A lithium battery fire is hot enough to soften steel to the point that a steel structure will collapse, even if the steel does not melt.
If this were not true, there would be no blacksmiths, and all iron articles would be cast.
For instance at an airport in Norway in January 2020. Here is a report on the incident from the Norwegians. The effect of ICE fuels is also addressed. This fire is thought to have started in an old diesel car, but it could just as well been a Tesla - we have lots of examples.
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"Investigation of a massive fire in a multi-storey car park in Norway"
Larkin is a poor thinker. It is the heat that eliminates a small short by "blowing" the fuse. Keep it cool and the short remains.
Lead acid batteries do very much explode. You would need to be very sheltered to not be familiar with that. They both can explode from shorts causing the sulfuric acid electrolyte to boil or from the hydrogen vented mixing with oxygen and exploding when sparked.
Lol! I like the fact that you show an example of gasoline fires destroying a huge garage to support the idea that lithum-ion battery fires are dangerous. "It could just as well been" lithium batteries!
Most likely there were a few BEVs in that garage. The report you link says they don't know how many vehicles total and they don't know how many BEVs. So not much of a report. They did say the BEVs did not contribute to the fire any more than gasoline cars as reported by the fire fighters.
I think the take away from this is, they need to park the gasoline cars somewhere else so the BEVs are safe from the gasoline fires. Er det ikke sant?
It would be annoying to have a bear in the kitchen. They make a real mess. And they smell bad.
South Tahoe seems to get more bears than we do. And the first floor of our cabin is concrete blocks, which are bug-proof and fire-proof and bear-proof.
We have a friend in Homewood that had to install electric door mats.
The original question was if such fires can bring a building down, the claim being that this was impossible. But it turns out to have happened multiple times, with films and investigations to prove it.
Also note that such parking structures are very common in airports around the world, and it was quite uncommon for a vehicle fire to spread to such a degree, to the point of taking the building down, until very recently.
EVs are quite common in Norway. And I bet the Norwegians know
*exactly* what kind of vehicles were destroyed, from vehicle registration records and insurance claims and/or lawsuits. Not to mention parking-garage records, and audits of licence plate number inventories taken every night (to prevent embezzlement). Even if the car was totally destroyed, it would be pretty easy to make the case that the car was lost in that fire. Wonder why they didn't want to say.
Did the battery or the shorting wire start the fire? I guess nobody will ever know.
Here in California, all sorts of people and businesses are being held liable for starting big forest fires, when the real problem is crazy forest management and insane fuel loads. There will always be ignition sources.
People should get awards for starting fires. Lots of little fires are better than a few gigantic ones.
In Australia, the fire-fighters do it as part of their job.
At the end of every winter Sydney tends to get covered in smoke haze as the fire services carry out "fuel reduction burns"'
In a bad fire season it doesn't help much. Getting rid of the easily inflammable scrub gets rid of a lot of tinder, but when whole trees start burning there's a lot more fuel available and the fire can get gigantic early on and burn though large areas.
Climate change isn't helping. The most recent bad bushfire season saw our stand of Wollemia pine - a living fossil - threatened.
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They seem to have been around for 100 million years which points up the speed of the recent warming.
What is certainly true, is that petrol fires are no joke. Pouring on a bit of water will spread the burning petrol if there is sufficient heat to keep it alight - you need enough water to cool the petrol (and anything else heated by the fire) below the ignition temperature, and you need to do it without spreading the fire. But you can put out the flames using foams that block the oxygen.
In some cases, just pouring on water is /fine/ - a thin layer of burning petrol floating on water is not going to damage a road that is already cleared, and it will go out quickly. But if that process carries flames to other things that can ignite, you're in big trouble. Choosing the best way to fight a fire is not just a matter of knowing the material that is burning.
Lithium fires are also no joke. Foams won't help in many battery fires, as blocking off oxygen does not stop the fire. Pouring on water can make it worse, causing a more violent fire. The ideal treatment is to put the battery in a water bath to cool it.
