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As a firefighter this is just as funny as cringeworthy to read. > An electric car fire gets very hot, and there may be a risk of explosion where toxic gases wi
by martin_a 3y ago
As a firefighter this is just as funny as cringeworthy to read.
> An electric car fire gets very hot, and there may be a risk of explosion where toxic gases will be released
You know what? That's the case with _every_ car fire in enclosed spaces.
Explosions in car fires are very rare (tires will regularly pop), but every fire will release toxic gases. Especially car fires with lots of highly refined materials in the interior. That's why we wear heavy protective equipment when dealing with fires.
> electric cars, hybrid cars and also hydrogen cars will not be allowed on board
Well, the future does not look bright for this shipping company.
- tiahura 3y agoBologna aside, isn’t there a legit issue re the difficulty in extinguishing an EV battery pack? I can see how “just give it a few days to burn itself out isn’t a viable strategy on a boat.
- V__ 3y agoSince it's a ferry, a solution could be to just push if overboard. How often do fires on ferry happen?
- cjfd 3y agoHave you ever actually seen a bunch of cars tightly parked on a ferry? If not, google 'cars on a ferry' and click some images. Now, imagine a car somewhere in the middle of the bunch catching fire. Are you going to volunteer 'pushing it overboard'?
- ugjka 3y agoyou can't push them when they are deep in a pack of cars
- yreg 3y agoYou would have to push the entire column of cars before it overboard.
- bzzzt 3y agoSo make sure the electric cars are loaded last.
- vasco 3y agoProbably still cheaper even paying for the recovery effort if they are not dumped too deep to replace those cars than to replace the ship, in terms of total cost if the ship is totalled. How you push a column of cars around a raging fire is another problem. I don't know what I'd do.
- masklinn 3y agoThese are not open-deck ferries, the cars are in closed decks.
- bzzzt 3y agoSo it's easy to cut off the oxygen supply to the fire?
- bell-cot 3y agoSure - so long as you've spent the necessary $millions in advance, to build that feature into the ship. Plus crew training, safety certifications, insurance, etc. Imagine if a couple idiot kids or passed-out drunks were in the compartment which you de-oxygenated.
- bzzzt 3y agoLast time I took a big car ferry the car decks were off limits for passengers. On a smaller ferry it's more of a problem but the risks are also lower.
- masklinn 3y agoLast time I took a ferry with car capabilities (between Hokkaido and Honshu) the car deck was very much accessible to passengers.
- GuB-42 3y agoLi-ion batteries supply their own oxygen when they burn, you can't smother the fire.
- Symbiote 3y agoThere are deck walls strong enough to prevent a vehicle falling out of the ship, but usually open at either end to ensure good ventilation. There are hundreds of these ferries operating in Europe (and other places with large islands or short seas/lakes), from tiny ones that carry 2-4 cars, to large ones with multiple decks. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/car-ferry.html?sortBy=relevant https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/car-ferry.html?sortBy=rele... Tiny (UK): https://www.alamy.com/the-dartmouth-to-kingswear-car-ferry-leaves-from-bayards-cove-dartmouth-image150265426.html https://www.alamy.com/the-dartmouth-to-kingswear-car-ferry-l... Small (Germany): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-car-ferry-harbour-friedrichshafen-lake-of-constance-baden-wurttemberg-147274580.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-car-ferry-harbour-friedric... Medium (Brazil): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-car-on-board-the-ferry-makes-the-crossing-between-the-city-and-the-101304128.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-car-on-board-the-ferry-mak... Large (UK/France): https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-vehicle-deck-of-a-cross-channel-car-ferry-on-the-dover-calais-73449924.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-the-vehicle-deck-of-a-cros... Note these are public passenger ferries. You arrive at the port, buy a ticket, drive on and (usually) get out of the car for the journey.
- Tarq0n 3y agoCars on a ferry are locked in by other cars, and in large ferries like this one a ceiling as well.
- mikestew 3y agoIgnoring the other impracticalities that sibling commenters have pointed out, are you going to be the one to reach inside and put the flaming car in neutral? 'cuz you ain't pushing shit if that thing's still in Park.
