AI Research & Frontier Labs · August 2026
Oldham, a former fire chief, was asked whether he would send firefighters inside a burning data center — a building with almost nobody in it — to protect someone else's hardware. His answer was that it depends on construction and containment, and that declining to go in is sometimes the correct command decision. He had just described the 44 firefighters exposed to battery-fire chemicals at a blaze in Round Rock.
Transcript
All kinds of chemicals, all kinds of chemicals. And we may not even know what they are, depending on the secrecy level, right, of the facility. But there's, I can't even listen. Just the fire we had in Round Rock has a list of about eight different really bad for you chemicals that were involved in those lead-acid batteries. They're carcinogenic, the respiratory irritants, repeated exposure in many cases is worse. And hopefully that's not going to be the situation. But there's heavy metals involved that stay in your body forever. Our 44 firefighters who are exposed, yeah, most of them were wearing personal protective equipment, but all it takes is a little gap, a little momentary exposure to start getting that into your system. Everybody had an exposure report, and many of them, all of them, may be carrying toxic time bombs inside them for the rest of their lives. I myself am an occupational cancer survivor from my time in the fire service. You get exposed to a lot of nasty stuff, and it's even worse in a witch's brew of nasty chemicals involved in a data center and particularly in batteries.
So, you know, let's just say you go back, you know, let's just say you were the incident commander of a data center fire. You're called out to a data center. How would you look at that? Would you think it would be sound to send humans inside a facility with very few humans inside to protect in order to put themselves at risk to protect someone else's metal and plastic?
That's not a simple question to answer. I hate sounding like a consultant, but it depends. It depends on the building construction. Can you isolate it and keep it confined to a small area of the building? Sometimes the safest thing to do is let it burn. Doing aggressive interior attacks, sending people into that building is if it's in the main building may not be a good idea. You've got to weigh the risks of letting it burn, the risks of an interior attack. There's a lot of factors that go into that decision. It's not a simple, I would do this if. There's so many things that have to be considered.
And how fast any, frankly,
any building fire, not just a data center.
Sure. And this building, though, in particular, so much electrical going on in there. How does that amount of electrical components, stuff that's powered, all these sources coming in, how does that affect how you would handle a data center fire?