Luton Airport flights suspended after large car park fire

Your experiment might if you had some idea of what you were doing. Are you saying that your experiment proves that the parking deck at the Stavanger airport did not start with a diesel car as the fire officials claim? Are you proving them incompetent?

What is going on in your head, that makes you so convinced you are right??? You are starting to come across like one of the more dense people here. Normally you are pretty rational.

Of course not. I merely pointed out that there were eye-witness accounts which claimed that the first vehicle to catch fire was electric.

You said: "> I don't think you understand what a flash point is. If the diesel fuel is burning, and rolls across the ground, the flame will follow the fuel."

I showed that in ordinary circumstances, on a concrete floor, it didn't behave that way. Your assertions based on closed-cup flash points (which I do understand) do not apply to diesel burning openly on a surface. Temperatures of at least 200C are needed before diesel will catch fire and continue to burn without needing a flame from an external source to keep it alight.

I do understand it [see other post]. It is not relevant to the spread of diesel fires in the open air.

Do I detect a vested interest here?

Which means nothing. The fire officials have completed their analysis and determined the fire was started by a diesel vehicle. Why would you bother to post anecdotal evidence in the face of an authoritative report?

Sorry, I thought you tested on a "paving slab", which is a very porous material from my experience. Concrete is very much not nearly so porous. Regardless, your experiment serves no purpose. A garage fire started in a diesel auto, as stated by fire officials. Do you really think your little experiment has any weight compared to that??? Why are you being so silly about this?

How is any of this relevant??? Diesel cars catch fire and can destroy entire garages. It's a proven fact according to the fire officials who wrote the report on the Stavanger airport garage fire. Here, since you refuse to find the report yourself, here is the link. You will find the relevant text in section 2.2.

Yes, by owning an EV, I have a vested interest in learning the truth, which is clearly not shared by yourself. Please use the link in my previous post and learn something.

Gosh Liz, Ricky keeps telling you how stupid you are and you just don't appreciate it.

I own a diesel van with diesel-fired appliances, some of which I have adapted for diesel myself; during that process I have learned a lot about the combustion properties of diesel. I haven't attempted to make comments about electric vehicles because I don't have any practical experience of them

You own an electric vehicle and have practical experience as an owner and user (but presumably not as a designer). You have made assertions about the combustion of diesel which clearly show misunderstandings of the theory and lack of practical experience.

It appears that your desire to learn the truth does not extend to areas of the wider subject on which you have set yourself up as an authority.

There is only one useful fact in this matter. How often diesel cars ignite on their own. Nothing else you have posted is remotely useful in determining this. You make up experiments as if you have some qualification in the matter, when you don't.

feel free to make up your own story line. I won't bother you with reality any further.

I don't think we can accept that at face value any more. 'They' tried to claim that it was a diesel car which started the fire at Luton and we now know that to be false, and that vehicle had a substantial lithium battery under the passenger seat. But they never mentioned that. I'd wager the same thing happened at Stavanger. Nothing must be allowed to impede the changeover to EVs, even if catastrophic damage ensues from a lithium fire. Hence the rush to cover-up the real cause.

You do indeed! As evidenced by "Ricky"'s sig no less.

It wasn't false. It was merely incomplete. The vehicle was a hybrid, but it would have been clearly marked as using diesel fuel, and superficial inspection after a fire might have missed the fact that it was hybrid.

If the battery had been on the edge of thermal runaway, that battery would have been hot enough for the passenger sitting on top of it to have noticed, probably for weeks, so it is unlikely to have been the source of the fire, much as Cursitor Doom might want it to have been.

They probably didn't know it.

Another of Cursitor Doom's fatuous conspiracy theories.

Not that we know the "real" cause. Cursitor Doom thinks he does, but what Cursitor Doom thinks is never all that closely related to reality.

Never claim malice when stupidity is an adequate explanation. Not one of Cursitor Doom's principles, of course.

Please check your sources. What I've found is the opposite, that the reports for Luton were changed from EV to diesel. Besides, the Stavanger fire was thoroughly analyzed with a formal report. When you talk about "report" you are talking about NEWS reports, which are not at all official. Here's the report on the Stavanger fire.

The BBC radio news reported the fire officer as saying it was a diesel vehicle. In a very brief news summary, the inclusion of this detail was clearly intended to have some significance and fitted in with the BBC's (not so) hidden agenda of greenwash. I have not heard a retraction or correction in any of the news bulletins since.