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- KnobbleMcKnees 3y agoI think this post was made because of this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66310280 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66310280 From the article: >Last year a cargo ship carrying 4,000 luxury cars caught fire and sank off the Azores. Lithium-ion batteries in the cars caught fire and firefighters needed specialist equipment to put out the fire.
- samstave 3y agoThere is a cargo ship right now in the NL that apparently has ~3,000 cars on it - and its on fire. I wonder if it has many EVs on it. Ah 25 Evs on it... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fire-electric-car-suspected-source-dutch-coastguard-2023-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fir...
- actionfromafar 3y agoA small contingent of about 25 EVs take responsibility for the operation, destroying thousands of their ICE foes.
- samstave 3y agoAnd the fact that the fire "started near the EVs" is a False Frag.
- reacharavindh 3y agoI was just at the fire station in Netherlands last week for a tour and asked the very question. Answer: Electric cars are different from ICE cars in that the fire must be put off differently. We are trained to handle an EV fire by using a “blanket” method wherein a boxy containment zone will be erected to completely enclose the burning EV limiting ability of that chemical reaction to break out in a larger way. We have the tools, and the necessary practice for it, and treat it no different than a regular petrol car.
- nradov 3y agoSure, but that doesn't work on a ship. Or in an enclosed parking garage on land.
- martin_a 3y agoHm, it's not that difficult in the end, at least on land. First part is checking whether the battery pack is affected after all. Not all EV car fires lead to problems with the battery pack and sometimes you can just extinguish the fire like any other. We check the battery by inspecting it with thermal cameras (remove any protection on the bottom of the car first - not easy). If the temperature of the pack rises after the initial fire has been put out, the battery pack seems to have a problem. In that case, permanent cooling is the way to go. You will start doing this by sprinkling the battery with a hose to keep temperatures stable. At some point, you'll want to release the personell and need a more permanent solution. That's where troughs come in to play. You will fill that up with water until you can completely submerge the battery pack in water. Either place the car in first or lift it in afterwards, that doesn't matter, it's just a handling thing. The car stays in there for several days until the chain reaction in the battery has stopped. I can see how this might be somewhat more complicated on a ship in the middle of nowhere, but you wouldn't want to have a burnt-out non-EV car standing on your ship for an extended period of time, too. So you'll have to reach shore quickly anyway and get more help.
- madsbuch 3y agoSeems like a crane and dropping the car into the ocean is the solution then! /s
- martin_a 3y agoIf all else fails, I'd consider that option. But the problem seems to be more of how to get a burning car out of the pile of cars in your ferry. Doesn't matter if EV or not, you want to have it out of there at some point and that seems to be tricky.
- mrguyorama 3y agoHow well can you manage the temperature of a "burning" lithium car battery with unlimited water supplies? Can you easily keep it cool enough to not damage the floor or deck of the boat it is on? If you can, it seems like the long term solution would be two seawater pumps, hoses, and a barrier so you can erect an impromptu kiddy pool around the burning vehicle, and just flow constant seawater around it until you get to port or it stops being a problem.
- tomcam 3y agoHave you found electric car fires as easy to put out as ICE car fires?
- martin_a 3y agoSee my answer on another comment: It's a question of the right strategy. But that strategy is being trained regularly, there are preparations in place and in case I would encounter an EV fire with my local department, we would have a through ready in about half an hour and could dump it in there. The discussion with EV fires now, we had 15 years ago with solar panels. People were panicking that firefighters would not be able to reach the burning roof under the solar panels, houses would burn down like nothing or that firefighters would die to electric shocks when taking care of those fires. Reality is that some regulation was put in place (roof-mounted solar systems need an emergency breaker in Germany) and people found that the solar panels were most likely already gone in fully developed fires or that they could be rather easy and safely be ripped from the roof, when necessary.
- prometheus76 3y agoBut we are talking about a car on a boat. Will your fire department be able to put out a lithium fire on a boat?
- Nathanba 3y agoalso it's probably very hard to get to that individual car on the ship, unlike how it would be on a road
- martin_a 3y agoI guess the ferry will have firefighters onboard. They should be trained on how to handle car fires in general. They will then need some equipment to get EVs out of their parking position (forklift maybe?!?) and have some container ready to drop them into. It's a problem that can be solved with the right equipment.
