It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says
- Thread starter e-beach
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floydr
100 W
If not water, what do you use to put the fire out?
Later floyd
wturber
1 MW
Not my area of expertise, but @justin_le seems to think water is a very good the thing to use. Maybe its a question of scale?
I think the water is used to keep the fire spreading and causing the whole forest to burn down. You’d need thousands of EV trucks to offset the ghg from a forest fire. There’s always been a tension between the folks who want to save every tree, until the forest burns down, and the folks that want to thin the forest so it doesn’t. Nobody really looks at the big picture.
There are specialty chemicals for this. Generally, water is not very effective.... so you need a crapton of it.
Sand works, oxygen deprivation helps.
Fire departments will either need to adapt or we need safer cells.. pick one!
wturber
1 MW
Justin's explanation is you need the water to dissipate the heat so the flame doesn't restart once extinguished.
wturber
1 MW
Looks like some people are actively working on the issue. Here's an approach that appears promising.
www.ctif.org
New revolutionary method tested extinguishes lithium-Ion EV fires in ten minutes with minimal water use
The water consumption was calculated to be around 750 liters / 200 gallons in total, with a combined use of the Cobra cutting extinguisher and traditional fire extinguishing with water.
Yup, water was only used to control reignition rather than extinguishing the flames. Local news interviewed CalFire for the details that the national news outlets didn't include.
Cal Fire explains challenges extinguishing electric vehicle fires after Tesla Semi fire shut down I-80
First responders plan to debrief their response to a Tesla semi-truck fire Monday that closed Interstate 80 in both directions for more than 12 hours, Cal Fire said.
www.kcra.com
“Due to the location and some of the variables, the best option for us was to let that burn down or a thermal runaway end and then cool the batteries to that threshold where we could get the vehicle moved up onto the roadway trailer and more stabilized,” Hale said.
I think it absolutely came down to a question of scale. Even if the FD had the training, resources, and equipment to put out a lithium battery fire... the Tesla Semi has a battery of approx 900kwh. That's like 9-10 Model S cars catching fire in the same spot at the same time.
molybdenum
1 kW
Sequestering the flaming cells and excluding oxygen will help a bit, though some battery chemistries actually produce oxygen when they go critical. Flame retardant foam/sand or complete immersion in water could exclude oxygen. Water has a huge specific heat capacity (4182 J/kg°C), which lets it absorb a lot of energy from a fire. 50,000 gallons is insane, and isn't available in a pinch to fight EV fires. Nothing ideal exists right now, so if there is a fire, all we have to resort to is harsh language.
Wish i had pictures of it.
Anything that can shut a highway down for 15 hours would be quite the sight.
floydr
100 W
Sand works on smaller battery fires. By the time you get to an EV car HV battery fire you are beyond dumping enough sand fast enough to put one out. Especially considering that the battery is typically at the bottom of car. Name a chemical besides water than works on a lithium ion battery fire.
Fire Departments need to adapt like wturber shows in post #9. Could built in hose ports on the battery case help? Plus we need Safer cells.
Later floyd
LewTwo
1 MW
Tesla Megapack on fire in ‘minor incident’ at battery storage site in Australia
A fire has taken place at a battery storage project in Queensland, Australia, as it reached the final stages of its commissioning phase.
www.energy-storage.news
Best I recall the professionals recommended letting it burn out. They only used water to cool off some adjacent units.
Ironically the cause of the fire at Moss Landing electric substation Tesla storage system was water.
LewTwo
1 MW
As a side note:
Any time that there is a concentration of energy storage is a confined area there exist a potential for a fire event that Water can not effectively extinguish. Just ask Putin about fires in Oil Storage depots.
Any time that there is a concentration of energy storage is a confined area there exist a potential for a fire event that Water can not effectively extinguish. Just ask Putin about fires in Oil Storage depots.
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Thanks for that article. I have intimate knowledge about that project. Glad to see they got it back up and running. I recall when the completed the final phase, it was the largest utility scale energy storage facility in the world. I believe it still is.