Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ikurei | Hacker News Reader

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> Electric car fires are no big deal anymore.

> Easy solution: Put them in a tub full of water for at least 24 hours

How is this not a big deal? This forces firefighters, which sometimes are small departments without a lot of resources, to transport the cars. It's a nuissance if it's 1 car, but a parking lot caching fire would be an absolute nightmare.

If a car catches fire in a narrow street in the middle of a city, and it jumps to just a few more cars, you may have a massive issue.

It's great that you guys have adapted to this, and I'm sure we will learn how to make battery powered cars safer. This is the early-ish stages of a new technology, which are always rocky times... but it is still a big deal which shows how early it still is, which would be fine if we didn't need to stop using gas ASAP.

PD: I tried not to sound snarky but I may have failed. I intended no snark. I'm actually asking, how can this not be a big deal? Because it sounds like a big deal to me.

> How is this not a big deal?

First of all sorry for my English, I sometimes fail to find the right words, so it's sometimes hard to explain what I mean.

It's not a big deal in the sense that you'll call the control/dispatch center and tell them that you'll need a tub for an EV. They'll then take care of getting it to you and that's what firefighters worry about.

How the car leaves the place? None of the firefighters' business, at least here in Germany.

Of course there are lots of things in the aftermath like how to recycle the water from that tub as it might be contaminated and needs special treatment, but that's a problem for someone else and possibly already solved somehow.

> but a parking lot caching fire

Yeah, that would be shit, but it could also happen today with gas-powered cars. I've experienced something similar myself once with a used car sales lot. It was somewhat frightening as the fire spread to multiple cars very fast because of the large amounts of heat.

In the end we concentrated on cooling the unburnt cars at first, and only as a second measure slowly fighting and extinguishing the ones that already caught fire when reinforcements (lots of!) had arrived.

Would you handle it differently with EVs? Yes, probably, you'd also need lots of tubs.

Would it be completely differently? No. Cars are, once burning, very nasty to extinguish, no matter how they are powered.

I wouldn't fear an EV more than a gas-powered car if I would get called right now.

I think your thoughts speak to how public services operate in US verus other western countries.

In the US, such a process would (in my naive understanding)cripple my small-mid sized coastal towns FD, and throw the town leadership into a headspin for 20 years until the next solution is paid for by the next group of decision makers.

It's very possible that the resources (tubs) for a large amount of cars, as in this scenario, would not be available. Even if it's a yesterday problem in the operational level, the logistics look fragile.

firefighters are tough people, they had procedures for gasoline fires, now they have them for electric fires. not a big deal.

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