It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says
It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says
The National Transportation Safety Board says California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons of water to put out flames after a crash.
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?
😃
I don't want to say the town's name. I am a CERT member and that's where I heard about it.
I read in a firefighter’s thread that the trick is to use a low pressure spray directly on the battery compartment. (It was a thread about Tesla cars not semis though so that might not apply)
The reason was you can’t actually put the fire out, it’s self oxidizing (it can literally burn underwater) so you basically need to wait till it burns itself out. Fortunately batteries only hold something like 1/10th the energy of gasoline and can’t release that energy as quickly so a fine light spray is enough to keep it from getting hot enough to catch anything else on fire including batteries in the surrounding battery modules.
Takes a long time, like hours to get it to a point they can move the vehicle and literally a couple weeks before the reaction completely fizzles out. They have special lots they tow them to where the car can fizzle itself out without damaging anything surrounding it.
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.
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.
And water has great heat capacity, with a nice phase change, too.
From reading other links in this post, it sounds like pollution (runoff) is a concern, which is unfortunate.
The water is non-polluting, the battery chemicals not so much
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).
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.
just get as many of your friends to squirt capri sun with you
About 1/3 of the amount that will make a child say "please, mom, no more Capri Suns!".
There's 5 200ml Capri Suns to a liter. At about 190,000 liters, we're looking at about 950,000 Capri Suns.
Somehow those packets seemed a lot smaller than 200ml.
I went through "Bedrijfshulpverlening" (Dutch, if you want to run it through translate just in case I mess up the correct translation). I guess it's business first responder or something.
When we were attending the fire training part and we were teached about fires, someone asked "what if there is a car fire". They said: "starting petrol car fires can be extinguished with a portable extinguisher if you are lucky. But electric car fires, leave them alone. They seal the cars in special water-filled containers and leave them alone for two weeks. There are reports that even after the two weeks, when the car was retrieved from the water, the fire started again on it's own. Firefighters really hate electric vehicles".
business first responder
"alright, is everyone here? this is an all-hands meeting. Where is Joey? Is he in the bathroom again? He's missed the last 3 meetings... Anyway. Top of the agenda, there's apparently a fire, right over there. Fires are kinda hot and so we have been sure to stay a good distance away, as to not raise the temperature of everyone's complimentary bottled water, handed out at this meeting.
Now it says here that we should tackle this situation as quickly as possible. Has anyone run the numbers by the finance team? We don't want to spend too much on this. The big-wigs upstairs never think about the big picture, and really I don't see why one fire is worth pivoting all our available resources. Samantha, yes?"
"Sir, the fire is growing at an alarming rate, shouldn't we just postpone the meeting and focus on the fire?"
"See, that's exactly the kind of thinking the execs have. But if we spend all our resources, cuts will be made, and jobs will be lost. Not mine, of course, but others. Did anyone do a PR analysis on us 'putting out this fire' versus just running a week-long 'we are sorry' ad campaign?"
(lol I just got the thought and ran with it)
"This could've been an email"
In Amsterdam firefighters have thrown burning teslas in de gracht for a few days.
Firefighter here. Sometimes a better and less harmful option is to let things burn and protect the area. I went to a semi wreck that was hauling diesel and on fire on its side in the grassy median about 100' away from a storm drain. Trying to put that out with just water would have become an environmental nightmare if all that fuel would have gotten washed into the storm system.
"But electric bad" is what this kind of news will make rednecks think, and they will over sentionalize the conflagration of an ev battery
My primary is a prius and I've done auto work and tech repairs for like 25 years now.
I'm not buying an all electric EV, yet. They're still wasteful and heavy and the battery tech isn't quite good enough. EV's pretty much have a life of 15 years on them (after going through tires faster) and then off to the junkyard once the battery goes out. I have high hopes for the solid state batts from Samsung hitting some production EV's in 2027, though. Lighter, faster to charge, and longer lifespans. Until that, I'm sticking to hybrids, where the battery is less than 100 pounds, cost a few grand instead of $15,000 and you can swap one out at home in an afternoon with no special/expensive equipment.
How much water does it normally take to put out a semi fire? Say a tire fire, engine fire, or the entire contents of a semi in flames? I couldn’t find the answer googling, but I did find that combustion engine semis burn at the rate of 7000 per year.
https://plattner-verderame.com/blog/the-dangers-of-truck-fires/
I don't even think this is the right metric to use.
You aren't putting a lithium battery fire out with water. You're just keeping it at bay until the energy is all used up. The more energy, the longer it'll take.
We might need new ways to deal with these fires, but it's not like we can completely submerge a semi in water.
I wonder how encasing the object in a fire retardant foam would behave, although we gotta think about the toxicity of that too.
Edit: I wonder if you could even calculate the amount of water you'd need to hold it off upfront based off the battery size and current charge.
There's already tools to deal with lithium fires, class D fire extinguishers, sand and vermiculite. When I worked heavily with lithium non-rechargables we had lithium disaster plans for fires, explicitly in that was alerting fire fighters that it's a combustible metal fire so they can react accordingly, those fires need to be smothered afaik, water was a big no no.
