Electric Vehicles – Who Knew?

(ECWd) –

I have been blessed to be able to instruct fire departments all across the country on the subject matter of adequate water flow, the key to fire suppression.  During a recent training in Massachusetts, Electric Vehicle (EV), fires became the topic of discussion.

While many news articles and videos speak to the massive volumes of water needed to extinguish an EV battery fire, there are other factors rarely talked about which create other serious risks, especially in smaller communities.

Fire Suppression is about overcoming the BTUs being generated with the appropriate agent, water, in this case, to put the fire out.  A key factor is being able to put the wet stuff on the red stuff, as we say in the fire service. Due to the location of the batteries in an EV, under the vehicle in a sealed metal container, they are almost impossible to put out with conventional firefighting tactics. That fact results in many resources needed for hours on end including manpower, fire engines, tankers, and most of all water. In some communities, a single EV car fire suppression effort can completely deplete the water capacity in their water tower and outpace the fill pump capabilities.  When that happens even more resources are needed to haul water from other communities, not to mention their manpower and equipment.

How many smaller communities can afford to have 5-10 firefighters on a single-car fire for hours on end? According to a 2021 article from The Hill, EV car fires can need 40 times the amount of water than that of a gas-powered vehicle. That amount of water can wipe out a small community’s water supply. What risks are created when the water tower in those small towns is depleted fighting a single EV car fire?

As the instructor that day in Massachusetts, I became the student.  The local tow company that recovers vehicles from a collision takes those vehicles to their tow yard and they typically sit for days, weeks, or even months, except for EV vehicles.  One tow company monitors the battery temperature every half hour because they have found a battery that has any damage from an accident can take hours before going into a thermal runaway that leads to its igniting.  The first indicator that it’s going to ignite is a steady climb in temperature. Another company no longer waits to see if it’s going to ignite and burn.

Who Knew?

While I do not know who first came up with the idea and put it into practice, I have confirmed there are numerous tow companies in the US utilizing a simple concept that eliminates the massive exhaustion of community resources by placing the vehicle in a dunk tank full of water.  Yes, they submerge the entire vehicle in an isolated tank in their tow yard and let it sit for 24 hours.  So rather than putting water on it for hours on end and using up massive resources, a simple tank full of water does the job needed and eliminates a huge waste of resources.

This practice was used in the Netherlands as covered in this article in 2019.  We now find fire equipment companies making dunk tanks for this very purpose, one of them right here in Illinois.

As a local Volunteer Fire Chief, I pray we never have to deal with an EV fire in our community but if we do, I can assure our taxpayers we will do everything possible to isolate the vehicle and avoid depleting our community water supply to fight a fire that creates other major risk factors for the community. We are better off letting it burn itself out than delaying the inevitable (total loss according to the insurance company), by putting water on it.