The real cause could not have been diesel on its own because diesel doesn't spontaneously burst into flames below about 200C - by saying these were diesel vehicles it makes it easy for the media and the public to draw the wrong conclusions. The real causes of diesel vehicle fires are electrical faults, spillages of flammable liquid onto a hot manifold, contents catching fire, tyres or brakes overheating etc. Apart from electrical faults, none of these would occur in a parked diesel vehicle that had not shown any signs of fire when the owner parked it - and an electrical fault would be highly unlikely to set fire to the diesel until the fire had reached an advanced stage.

As an aside: about 30 years ago one particular make of car had a bad reputation for catching fire after even a minor collision. The cause remained unknown until one day there was a very minor collision followed by fire outside our local fire station. The firemen (it was mainly men in those days) dashed out and promptly extiguished the flames, then had a look to see what had happened. The plastic brake fluid reservoir had popped out of the metal brake cylinder casting and was dangling on its sensor wiring. The fluid had poured over the hot manifold.

Brake fluid will spontaneously catch fire in air at a much lower temperature than petrol, but everyone had previously assumed that petrol must have somehow been involved and had failed to find the real cause.

A note was issued for owners or garages to put a nylon zip-tie around the reservoir, to hold it firmly onto the brake cylinder body.

It is an astonishingly good catalyst for destroying ozone. It turns out that even fluorine chemists like to be able to go out into the sunshine.

ISTR Halon 1211 is still permitted in critical aerospace applications. Our computer suite was protected by a Halon system and there was a normal air set hung up in the middle of the room and another just outside the door.

The advice was if it went off to stop breathing and get out immediately. A lungful of that stuff and you have only 12s of consciousness remaining before you black out. Never had it go off.

We did have an inert gas risk but from bulk argon where I worked. Almost the same molecular mass as CO2 so it pools in low lying corridors and you don't notice a lack of oxygen at all. Advice was always don a normal air set before going in to rescue someone or else you will risk becoming a casualty yourself. What snuffs out fires isn't good to breathe.

In general, anything that can put out fires can put out people.

who were convinced it started in the diesel car. They published a very comprehensive report on this fire. I'm sure you can find it with Google.

I have and it is not very helpful. It concentrates on what paperwork was in place, how the building structure stood up to the fire, which regulations had not been followed, what environmental impact the firefighting had been - and barely mentions the supposed cause.

Many of the critical logs were not available to the investigators or were only avaialble in an edited form. There is no attempt to explain why the initial reports (several) stated that the vehicle on fire was electric and the audio log of the phone calls and radio conversations is missing.

Independent reports on fire spread between vehicles only applied to petrol and diesel cars or were vague from lack of relevant data. The difficulty of extinguishing battery fires in electrically-powered vehicles was mentioned, but the rest of the vehicle was stated to be no more likely to cause or spread fire than any other kind.

It was claimed to be caused by an Opel Zafira. They had been recalled in 2016 because a thermal fuse in the heating and ventilating system was known to cause fires. The report says the vehicle was parked when it caught fire - and then says it caught fire shortly after it was started.

Rick has posted a link to the official report on the Stavanger fire.

It specifically states "On 7 January 2020 at approx. 15:25 hours a fire broke out in an Opel Zafira", and "The car ignited a short time after it was started."

The Zafira was offered with both diesel and gasoline engines.

clearly intended to have some significance and fitted in with the BBC's (not so) hidden agenda of greenwash. I have not heard a retraction or correction in any of the news bulletins since.

More likely they wanted to make clear that it wasn't an electric vehicle - which it wasn't - due to the current hysteria about electric vehicles fires.

But electrical faults can happen in parked cars. It's not common, but it does happen.

Fires have a way of obscuring "the real cause". They are destructive.

This emphasises the point that there are lots of ways for cars to catch on fire, and the current obsession about self-heating and thermal runaway in electric car batteries probably stops people from looking at all the other potential failure modes.

I was told by a man that runs a junk yard for cars that they either disconnect the battery or remove it for safety reasons. Never could be sure is there was some wiring damage that could cause a fire. That was years before the electric cars were sold.

I'm confused. You are saying, a "fire officer" reported the fire as starting in a diesel fueled vehicle, but you appear to be rejecting that as a lie by the BBC??? Really? You think the BBC lies about *facts* they report. In particular, *facts* that will eventually appear in an official report at some time in the future?

But this is *your* analysis which means nothing. Are you saying the garage fire at the Stavanger Airport was not started by a diesel vehicle? I provided you with the link to the official report. Did you refuse to read it because it contradicts your beliefs?

At this point, I can't believe anything you say. You seem far too happy to twist reality.

You are diverting from the reality that diesel vehicles catch fire in parking garages. It is not relevant what the details are.

Read the goddamn report on the Stavanger fire. Until then, you are just being deliberately stupid!

I really need to start using a proper newsreader so I can ignore posts from people who are willfully stupid.