California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.
Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.
The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.
Our town had to use an excavator and dozer to bury a Tesla car because it wouldn’t stop burning.
Our town…
Do you mean Babylon, Marduk?
How much is this in Capri Suns?
950,000 Capri Suns
(200ml per Capri sun, 5 Capri sun per litre, 190,000 litres water)
But it would take a long time to open each packet and spray it on the fire.
But it would take a long time to open each packet and spray it on the fire.
- Lay the Capri Suns in the ground next to the fire
- Get another semi truck
- Drive over the packets to squish out the liquid onto the fire
- If the additional semi truck catches fire as well, repeat from step 1
Fuck. Get this dude into Congress right now.
Do we have they did the math yet?
just get as many of your friends to squirt capri sun with you
There’s 5 200ml Capri Suns to a liter. At about 190,000 liters, we’re looking at about 950,000 Capri Suns.
Is water the best choice for a chemical fire?
Depends on the chemical, but it is an appropriate way to fight a liion battery fire though.
You’re fighting thermal runaway. Water is very effective at cooling and helps control the fire and keep the heat down. US DOT recommends water spray.
It absolutely isn’t.
But it the most available and least toxic fire suppression, especially on a highway.
Foam is full of PFAS, etc and the cost (in CO2 and money) of air dropping, and having to wash the foam off the highway afterwards - leading to runoff - is huge.
Imagine that happening 100 times per day on American highways (when electric trucks become commonly used).
Maybe. Water is cheap, available in quantity, and non-polluting. Since a battery fire is self-oxygenating, I don’t think putting it out is something you expect. All you can do is take away the heat both to contain the damage and to eventually stop the reaction.
Maybe don’t use water to put out a fire that can’t be put out with water. Aren’t these supposed to be professionals?
The purpose of the water is to cool the wreck and the area around it while the metal fire burns itself out, because waiting it out is the safest option for the firefighters.
Flooding the batteries with water is the best way to put out a lithium-ion battery fire.
Isn’t oxygen deprivation (usually through burying) a much faster method?
Maybe for smaller things, a regular car maybe.
But by the time a suitable digging machine arrives on scene and digs a big enough hole for a semi it’d probably be faster to flood it with water. Not to mention what might be underneath the ground, so they’d also have to spend time determining if there’s any gas lines or whatever before they dig so they don’t make a much bigger problem
Lithium fires are self-oxidizing, so that won’t work. Burying it helps keep it from spreading, though.
Do you volunteer your backyard for such burials?
Sure.
It isn’t.
https://youtu.be/qgP7KkDesBo?si=XNb_yZYwA943t0lP
Water seems to put it out for a bit, but the reaction is self-oxidizing and starts right back up again. That’s why it takes so much water; fire fighters keep dowsing it and then doing it again. Takes all day, and the whole thing burns away in the end.
The way to do it is, if possible, tow it somewhere away from other things, keep the fire from spreading, and otherwise let it burn. For cars, there are fireproof blankets coming on the market to contain it. Semi-trucks are probably too big for that, though.
For as much as people want their Musky circlejerks. This is really just a problem with the switch the EVs that people aren’t willing to accept.
There is no way to really stop an EV battery fire.
The batteries in these cars are made up of several cells, packed into a watertight, fire resistant box. When just one of those cells goes it’s over. It can create a chemical reaction that can ignite the cells without the need for oxygen, pure heat will set them off.
The only real way of dealing with them is to let them burn themselves out, and even after that they aren’t safe and could reignite.
The way to stop them is solid state batteries
Or maybe just good guys with Li-ion batteries.
What we really need is POCKET SAND!
that sounds great, where can I buy one?
Let me know if you find out
How many lithium ion battery fires have you put out?
Two.
The best policy is to not puncture batteries, and train others to not do so.
The next best is to know to smother them.
how do you smother a semi fire on the highway, a) with a water tanker or b) with a sand tanker, how many municipalities have a sand tanker on hand, how do those sand tanker hoses work again, lots of sand tanker slingers round your parts cowpoke?
Isn’t that foam what we are discovered is leeching into ground-water supplies everywhere and is super unhealthy for everyone?
Foam suppressant is appropriate for liquid fuel fires like oil. It is not appropriate for metal fires.
You sure?
https://textechindustries.com/blog/how-do-you-extinguish-a-lithium-battery-fire/
To put out large lithium-ion battery fires, use a foam extinguisher containing CO2, powder graphite, ABC dry chemical, or sodium carbonate.
Not who you responded to, but that’s an interesting source. I’m intrigued by a textile company claiming to be experts in lithium ion fires.
It sounds more like options for preventing a fire to spread. It’s also including CO2 extinguishers under “foam” which they very much aren’t, making me doubt the rest of their blog post.
Extinguishing fires can work largely in two different ways. Either by smothering a fire or by cooling a fuel below it’s flash point. Quite often they put out a fire by doing both. A fire that contains an oxidizer cannot be smothered, but smothering can help prevent other materials in a vehicle from being able to burn along with the batteries. Cooling down a large, vehicle sized lithium ion fires takes an incredible amount of water. However, the cells themselves contain so much energy that their failure produces more thermal energy than water is able to remove.