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- auxfil 3y ago[dead]
- esjeon 3y agoFirstly, all large chunks of Lithium-based battery packs must be regulated/controlled, just like how airlines are doing. Secondly, Hydrogen is dangerous indoors, because the gas gets trapped AND is odorless, and no one will notice until something goes boom.
- frumper 3y agoNatural gas and propane are odorless too. They solved that problem by adding an odorant to it.
- unethical_ban 3y agoI don't think you can add an odor to an offgassing byproduct of a battery.
- frumper 3y agoMy comment is responding to the parents comment about hydrogen fuel. https://www.hydrogenfuelnews.com/hydrogen-fuel-odorized/8550495/ https://www.hydrogenfuelnews.com/hydrogen-fuel-odorized/8550...
- ars 3y agoIt's harder than is obvious, the odorant must spread in the same way that the hydrogen does under wind and buoyancy. Natural gas is a bit of a heavier molecule but hydrogen is very light and I suspect that the hydrogen and the smell would very rapidly separate. A bigger problem is that hydrogen can leak through tiny cracks, and odorant can't.
- Thoeu388 3y agoAs a firefighter you should know putting out lithium battery fire is very different. It burns much hotter, releases toxic gas. You can not use water to put it out, lithium reacts with water and releases more toxic gas. Water is like gasoline. Battery also reignites randomly, even after fire was stopped. To completely stop lithium battery fire, you need to submerge it in liquid oil for several weeks, to make sure that thing is completely dead. In country of 10 million people, we only have two tanks, that can deal with electric car fire. Electric car can self ignite randomly, even after being parked for several hours or days. We are lucky Tesla has good QA, but that will change as other brands (even Chinese) will flood market. And there will be DIY battery repairs... Ferry in Norway could have cars from Bulgaria or Serbia onboard. Even homemade electric bike is electric vehicle! I am absolutely for banning electric cars from underground garages, ferries, long tunnels, and so on.
- martin_a 3y ago> In country of 10 million people, we only have two tanks, that can deal with electric car fire. In a county of 160k people we have two troughs on standby for these cases. It's about being trained and prepared and things will lose its horror.
- CogitoCogito 3y agoI'm a bit surprised that Norway would be so far behind your county, but regardless it seems like the shipping company is acting prudently given Norway's lack of readiness.
- Thoeu388 3y agoThat is Czechia, not Norway.
- CogitoCogito 3y agoYeah I should have realized you couldn’t have been talking about Norway. Had I turned my brain on, I would have realized that a rich country with so much EV uptake couldn’t possibly be so far behind in EV fire suppression.
- djha-skin 3y agoYears ago, when Tesla was a sports car, my uncle had a friend who was called by fire departments to help when a Tesla crashed. They would not touch the vehicle or anyone inside until he came and did his work. He got several 55 gallon drums and filled them with water. Then he gets a heating element and hooks it to the battery. He drops the element in the water. The water starts to boil within seconds. Once it is at boiling point he takes the hearing element and puts it in another 55 gallon drum. He repeats this until the battery is drained. It sounds like fire fighters are still scared today. Perhaps it is because there is not only a risk of fire, but also electrocution.
- martin_a 3y ago> It sounds like fire fighters are still scared today. Perhaps it is because there is not only a risk of fire, but also electrocution. Yes, as mentioned there's not enough training happening. Every firefighter should be trained for handling fires in electrical installations. If you can't shut it off, there are safety distances you'll have to maintain, these are even defined in industrial standards. For "low voltage" (up to 1.500 V DC) the safety distance is 1 meter for a wide beam of water and 5 meters for a narrow beam of water. This can be well kept (don't lay down in the water, though) with appropriate tactics.
- mkmk 3y agoCould someone who took EE please remind me... how many drums of water could a fully-charged Tesla boil?
- gary_0 3y agoThat's not EE, that's basic math/physics. The largest Telsa Model S battery is 100kWh, which is 360MJ. Boiling 1L of water from room temperature takes 330kJ. 55 US gallons is about 200L water. 200 * 330kJ = 66MJ to boil the whole drum. 360MJ per battery / 66MJ per drum = 5.46 drums of water.
