Tesla's and other electric cars have been around for a decade now. It's completely reasonable to expect fire departments to have trained their staff to deal with EV crashes.
In contrast, 60+% of the budget goes towards making sure police officers can make over $200,000 a year with overtime.
When we say "Governor X defunded public schools," no one takes that to mean that they removed every single penny from the schools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Here are more examples:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-beca...
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/02/12/We-Actually-Mean-Aboli...
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/the-abolition-mov...
And, indeed, your first article actually uses the term exactly as we're using it.
While the author is arguing for abolition, and the first and only time she uses the word "defund" it is to say
> Defunding the police is one step on a broad stairway toward abolition. Cities can reduce the size and scope of police...
A quick search of "what does 'Defund the Police' mean" will find that the vast majority of proponents, and of articles written about them in almost all newspapers and magazines, interpret it as reducing the budget of the police and redirecting that budget into non-violent community aid.
Above article refers to this long interview: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/obama-urges-activist...
And I agree with him, if you have to add ", and by this phrase I mean a b c d e f" or "please search the Internet and click a good URL (not Breitbart, but also not Mariame Kaba) to see what we mean by this phrase", do you think people wouldn't just think you're an extremist after the snappy phrase and stop listening?
The self-sabotage (and then people like you defending the phrase) is so mind-boggingly dumb. Do you want change, or do you want to alienate people?
But eh, on the topic of alienating people, I've seen enough "online activists" snap at supporting voices that I thought "I wouldn't be surprised if that supporter stopped sympathizing with them.". Then you have supporters turn to quiet "Fuck it, I'll just shut my mouth" or worse, be opponents.
The paid fire and ems people hate the volunteer departments, the fire-only departments turn their nose down at EMS, and the police are good at swooping in and taking over stuff like paramedics.
Volunteer departments are often big political power bases too. In some states, that results in volunteer departments getting lavish firehouses and fancy gear. I live next door to a city firehouse, their “new” pumper is an 8 year old, $800k (new) truck that saw 70-80 calls a month. It’s new owner doubled the mileage in 90 days.
Poor cities and rural counties might have underfunded services but they don't generally have the dysfunction you're describing because the money to support the dysfunction simply isn't there.
What does this mean to imply? They bought an old truck, gently used, and then used it a lot more...
Is the new mileage because they need to use it? Is that bad? Is 800k a lot for a fire truck?
In a 4-stroke engine each cylinder ignites once every two revolutions, so even a 12-cylinder engine wouldn't reach 2000 ignitions per second until 20,000 RPM.
A more typical case - say, a 6 cylinder engine hitting the redline at 7,000RPM is experiencing 350 ignitions per second - so, hundreds rather than thousands.
Do you know what's not equivalent to an electric car? A fertilizer plant catching on fire. And you guessed it, that's also handled by the fire department.
It’s not unreasonable for firemen to put out fires. It’s just a novel path that requires training.
Large tanks of volatile, flammable, potentially-explosive liquid in proximity to ignition sources in the car?
The efficient way to do that is to tax companies and use the tax dollars to fund public services like fire departments. Expecting Tesla to send in their own firefighters when a Tesla catches fire would be ridiculous. Public services are good, and the method for funding them is well established.
If we want to have additional levies for safety regarding lithium batteries, hopefully we are making sure to do the same for oil too...
Large Lithium fires are fairly uncommon right now, they don't behave like most other classes of fires that firefighters are dealing with. Personal device fires are more common, but total heat / damage is less and the fire is frequently able to be controlled outside of confined areas (aircraft).
With a relatively low volume of large lithium battery packs, and the difficulty in containing them, it could make sense for a targeted levy to cover the cost. Lithium car fires are currently dealt with by trying to isolate the burning vehicle and overwhelming the fire with water (removing Oxygen and temp), however this is very inefficient. I have heard of a former fire chief arguing that to deal with the growth of large battery packs will require either massively increasing the number of appliances (fire engines) or defaulting fire appliances to using special foams as opposed to water. The foams will increase the cost to fight ALL fires, as many engines typically have to be ready pre-mixed before dispatch.
It has also been suggested that density limits, and battery packs be designed to include fire suppression and make this mandatory to allow vehicles on the road. This would create massive packaging issues for every EV company, add significant cost while reducing performance. All in all I think we need to consider if we charge the EV / household battery pack companies for this or we all bare it in general taxes for the environmental benefits. I think bearing it out of general funds is completely reasonable, however I wonder if we are going to get safer batteries if we pass on the cost and let the rate go down as the number and severity of fires decrease. The might be some marginal improvements that quickly get implemented in that case.
Now that there's a global shared effort to make everybody able to work safely around these issues should be mandatory.
There's not that much lithium and there is lots and lots of heat.
Your point is maybe that the simulation is bad. But I think it can be helpful nonetheless. Even if the simulation is "you have a battery fire in front of you. Tell me what you would do?"
If this is really a priority, then make it a priority. Start paying firefighters like cops are paid, and fund the fire department like the police department is funded.
In many places, fire departments are entirely voluntary while police departments are funded to the tune of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
In several places I've lived, the only way fire departments would get that training is if someone donated a bunch of EV batteries to be destroyed by them.
Why not? That's exactly what they do with ICBs and houses to train here.
Any company H&S rep will know this