Is water the best to put out large EV fires? Nope.
Is water good at preventing fires from spreading? Yep.
Is water easily accessible and carried on every fire truck and engine and available through hydrants? Also yep.
A lot of agencies are including car sized fire blankets as well that help smother the fire some and make burnt/burning EVs safer for tow trucks to move to a safe locations where they can be left to burn out. Sometimes for over a month! You might see fire engines literally escorting tow trucks because even with the blanket and being doused with tens of thousands of gallons, it’s still at risk of reigniting during transport.
The other big issue that agencies are facing with EV fires is that the water used to suppress these fires essentially becomes hazmat. So there are issues with letting it just run off into the storm system or the environment.
Anyone dealing with batteries would have. It is more common than you think and not just people being keyboard warriors.
AFAB?
Is this 190 tons of water?
189.27 metric tons of water, so yes, rounded up, 190 tons.
Or roughly 2.5 average swimming pools and for those ex-redditors out there: 1.6 million bananas
Something tells me that we have to move away from cobalt/manganese chemistries for BEVs.
Solid state batteries are supposedly much more fire resistant.
Even the currently available LFP is much less violent.
Yes, true. Albeit they have worse energy density and some advantages as well.
How are you getting 189.27? 1 liter is 1kg, so it should be 190 precisely.
Because we are discussing metric tons of water where 264.17 US gallons = 1 metric ton of fresh water @ 4’C
Hmm… I’m gonna guess that water was much hotter than 4°C, what with being used to put out a fire and all.
What size is an average swimming pool area-wise? Or are you talking about Olympic size swimming pools?
Feet: 16’ x 32’ w/ a 4’ shallow end and an 8’ deep end filled with fresh water at an exact temperature of 39.2’F.
Metric: 4.9m x 9.7m w/ a 1.2m shallow end and a 2.4m deep end filled with fresh water at an exact temperature of 4’C.
How many washing machines
removedant?
lol
Probably only shows up that way on lemmy.ml, which has a blocker for various things they consider slurs, which can become silly when you’re dealing with words/phrase like “fire retardants.” Looks normal to me over on blahaj, and the same over on lemmy.world
Probably only shows up that way on lemmy.ml, which has a blocker for various things they consider slurs
Lmao, the community most likely to complain about censorship…is practicing… censorship lolol
It’s the Scunthorpe Problem.
The Sremovedhorpe problem, you say?
deleted by creator
Surely firefighters know better than to use water on a battery?
I wonder, would some quickly deployable heat barrier to surround it that can be filled with water once work? Kind of like dunking it a pool, except kind of backwards in that the “pool” is deployed around it and then filled?
I’m not sure how you just build a pool that doesn’t leak and can hold the weight of the water…
And morons keep buying Teslas.
It really seems like Elon Musk has been given free reign to kill people.
To be fair, won’t this be an issue for all EVs?
Totally. And ICE cars never burn, amirite?
It does take a lot less effort to put out an ICE engine fire.
No, but at least you can put those out with water when it happens.
Good point. I’m not sure. It may be that we’re (I’m) hearing more about Teslas catching fire because they’re the largest distributor in the US (and I live here). However, they’re not the largest in the world and I haven’t heard of this problem happening with other EVs (though they may be).
Regardless, Elon Musk is a pompous charlatan and defrauder that deserves much worse than he’ll ever get. Bias be damned.
Wow, you should look into the hundreds of ev car fires in China that happen for may more reasons than crashes. Such as charging the battery and just sitting there in traffic or just sitting in an ev car lot. BYD is one of the largest ev brands in China, and their shit just catches fire for no reason some times.
I wouldn’t be surprised Tesla uses shit quality batteries
All ev batteries will burn like this, though. It’s the nature of this type of battery.
Not all EVs need Li-Po batteries. They probably won’t be in the next couple of years. The cheap end of the market will use sodium-ion, and the more expensive end solid state lithium. Both have much better fire protection and puncture resilience than Li-Po. Both types of batteries are at the manufacturing stage, but aren’t in cars yet.
Yep yep surely, but I think batteries could be manufactured to be just more or less resistant
Wasn’t there an entire ship of Audis?
No. This kind of safety issue isn’t universal to all lithium chemistries, much less other chemistries. If they do catch on fire, it isn’t self-oxidizing the way it is for Li-Po chemistry. Other types also have better resilience to punctures.
All forms of high-density energy storage are dangerous, regardless of who manufactures them.
It’s any lithium battery, not just one evil villain. At least you’re not recharging your car inside the living space of your house, like your computer or phone or e-bike or e-scooter or vacuum cleaner
Personally I think there’s a market for a fire proof container for charging batteries. I’ve been thinking about stacking cinder blocks in my basement for charging yardcare and tool batteries such that they couldn’t catch anything just in case