- mkmk 3y agoNice, that's a pretty manageable amount of water to imagine a firefighter having access to. Are there better ways of discharging EV batteries?
- woodruffw 3y ago"Toxic gases" aside, I think this part is more relevant to their ultimate decision: > The decision was made after an external risk analysis was made on behalf of the company. What the risk analysis found was that fires in electric cars are considered more difficult to extinguish than fires in cars powered by petrol and diesel. In other words: the problem is that they can't easily extinguish these fires on their ships. Or, perhaps, doing so isn't worth whatever the corresponding insurance burden is.
- codyb 3y agoWe seem to have regular fires in NYC now caused by folk daisy chaining Ebike and Escooter batteries to charge them. They seem to spread super quickly, be hard to extinguish, and release a lot of toxic smoke. 0 - Four dead at ebike store 1 - Leveled a supermarket and laundromat. Firefighter quoted "something we've never seen before, in terms of going from small to big in a matter of a few minutes" 2 - Over three dozen injured [0] - https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/20/us/nyc-ebike-store-fire-lithium-ion-batteries/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/20/us/nyc-ebike-store-fire-lithi... [1] - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lithium-ion-battery-blamed-yet-another-fast-moving-fire-nyc-officials-rcna73566 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lithium-ion-battery-bla... [2] - https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-11-06/nyc-probes-battery-linked-fire-that-injured-over-3-dozen https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2022-11-06/nyc-probe... It just goes on and on like this with a simple search for "battery fire NYC".
- woodruffw 3y agoYep. The city has begun offering subsidies to delivery drivers to get them to switch to known safer e-bike models[1]. However, the prices are high even with the subsidies; the fires will likely continue (and continue to be very deadly) until the city takes registration and regulation of repair shops more seriously. [1]: https://nyrideclean.org/ https://nyrideclean.org/
- pornel 3y agoIt's not the same situation: 1. People won't be charging EVs on board. 2. BEVs have proper battery management system with temperature monitoring and active cooling, not some DIY hack. But lithium fires, if they start, can be nasty, so I'm not surprised the insurance doesn't like it.
- century19 3y agoWhat do you think of this story with one person dead? https://news.sky.com/story/one-dead-and-several-injured-after-major-fire-on-cargo-ship-near-ameland-in-netherlands-12927537 https://news.sky.com/story/one-dead-and-several-injured-afte...
- martin_a 3y agoI don't think much of it, too little information available at this point. Reuters [1 or see comment above] says the fire started "near" an EV, Sky seems to know better and says an EV was the source of the fire. What's right now? If an EV was the cause of the fire, the question would be, if the outcome would have been different if the car was a petrol car of some sort. Also: Why did somebody die? Why did some people jump overboard while others were airlifted? What's with emergency boats and whatnot else? More from the Reuters article: "It's a very hard fire to extinguish, possibly because of the cargo the ship was transporting". Is that because of the 25 EVs on board or because something else? This whole story is made up like the whole ship went "Boom!" and from one second to another the whole thing was up in flames. [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fire-electric-car-suspected-source-dutch-coastguard-2023-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fir...
- century19 3y agoI've read other people say some cargo ships have been refusing to take EVs, there have been a few of these incidents in the last few years. If so, this looks like an incident that could make banning EVs on boats more common.
- anigbrowl 3y agoI think it's in the light of this incident: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fire-electric-car-suspected-source-dutch-coastguard-2023-07-26/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/one-dead-cargo-ship-fir...
- autokad 3y agoI don't know a whole lot about electric vehicles, but I am already aware that fire departments struggle to put them out compared to say, an ICE vehicle fire. Often, fire departments have to just let the fire burn itself out. Fires on ships is extremely problematic, as I am sure you are aware. likewise, the fumes released from the batteries are much more toxic than those released from gasoline. coper, cobalt, lead, and other toxic minerals are released into the air in much greater quantities. as you can imagine, this is also extremely problematic in enclosed spaces, like on a ship.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]