While we DID send MANY kilovolts into ham-hocks, rump roasts and whole turkeys and chickens back in the day to test our data centre power surge/power spike failover systems which provided us with many a flash-arc-cooked dinner, we NEVER sent that electricity over to LIVE DATA CENTRE SYSTEMS! This type of bypass is LUDICROUS in the mere fact that it was even WIRED this way is unfathomable to us! Even in the early/mid-1990's when were were blowing up lots of dead food with electricity, there is NO WAY our building wiring and failover circuits would even ALLOW such jerry-rigging as was described in this story!
Whoever originally designed and wired the UPS system and data centre building circuits has some SERIOUS self-introspection needed! There should have been MULTIPLE FAIL-OVER and breaker-circuits allowing AUTOMATED and MANUAL BYPASS of any such generators, power conditioning and power backup devices! Many times you have to do an intrinsicly safe LIVE REMOVAL and/or LIVE INSERT of OLD and NEW computers, generators, UPS'es and switching gear. The FIRST thing you do when you design and build a data centre is to ENSURE proper fail-over and automated/manual bypasses and switch-overs. This is Data Centre Building Design 101 and should NEVER have happened in the first place! Even building cabling grounding and multi-rack grounding has to be thought of and TESTED from the get-go! You just can't plug-in big power systems without some forethought and BASIC pre-thought-out design work!
I don't care if you design a 5000 Euros data centre or a 50 Million Euros data centre! THINK and BUILD-IN all the PROPER cable designs, building power and rack grounding, UPS/power supplies backup AND bypass/failover circuits in BOTH automated AND manual modes in case everything fails all at once!
I can't believe this is happening at this time where we can now look up modern electrical codes and MANY data centre design tips'n'tricks as a set of PDF files that can be found and downloaded in mere minutes!
I am flabbergasted and kind-of ANGRY that things like this STILL happen! 380 Volts is a big amount especially since it was at something probably like 40 to 50 amps which 19,000 WATTS of power which can deep-fry ANY human body in mere seconds. Sorry if I sound a bit self-righteous BUT electricity is NOT something to be toyed with willy-nilly! I know far too many people who were severely injured and killed even by a just a few volts and amps! When it comes to electricity it's ALWAYS SAFETY FIRST! DO NOT JURY-RIG and BYPASS safety circuits that are there for a reason!
V