According to the Norwegian Fire Brigade (in Norway we have a higher proportion of electric cars than anywhere else), a fire in the battery of an electric car is a much bigger problem than a fire in a petrol car. They have had to develop new methods - including lifting the burning car into a large water bath. However, most fires in electric cars (especially newer ones) don't ignite the battery, and fires are far rarer in electric cars than petrol cars (relative to the number of cars). Overall, therefore, electric cars are significantly safer (by a factor of about 5, if I remember the statistics correctly) than petrol cars in terms of fires.
What is new, however, is that we now have lithium batteries inside buildings in a way that we don't have petrol. The high-risk time for petrol is when filling a tank, or when there is another problem with the running car - petrol fires in cars parked in garages are very uncommon. The biggest risk for lithium batteries is when charging them, especially if the battery is damaged or the charger or battery is of poor quality. So people are seeing lithium fires in their homes from charging electric bike batteries and the like. There have been several major fires from burning batteries at electric scooter hire companies.
Of course they know exactly which cars were destroyed in the fire. They even know exactly which car started the fire - a deseil Opel Zafira, which is a model implicated in several other fires.
Although I don't know the numbers myself, I would expect there were a good many electric cars in the parking house. However, a high proportion of these would be found in the spaces with chargers which was on the other side of the building from where the fire started.
If you want to read the full report, it's available here
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Of course, most of it is in Norwegian.
The report concludes there was nothing to indicate that electric vehicles made the fire worse in comparison to conventional vehicles (nor was there any reason to suspect that conventional vehicles were worse).
The prime reasons for the scale of the destruction are found in the building construction - no sprinklers, and too little space between cars. Like most car fires, petrol or electric, it was mostly the rest of the cars that burned. Petrol tanks and batteries are both well protected and isolated, and are often not involved in the fire. (Exploding petrol tanks are for Holywood, not reality.)
You are shooting from the hip rather than knowing anything about it. Even if you only have a thin layer of gasoline as the water spreads out, at some point it flows to a point where it collects, like a drain. That gets interesting!
Yeah, fire spreads and that's a big problem.
Good thing we don't have to worry about lithium fires.
Yep, there's no reaction like overreaction. You only need to hose the fire. Lithium-ion battery fires are not hard to put out at all. The problem is you need to monitor the battery for a while since damaged cells can flare up again. At no point is the fire as hard to fight as a gasoline fire.
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More like 10 to 1.
“From 2012 to 2020, there has been approximately one Tesla vehicle fire for every 205 million miles traveled,” Tesla tells us. “By comparison, data from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and US Department of Transportation show that, in the US, there is one vehicle fire for every 19 million miles traveled.”
You are mistaken. EVs don't use lithium batteries. They are too dangerous.
Gasoline or even diesel fueled vehicles are a danger at all times. The airport garage file at Stavanger, Norway was started by a diesel Opal.
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You should not compare electric bikes and skateboards to BEVs. If you don't have information on BEVs, then don't try to make connections that don't exist.
Got it - 100 pages. I can sorta read Norwegian, but it's very slow so I use google translate a lot.
For comparison, I looked into the US equivalent, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), which is also a de jure standards-making organization.
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They sorta agreed, but did make the point that EV battery fires developed far faster, making fighting such fires far more stressful.
The also made the point that modern cars have far more plastic in them, about 10% by weight, and plastic burns with considerable release of energy.
Plastic gas tanks also rupture in the heat, but this wasn't a lot different from a metal tank as to when the fuel leaks out.
The more basic point is that what had been adequate for a parking garage is no longer adequate.
I would guess that the solution in Norway will be to upgrade the sprinkler systems for much greater water flow, and also to drench a far larger area when triggered by the heat of a fire, to keep nearby vehicles from joining the fun.
The parking house in question is being completely rebuilt. But in general, you are correct that sprinkler systems need updating (or installing, for places that didn't have one before). The rules for spacing between cars are also being changed, AFAIK, though I haven't bothered finding out the details. Bigger gaps would reduce the spread.
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