Target response times for fire trucks are measured in minutes. Fire damage increases on an exponential curve, a couple minutes can make a huge difference when lives and homes are on the line.
EVs are a great technology for urban settings in moderate weather conditions, like in the big California cities where travel needs can be predicted, e.g. I travel < 40 miles/day and can recharge at home overnight.
Jamming them into applications for which they are not yet viable is a recipe for failure. People will only tolerate so much cost and inconvenience for the sake of climate change, it is important we not waste it on foolishness, because it's of urgent importance that we succeed in addressing it.
EVs have represented a relatively small fleet of new and mostly high end cars so far. Which means that they haven't posed much of a problem so far. The budgets for most fire departments are pretty limited and they focus on priorities. EVs are hardly a priority for most of them even now as the fleet is growing exponentially and perhaps more critically, it's aging thus increasing the risk of fires.
Understanding the impact of first responder infrastructure to me is one of the things that seems to get lost about increasing the amount of EVs on the roads.
Not sure it’s a tremendously great solution is to lay a blanket on a EV fire and have the fire department camp out to manage the situation for 12 hours waiting for the batteries to cool to the point where they don’t self combust again so the the vehicle to be safely moved.
Im a Vol Firefighter in a Major City Suburb with lots of highways and tons of crashes. We get 2-3 car fires and passenger extractions per month. The first question we ask on the way out is "Is this an EV?"
We need to know this because EVs trigger the rollout of Water Tankers from surrounding towns, as many as we can get. Usually a Water Shuttle has to be set up. Not many Fire Hydrants on Highways, and EV fires require A LOT of water, like several house fires worth...
Here is some external detail on this - https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-crash-fire-lithium-bat...
Also, we need to start calling more manpower. EV fires burn a very very long time while ICE fires are usually put out in the first few mins, and with 1 engine's 1000gal tank water.
Adding to this, the fire is usually under the car, and quite hard to get too. We are very good at opening locked car hoods and cutting metal to get at the fire, but when its deep in the guts of the thing, its impossible. At my department, we have started working on ways to jack the car up safely while its on fire so we can get water onto it. Trust me, its even harder than you would think...
The Standard Operating Procedure is to put water on the car and surrounding area so that nothing else catches on fire, but basically we have to let the thing burn out, and that can take hours and hours...
EV car batteries do not rely on the environment for their fires to burn. The fuel brings its own oxidizer, and it doesnt need anything else. We can put out Liquid Fuel fires by robbing the oxygen or removing the heat(thats what the water does), but once EV fire gets to a particular point of no return (which it arrives at very quickly) there is really nothing that can be done to stop it, just
make sure it doesnt get any worse...
Here is the current thinking from the NFPA (firefighting safety and standards organization in the US), you'll see EV car fires are long on problems, but even the most focused minds in the US Fire Prevention industry are short on answers at this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp3WvKON_W4
- Fire departments cannot afford to have their apparatus out-of-service for hours while they recharge.
- The truck alone weighs around 10,000-15,000 lbs, without water, and they carry anywhere from ~500 gallons of water (attack engines) to upwards of ~2600 gallons (tenders). That’s 14,175lbs to 36,710lbs of truck.
- The engine powers the apparatus itself, its pumps, and often, a huge alternator for its electrical systems, and an inverter supplying 110V for use with fans, portable lighting, etc. It has to do this for hours.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
There is a several order-of-magnitude difference between the power required to service the station, dispatch, etc, as opposed to what’s required to rapidly recharge the kind of massive batteries an EV fire apparatus would require.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Local government maintains diesel generators and a fuel supply to handle this kind of extreme infrastructure failure.
> For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
Fire trucks aren’t semis. They have very different energy demands, usage patterns, risk profiles, and failure modes.
Tesla's and other electric cars have been around for a decade now. It's completely reasonable to expect fire departments to have trained their staff to deal with EV crashes.
I remain an EV skeptic because of the flammable electrolyte in Li batteries. They did a good job of protecting the battery pack and managing possible thermal runaway. But reading some EV crash news, I noticed one aspect of EV fire is particularly frightening: the speed of the fire and thoroughness of the fire burning. If the crash is severe enough to cause fire, it's usually within 1 or 2 minutes before the fire reaches the driver seat and then it'll burn it down to skeleton and the firefighters can only stand by and wait for it to burn out.
