Video: Major fire sweeps through Almere data center; Cause unknown
A large fire broke out Thursday morning at a data center on Rondebeltweg in Almere, Omroep Flevoland reports. No injuries have been reported.
This includes the Sallandsekant, Danswijk, and Nobelhorst neighborhoods, as well as the Weteringpark, and people on the Hoge Vaart waterway between the Almere-Stad and Almere-Hout districts.
Records show firefighters were first dispatched at about 8:30 a.m., with the alarm escalating twice within 30 minutes. By 9:10 a.m., the incident was classified as a major fire, and a GRIP 1 regional emergency was declared. Both the major fire and GRIP 1 alarms remained in effect as of 11 a.m.
GRIP 1 is the lowest of five levels in the Dutch scaling protocol. It requires cooperation among multiple emergency services—including the safety region, fire brigade, police, ambulance, and municipality—and the establishment of a Commando Plaats Incident (CoPI) to direct on-site response under a single incident commander.
The fire is burning in a compartment at the rear of the NorthC Data Centers building on the Sallandsekant industrial estate on the east side of Almere Stad. Firefighters are combating the blaze while working to prevent it from spreading to other parts of the facility. A diesel tank at the site is being cooled as a precaution using a crash tender from Lelystad Airport.
A crash tender is a specialized firefighting vehicle primarily used at airports for aircraft fires. It has enormous extinguishing capacity, which is being used here to cool the diesel tank.
NorthC, the owner of the data center, said nothing can yet be said with certainty regarding the cause of the fire or the extent of the damage to the infrastructure. However, all people present in the building were evacuated in time, NorthC Datacenters CEO Alexandra Schless said.
The Dutch ICT service provider SURF reported that a number of its members — institutions in education and research — have parts of their infrastructure running in the data center.
“Therefore, institutions may experience disruptions on the network or applications that depend on connections to this data center,” SURF said.
Utrecht University confirmed it is experiencing consequences from the fire. A spokeswoman said the exact nature of the impact is still being determined. In any case, the website of DUB, the university’s magazine, was reportedly inaccessible.
