Our small lab had a close shave on Friday when an office within the same block went up in flames. Luckily, the excellect firefighters controlled it and we were fine. Obviously, loose hard drives etc can be stored within a fireproof safe. But what about large tower PCs etc, especially those that have yet to be imaged and archived. Is it just a risk that we all have to take?
Your close-call well illustrates one of the core principles of Information Assurance Risk Assessment and Mitigation.
The trick is to balance, among other things, Annualized Loss Expectancy with the cost of protecting an asset. In other words, is it really worth spending X to protect Y from Z?
It's always the One Thing you think will never happen (or the one that you don't even think of in the first place) that gets you.
Congrats on dodging this recent bullet!