See my answer on another comment: It's a question of the right strategy. But that strategy is being trained regularly, there are preparations in place and in case I would encounter an EV fire with my local department, we would have a through ready in about half an hour and could dump it in there.
The discussion with EV fires now, we had 15 years ago with solar panels. People were panicking that firefighters would not be able to reach the burning roof under the solar panels, houses would burn down like nothing or that firefighters would die to electric shocks when taking care of those fires.
Reality is that some regulation was put in place (roof-mounted solar systems need an emergency breaker in Germany) and people found that the solar panels were most likely already gone in fully developed fires or that they could be rather easy and safely be ripped from the roof, when necessary.
I am not sure what's your point? There's far less EVs now, and a negligible percentage of them are over 10 years and badly maintained. Also, the nature of fires is still very different.
With gasoline you can put it off using water, while for EVs water will actually make the fire worse and you'll need special compounds to turn it off.
I think the key word there was "spontaneous", along with the relative danger and difficulty of dealing with them. An EV fire can take 24 hours to secure. A gasoline car takes about 300 gallons of water.
I'm not saying EV fires are a bigger issue than gasoline cars. I'm saying that you cannot look merely at incident rate to determine the issue.
> [Firefighters have] had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” the NFPA’s Andrew Klock told Vox. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge.”
> But MSB’s Per-Ola Malmqvist has developed webinars that explain how to safely put out battery fires. In a 2022 webinar, he described the tools and techniques that were used to put out a raging EV battery fire in 10 minutes using only 750 liters of water. In another webinar about EV fire suppression best practices, Malmqvist interviewed a firefighter from Vestfold Fire Service in Norway, where the extinguishing method Malmqvist recommends was tried for the first time in battling an electric-vehicle blaze.
Not surprising. However, I would have liked to have heard a better explanation of the problem about EV fires self-reigniting, which can happen hours or days later. They touched on it, but passed it off as lack of firefighter training.
Fun fact: per mile driven, there are about 1/10th to 1/5th as many EV fires, as there are gas car fires.
Putting ten gallons of highly toxic and flammable fuel into a car-shaped object just to commute one person a few dozen miles is quite literally insane from all practical points of view. Electric tech is marginally less crazy, and also a step forward.
IMO this is an aspect of the shift to EV's that I don't hear all that many people talking about- is the gov giving enough resources/training to local emergency services providers to deal with these sorts of fires and the disposal of the EV materials after a fire. Totally surmountable, but I feel like I don't hear the federal gov talk about it much and instead the focus is on more chargers and tax credits to eliminate range anxiety and drive the cost down for consumers
I have to admit I under-estimated how problematic electric vehicle fires would be based on my knowledge with smaller lithium-ion devices like phones (that just pop and quickly fizzle out). But after reading about fire fighting them, you realize how big of a powder keg they are, in particular as they can spontaneously re-ignite themselves and water has limited effective (even if still the best we have).
Although there are some innovative solutions coming on tap, like this special modified shipping container that you put a still-on-fire EV into and then drive it to another safer location:
They are more dangerous than gas fires and many people do not understand this yet. While it might be 10 years old, most people have not used nor understand many parts of EV's, like regenerative breaking, the lower center of gravity and the dangers of the batteries.
> The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recently issued a report showing that many fire departments lack the training and equipment needed to properly handle burning lithium-ion batteries.
That survey was published in 2018 ('recently'), so probably collected in 2017. My son is a volunteer firefighter and he reports that they have had no shortage of training on EVs. And that they don't do anything without proper PPE.
I would be far more concerned with the acceleration of the fire. If I have plenty of notice to get away from the vehicle and to keep others away, who cares how vigorous it is? Either way, the car will burn down. I don't think it matters how long that will take.
A vehicle fire with an EV is much more dangerous than an ICE. They burn hotter, re-ignite, and take a massive amount of water to put out (like, a pools worth of water)
EVs are a great technology for urban settings in moderate weather conditions, like in the big California cities where travel needs can be predicted, e.g. I travel < 40 miles/day and can recharge at home overnight.
Jamming them into applications for which they are not yet viable is a recipe for failure. People will only tolerate so much cost and inconvenience for the sake of climate change, it is important we not waste it on foolishness, because it's of urgent importance that we succeed in addressing it.
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