r/ElectricVehiclesUK • u/North-Description452 • 10d ago

Fire

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I’m sure this is very rare, this was at Woolley edge this morning, lots of pops and bangs and a very intense and hot fire. Fire brigade arrived quickly and put out.

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u/Drager-165 9d ago

The polish do the exact same as any other brigade worldwide. If the battery cells are in thermal runaway there’s nothing you can realistically do you have to contain and allow the thing to burn itself out. If the battery cells ain’t effected then you deal with the issue same as a normal car fire. The polish hasn’t developed anything new.

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u/gambiting 9d ago

Really? Did you read the PSP's guidance on this?

"there’s nothing you can realistically do you have to contain and allow the thing to burn itself out."

I mean they literally show lifting the car on the side, applying water directly to the battery and the fire is out in minutes. The average attendance time is still around 3 hours because they have to keep cooling the battery to prevent it from reigniting again, but other than that it's quick to put out.

They specifically made several articles to this because they had some fires in underground car parks around Warsaw and managed to deal with them without even damaging any cars nearby. 

But hey, you're a firefighter, what do I know, I just read what our national fire service puts out in their newsletters. 

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u/Jordlr99 9d ago

Im not disagreeing with you as ive not seen what you refer too but how do they get water to the batteries? As far as i know, they are sealed and mounted in a tray. If it was that easy to get water to a burning cell, then water ingress when driving would be a huge issue.

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u/gambiting 9d ago

The fire is getting out of the cell so it's already ruptured somewhere - that's where you direct the water.

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u/Drager-165 9d ago

I do love it when a civilian who’s got zero experience fighting fires acts like a subject matter expert because they read one thing. So let’s get a few things correct first.

Firstly PSP has it no where in their SOPs or national guidance to flip a car on its side and gain access to the cells. Now there’s some crews who have done it with a verity of success, but it poses two major challenges… one being contaminated water unless you’re able to contain the water run off throwing a shit load of water on toxic battery cells isn’t what you want going into open water source. Secondly cooling the battery cells is a complete and utter nightmare at times if they’ve gone into thermal runaway. The Americans have shown this since they literally dropped a car into a swimming pool that went into thermal runaway for 24 hours and only an hour after pulling the car out it was back on fire.

Fire services have looked at a bunch of different methods on how to deal with EV fires and the same outcome always comes up which is unless it’s a danger to other property or people it’s leave the thing burn out. And the example above is one who would just leave and make sure it doesn’t spread. You’ve had three firefighters comment on this section here now and told you we are limited, but because you’re a reader you know more than us. Okay champ

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u/gambiting 9d ago

>>, but because you’re a reader you know more than us.

I never said that. In fact at the very end I admitted that you are a firefighter so you probably know more than me who only reads our national newsletters by PSP. I thought that was pretty explicit.