could see flooding as being an issue, but couldn't you just excavate another 30-40 feet below the floor of the datacenter and give water somewhere to go? The water would have to fill up that space before it became a concern to you, and I would assume that if you designed it in such a way that you never expect water to get down there in the first place then if you put pumps to deal with any water that does come in it shouldn't be too hard for them to keep up with any water that does.
The biggest problem in OK is not wind... it's all the crap that got picked up by the wind, and is being slammed into your specially designed structure at 300MPH.
Just like the biggest problem for structures in hurricanes is not actually the wind, it's the water and debris that's getting slammed into them by the hurricane.
The real question is what idiot decided building a datacenter in Oklahoma was a good idea in the first place? I wouldn't store my compost pile there.
It's actually more about the roof.
Concrete walls are the easy bit, the problem is having a roof, especially on a broad structure, that doesn't buckle and fail, or just take off on it's own. Especially when the building isn't sealed (Airliners handle twice the wind, but they have no holes.) and no building is completely sealed because you need air for the occupants, the equipment, and the generators.
Other issue, already covered here, is it isn't only the wind, it's what the wind is throwing at your building at 310mph, to make fresh holes, and start weak-points in your structure. Or just when your sub-contracted doors and windows and vents fail to stay shut.
So it actually gets pretty interesting. The concrete walls are pretty much the least of it.
If an OK data center can withstand 300MPh winds, what can a good data center withstand?
oral roberts. should be some nearby
Sure it may be able to handle 310 mph winds, but can it handle a house (or car or bus) being blown by 310 mph winds?