A small section inside a Google data center in western Iowa exploded Monday night, injuring workers and causing temporary disruptions to some of Google’s most popular services, including Gmail, YouTube and the Google search engine.
The explosion at the data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, injured three employees, local officials said.
“Three workers were accessing an electrical cabinet when there was an arc flash that caused all three of them to be burned,” Council Bluffs Fire Chief Justin James told CBS MoneyWatch. “All were transported to the trauma center for care.”
Data centers are large buildings that house dozens of supercomputers and servers that are typically used to store and process information that people generate while working on their personal computers. Google has 14 data centers in the US, including a second in the Omaha suburb of Papillion, Nebraska.
An arc flash is a sudden burst of light and heat that occurs when a powerful electrical current travels through a conductor, misses its intended destination, and ends up on the ground. The heat given off by an arc flash can reach up to 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
First responders went to the Council Bluffs data center around midnight after being told there was a “large explosion,” Council Bluffs Fire Department Deputy Chief Jim Wood said in the Omaha World-Herald.
Google did not immediately respond to requests on Tuesday. The Council Bluffs data center was built in 2007 and now employs more than 900 people, according to the company’s corporate website.
This is a developing story.
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