The Data Center Fire Risk Nobody's Talking About | For Humanity #91

Gary spent 50+ years in public safety — police officer, then two decades in the fire service as an EMT and wildland firefighter, then a 911 center director and emergency manager, then six years running Apple’s global public safety business. Last December, he and his wife co-founded a data center opposition group in Round Rock, Texas, after learning a ninth data center was headed for their town. A few months later, the Sabey Data Center a few miles from his house caught fire. He pulled the fire report and the hazardous materials records himself, through open records requests. What he found is the subject of this episode.

The numbers nobody’s citing

Gary rattles these off from memory, because he’s spent the last several months compiling them:

* An Amazon data center in Ohio logged 84 fires between 2021 and 2025. The same facility has, in some cases, delayed fire department entry by up to an hour over security protocols — with an active fire burning.

* A Chesterfield County, Virginia facility had 4 to 7 fires in a single year, all lithium battery failures.

* A data center in France lost multiple buildings on one campus to fire.

* The Round Rock fire in March 2024 — lead-acid batteries, not even the more volatile lithium-ion kind — took 14 pieces of fire apparatus, a specialized hazmat team, and 44 firefighters just under five hours to control. Damage estimates have climbed from an initial $2 million to closer to $11 million.

That last one is the one Gary knows best, because it happened in his backyard. The smoke — carcinogens, heavy metals — drifted into an immediately adjacent residential neighborhood on a foggy, low-wind morning, so it banked down and stayed low instead of dispersing. Firefighting runoff went into a storm drain that feeds a creek tributary. No public notification was issued. No media alert went out. “This was held very, very quietly by the city,” Gary says.

Why it’s so hard to actually put out

The Round Rock fire involved lead-acid batteries. Most new capacity is lithium-ion, which is a different problem entirely. Lithium cells fail through thermal runaway: one cell overheats — from a manufacturing defect, overcharging, water intrusion, physical damage, even a coding error or a deliberate cyberattack — and it heats the cells next to it, which heat the cells next to those. In a sealed building, the vented gases can build up to the point of explosion. And extinguishing the visible flame doesn’t mean the reaction has stopped: crews see fires “go out” and reignite hours later because the heat inside the module never actually dropped.

Then there’s the water math. A data center fire can take 1 to 2 million gallons of water to extinguish. Round Rock has a municipal hydrant system that can supply that. Most of the towns where data centers are actually being sited — rural Texas, rural Pennsylvania, the four-hours-outside-New-Orleans sites Gary references — don’t. A rural water tender truck carries 2,000 to 3,000 gallons. Getting a million gallons to a fire with a 2,000-gallon truck means roughly 500 round trips between the water source and the fire. That’s the arithmetic a volunteer fire department is looking at when a facility the size of a small city catches fire in their jurisdiction.

The standard that exists — and isn’t being enforced