Data center gas: Baseless hysteria or more to it?
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plateshutoverlock@21:1/5 to
All on Sun Sep 24 20:21:03 2023
"Stahl and Lebedun[22] describe an outbreak of mass sociogenic illness in the data center of a university town in the United States Midwest in 1974. Ten of 39 workers smelling an unconfirmed "mystery gas" were rushed to a hospital with symptoms of
dizziness, fainting, nausea and vomiting. They report that most workers were young women either putting their husbands through school or supplementing the family income. Those affected were found to have high levels of job dissatisfaction. Those with
strong social ties tended to have similar reactions to the supposed gas, which only one unaffected woman reported smelling. No gas was detected in subsequent tests of the data center."
I'm wondering how new the equipment was in this data center because it's possible that the new equipment had all kinds of chemicals on them, used mainly for finishing the cabinets. Once the machines were unsealed from their containers and installed, and
left running for a while, the cabinets and such would start outgassing whatever chemicals were used in the finishing process in large quantities. The air cooling/ventalation system in the data center would then begin to vent out this 'new car smell' from
this space, and there might have been no detectable traces of these chemicals left by the time the investigators came
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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