15 minutes prior, I was working on the mux cabinet that would have put my back 18 inches from that conduit.
Good 'ole Racal Milgo equipment - where we had ~24* terminals on a 9600 baud line and we were happy to have that much bandwidth.
After that incident, there were a lot of changes to the data center, all safety related. It was a combination of an office building that was repurposed, a county government that was expanding very quickly, computer equipment that was taking more room and a government contractor under pressure to keep things running while the expansion was going on.
I don't believe the county government fined itself, but, things did change. It was the only building other than the courthouse in another city where we didn't run plenum rated cable. After the incident, all cable we ran was plenum rated.
It was the wild west back then. 143mb hard drives were the size of file cabinets, 67mb removable disks had 5 platters and weighed about 20 pounds. PCs were just starting to come into play, but, the mainframes and minicomputers took a lot of space. The tape library was easily 300 sq feet. When we needed more space, we asked the county, they would move whatever office group was adjacent to the computer room and the space would be expanded. There wasn't a lot of documentation at the time regarding best practices.
I never really felt that I was in danger, though, at 18, you sort of feel invincible anyhow. Had the computer room been built properly and not been converted office space, it wouldn't have had a drop ceiling and the outcome may have been different. Had the system been sized properly for the expanded room, perhaps things would have been different.
Edited: even though the mux we were using was a 32 channel mux, probably eight or more of the ports would have been 1200 baud for printers.