Generally though, the plan was, escape and enforce a quarantine zone because primary cells give off nasty stuff, if you can drop it in a bucket of vermiculite if it's out of the containment vessels and pretty much let them do their thing. Then once it seems like it's done, wait more time to make sure it's actually safe with 30 minute gas tests, then package them for safe transport.
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
Thanks for that. I was unaware that is how it worked.
Remember that non electric cars are still dangerous too. Just think about how often you see a wreck that has cops, firetrucks, and cops all around it. That isn't going to make the same level of national attention as an electric car burning would get.
There are a lot of reasons WHY news agencies disproportunatly show the downsides of green energy, and I'm hardly scratching the surface, but here's my personal reasoning:
News sites like to over dramatize green energy dangers as they are funded by fossil fuel companies (ads). Theres a large amount of disinformation that they misleadingly tell people, take for example birds running Into windmills is something a LARGE amount of people know and think is an issue. However, statistically fossil fuels cause ~50x (iirc) more bird deaths per unit of energy than windmills due to birds being an apex preditor. Another example is that nuclear waste is a big issue that will prevent nuclear energy from becoming superior when that issue was solved several decades ago.Yes, elon sucks and some of his practices should be banned, but it's still green energy and you can't let it distract you from the benefits of all electric vehicles.
There are a lot of reasons WHY news agencies disproportunatly show the downsides of green energy
Electric cars are not "green energy" - that's utter bullshit.
-
the energy consumption of electric cars is about as clean as the power plant that produced said energy - if that happens to be a fossil fuel plant, it's dirty as fuck, just with the pollution in a different location from where the car is driving If you have renewable energy, then yes, they can be cleaner, but:
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we don't have enough (mineable) rare earths to replace even a sizeable fraction of the world's car market with electric vehicles
- A great deal of electricity is produced by renewables these days, and that percentage increases every day.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240221-1
- There’s plenty of lithium. Lithium batteries are also recyclable, unlike fossil fuels.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles
- Sodium ion batteries are also a thing.
The dirtiest, least efficient coal power plant is still IMMENSELY more efficient than a car combustion engine. When you don't have to make your energy generating device mobile, you can get a LOT more power from your fuel.
Maybe spend some time learning about a subject before you make claims about it. There's less chance of looking like an ignorant fool that way.
Let me guess. You spend a lot of time in /c/fuckcars and therefore find ANY type of car bad and pointless?
Not this nonsense again. 60% of EV owners have solar panels for starters
Secondly, they're becoming increasingly less reliant on rare earth metals and all that can be recycled anyway
Their battery can be used for v2g to assist solar and further transition
Finally, they're incredibly effectively compared to combustion.
In comparison to combustion and hybrid, they're way cleaner over the entire life
And now with sodium batteries coming into the market, they'll increasingly become so.
Are they as clean as bikes? No
But not everyone wants to be isolated within 5km of public transport and their home.
I'd have to travel 2 hours by train to get to work, and wouldn't be able to go mountaineering or hiking anymore
Also, what's with the nonsense about there aren't enough mineral resources.
EVs don't need to use lithium batteries. The technology can evolve with any battery chemistry or power source.
Whereas gas or hydrogen is limited to those two options permanently
Hydrogen in particular has absolutely s*** efficiency in all parts of the process. It's only clean if you ignore the high energy wastage
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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
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.
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.
AFAB?
No.
all fires are bad...?
See, that's why I'm so glad they cleared a whole forest in a water protection area to build their german gigafactory.
Water and trees are totally overrated.
s/
They have "Tesla Semis"?
Yep, the Tesla Semi has been in limited production, and in use as a hauler. It's got up to a 500 mile range on its massive battery bank (with real world loads clocking at least 375) and it way outperforms diesel in the performance category.
Of course, you still have to charge it, so that bit has to be sorted out first before long haul is viable with these.
Yeah, some of them even work and are good enough to haul chips.
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...
You couldn't build it and get it filled fast enough. Also with a 1k degree battery a lot of that water is boiling off instantly.
Hmm, yeah, good point. What if you throw a bunch of dirt or sand on it from a truck filled with it from a distance until it's covered? Like one of those things that poke up from wood chippers and launches the chipped wood into a higher truck, but redesigned to throw dirt or sand at a burning EV from a dump truck at a safe distance?
Surely firefighters know better than to use water on a battery?
Currently, water is still the best option, when you have access to enough of it.
But I'm sure they're all ears for your better solutions.
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?
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.
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.
This is not a Tesla problem. This is electric vehicle problem.
My local fire department once had to put out the same VW Buzz 3 times because it kept re-igniting. Nowdays they have containers filled with water that they completely submerge electric vehicles into that had caught fire.
It's a Tesla problem in that it is a bumrushing tech that hasn't matured for what it's being used for because profit motive.
And no, if the tech isn't mature to be both useful AND safe in the event of failure operating in the world, it belongs in the lab, not up for sale.
We shouldn't be mass producing any vehicles that become bombs/environmental disasters that standard fire and rescue can't appropriately address with reasonable tools upon crashing, because they inevitably will.
Its a market capitalism problem. Fire, ready, aim because rush the pos to sale. Musk is certainly a standard bearer as a prominent "get government and society's wellbeing out of the way of my quarterly profit expectations" asshole sociopath capitalist.
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
Wasn't aware. I think that's a great idea, honestly. Keep yourself safe.