They Dug a Hole in a Running Data Center | Fire, Flood Blood

A cracked floor tile. A massive hole. A soldier holding up a rack carrying an entire military base’s communications. What could possibly go wrong?

Recorded live at VMware Explore 2026, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson welcome returning guest Jeremy Wright for another edition of Fire, Flood & Blood, where IT practitioners share their unforgettable stories from the field.

Jeremy takes us back to 2007, working as a civilian sysadmin on a U.S. military base in Iraq. An attempt to repair cracked tiles turned into excavation beneath a running data center, leaving a critical communications rack dangerously close to collapse. And that wasn’t the only challenge: an Abrams tank took out aerial fiber, and torrential rain poured onto server racks.

It’s a memorable reminder that infrastructure reliability depends on more than the equipment inside the rack.