Our town had to use an excavator and dozer to bury a Tesla car because it wouldn't stop burning.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
347 points (96.3% liked)
News
23622 readers
2888 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I don't think so, but what else are you gonna do? Can't really submerge it in foam at a moments notice like you're supposed to
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(12 replies)
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.
But it would take a long time to open each packet and spray it on the fire.
- Lay the Capri Suns in the ground next to the fire
- Get another semi truck
- Drive over the packets to squish out the liquid onto the fire
- If the additional semi truck catches fire as well, repeat from step 1
Fuck. Get this dude into Congress right now.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
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".
Lithium is a metal right? Putting water on a metal fire usually just makes the fire worse.
load more comments
(7 replies)
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)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
The problem though is how do you do that in the middle of nowhere on the highway like in this case? We need something big enough and portable enough. They clearly didn't have that for this fire.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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
load more comments
(1 replies)
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
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(9 replies)
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
Something tells me that we have to move away from cobalt/manganese chemistries for BEVs.
load more comments
(6 replies)
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.
load more comments
(8 replies)
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.
load more comments
(14 replies)
load more comments
(15 replies)
view more: next ›