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Comment by mastry | Hacker News Reader

Is that unusual? Nothing in the article compares it to other fires. Honestly curious.

Also, this was a little ironic…

> The Tesla truck, driven by an employee, was headed to the company’s battery factory in Sparks, Nevada

ICE vehicle fires take about 1000 gallons, and the average fire hydrant puts out about 500-1000 gallons per minute. Structural fire engines carry about 1000 gallons and the heavy duty nozzles and ground monitors/deck guns put out 500-1000gpm. This is a LOT of water for a vehicle.

More like 300-400 gallons for your average urban engine. That's enough (with not much to spare) to knock down your average ICE car fire, but it's really there to allow the crew to get to work while they ship a hydrant.

I had the same thought, how many gallons is a diesel semi truck fire?

The part that concerns me is once electric cars are more ubiquitous, say 50% of cars on the road. How will we handle a pileup, where there could be five cars that all need the same level of fire department effort? Could there be some domino effect?

> and required aircraft to dump fire retardant overhead

I don’t think that’s standard vehicle fire practice.

I read the fire sheets for other tesla cars and they say 8k gallons to suppress a battery fire. However, the Semi's sheet does not give a qty estimate.

https://www.tesla.com/firstresponders

Well, I guess for gas-powered car 500 gallons would be sufficient, so 2 orders of magnitude less water.

EDIT: 500 gallons was originally just a wild guess, but here's an article where some firefighter gives 500-1000 gallons range: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/tesla-crash-dri...

Sparks

That's low for an electric vehicle fire. An average car takes 500-1000 gallons. Teslas can take up to 30000-40000 gallons. Fwiw, most fire trucks only carry up to like 3000 gallons.

Most "Fire trucks" - I'm assuming you mean Engines - carry 500-1000 gallons, usually more on the 500 size. A "Water Tender" generally around 2000 gallons.

Engineer here.

> Fire trucks" - I'm assuming you mean Engines

No-no-no, an engine is a part that makes a fire truck move. Fire trucks usually have a diesel engine.

tips fedora

Software engineer, or IFSAC Apparatus Operator engineer? On the west coast we absolutely refer to our pumping apparatuses as fire engines; when Engine 813 is dispatched from our station to a call we bring the whole vehicle and not just the engine block!

Same in my department.

(The generic term for some type of fire-fighting vehicle is Apparatus.)

> Software engineer, or IFSAC Apparatus Operator engineer?

Yes, correct, engineer.

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