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.
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.
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.
The way to stop them is solid state batteries
You’ll take my spinning platter batteries from my cold, dead hands
Or maybe just good guys with Li-ion batteries.
What we really need is POCKET SAND!
And absolutely HUGE pockets!
that sounds great, where can I buy one?
Let me know if you find out
honestly, i don’t expect an answer. New battery tech gets announced every year, claiming to revilutionize energy storage. None have made it to market in any meaningful way, if at all. Lithium batteries hit the sweet spot of price to performance, and nothing else can compete. Looking forward to the day that changes.
Massive changes have been happening in the battery field for decades, they just aren’t fast. Our rechargeable batteries are smaller, more energy-dense, longer-lasting, and cheaper than they were 40 years ago. They aren’t magical, last forever, infinite power, instant recharge batteries, though, that’s correct.
So, you actually can buy solid state batteries now at least as external battery packs to charge phones and whatnot, but they’re still lithium based,
Flooding the batteries with water is the best way to put out a lithium-ion battery fire.
Isn’t oxygen deprivation (usually through burying) a much faster method?
Lithium fires are self-oxidizing, so that won’t work. Burying it helps keep it from spreading, though.
Maybe for smaller things, a regular car maybe.
But by the time a suitable digging machine arrives on scene and digs a big enough hole for a semi it’d probably be faster to flood it with water. Not to mention what might be underneath the ground, so they’d also have to spend time determining if there’s any gas lines or whatever before they dig so they don’t make a much bigger problem