Tech and AI
A fire at a 3.2 billion dollar data centre found three dry hydrants and no alarm panel
By Staff Writer | 8 September 2026
The local volunteer fire chief went into a burning building on one of New York State's largest artificial intelligence campuses without water, without a working alarm and without the safety data sheets he is entitled to. Three months on, he says the hydrants are still dry, and the question of who is responsible runs through four companies.
The fire broke out on the morning of Tuesday 2 June 2026 in a former water treatment building at the Lake Mariner campus in Somerset, Niagara County, on the Lake Ontario shore, where a closed coal-fired power station is being turned into a data centre campus of up to 500 megawatts. The Barker Fire Department, a volunteer company, answered the call with help from Olcott, Hartland and the City of Lockport. Nobody was hurt and the fire was put out quickly. What the chief found on arrival is the story.
When we have a fire alarm, it goes off on a panel to tell you where to look. When we got there, they couldn't tell us where the alarm panel was. It's pretty much still under construction. Our biggest problem is the water supply. We tried three hydrants and they didn't work. We ended up using tank water from our trucks. It was a very hot, smoky fire, and it would have been nice to have had a hydrant.
Steve Matisz, chief of the Barker Fire Department
The building had no functioning alarm and no suppression system. The crews faced heavy black smoke in a windowless former laboratory and office that had been burning for some time, and when the chief asked for the material safety data sheets for the chemicals inside he was told they had burned up in the fire.
I have concerns for their safety. There's a lot of electrical components in there. If I had known what was in that building, I may have been a little more hesitant to enter it. I have already changed our plan so that the second vehicle in is a tanker because we can't count on their water system. Every firefighter needs to come out of there just as they went in.
Steve Matisz, chief of the Barker Fire Department
Who answers for it
A feature published on 7 September set out to find who is responsible, and found the answer spread across a corporate chain. TeraWulf owns and operates the campus, on land it leases from a company owned by its own chief executive. Fluidstack, a British artificial intelligence cloud company, leases the buildings. Google backstops the project debt and holds warrants for a future stake in TeraWulf. Anthropic is among the customers whose compute demand the site exists to serve. The company's own release of 18 August 2025, announcing a fifth building of 160 megawatts, gives the numbers: Google's total backstop rises to approximately 3.2 billion dollars and its pro forma equity ownership to approximately 14 per cent, and Fluidstack's contracted critical IT load at the campus rises to approximately 360 megawatts.
TeraWulf told the feature's author that it is responsible for operational safety and emergency preparedness at the campus, including required safety systems and coordination with local first responders, and Kerri Langlais, described as its chief strategy officer, said the company had installed secure key boxes for the fire service, additional hydrants and go-bags of safety data sheets after an after-action review with the county. Reached in mid-August, the chief said a representative had visited about the key boxes and a meeting was scheduled. On hydrants he said that, as far as he knew, they were still dry and he had not seen work done on them.
The town supervisor, Jeff Dewart, said in June that he had been told a hydrant would be installed near the building that burned and that the data sheets would be kept in fireproof boxes in every building. The same feature reports that the company's communications team has not answered the town's requests for a meeting since.
The construction reading
The chief's description of the site is the plainest: they are trying to build it fast and get it going, like any construction project, and every time his crews attend there are changes week to week.
The lesson for anyone building or financing one of these is not novel. Fire water, alarm panels and data sheets are the contractor's problem until handover and the operator's afterwards, and on a rolling campus that boundary is never clean. A written pre-incident plan agreed with the local brigade, hydrants tested and recorded before the first energised equipment arrives, and a named person who answers the phone when the fire chief calls cost almost nothing against 3.2 billion dollars. In Somerset, three months after the fire, the chief is still asking for the meeting.