Within the fall of 2024, a trucking firm in Falls Township, Pennsylvania, briefly saved a storm-damaged Tesla at its yard. Just a few weeks later, the automotive burst into flames that grew uncontrolled inside seconds, some capturing out 30 toes.
An area hearth firm tried in useless to squelch the blaze, spraying greater than 2,000 gallons of water on the automobile. Ultimately, the firefighters requested assist from a hearth firm in neighboring Bristol Township, led by volunteer hearth chief Howard McGoldrick. He’d been combating fires since 1989, however this conflagration was uncommon: It was a chemical hearth in a lithium-ion battery, which means it offered its personal warmth, gasoline, and oxygen. And it was extremely difficult to extinguish.
McGoldrick was encountering fires like this increasingly usually. The earlier yr, he says, a number of rowhouses have been badly burned after overcharged lithium-ion batteries in racing drones ignited inside. In one other close by incident, previous lithium-ion biomedical units at a scrapyard bought soaked in a rainstorm and combusted.
The Tesla hearth felt like a breaking level. “We have been like, ‘Okay, that is simply too many incidents in a brief period of time,’” McGoldrick remembers. He went in quest of somebody who might assist his firm get higher at responding to fires in lithium-ion batteries. He discovered Patrick Durham.
Durham is the proprietor of (and mustache behind) StacheD Coaching, certainly one of a rising variety of non-public corporations serving to first responders learn to cope with lithium-ion battery security, together with electric-vehicle fires.
Though there isn’t strong knowledge on the frequency of EV battery fires, it’s no secret to EV makers that these fires are taking place. But the producers supply no standardized steps on find out how to battle them or keep away from them within the first place, leaving first responders scrambling to look by every automotive’s emergency response information—one thing that’s onerous to do once you’re standing in entrance of an immolating automobile.
On this void, Durham affords a wealth of assets to first responders, from easy-to-follow video tutorials to hours-long in-person workshops. In 2024 alone, Durham says he educated roughly 2,000 first responders across the nation. As extra folks purchase EVs, partly to assist handle local weather change, the necessity for this coaching has solely grown; in lower than two years, Durham’s YouTube channel has attracted nearly 30,000 subscribers. (The US doesn’t at the moment acquire knowledge on the frequency or causes of EV fires, however this yr the US Fireplace Administration and the Fireplace Security Analysis Institute are rolling out a brand new knowledge assortment system for hearth departments.)
A circumspect man with a shaved head, brown eyes, and a thick horseshoe mustache framing his mouth, Durham beforehand labored as a mechanical engineer growing battery containers for EVs. He’s additionally a volunteer firefighter, and in 2020 he provided his first coaching on fires in lithium-ion batteries to his native division. From there, his popularity unfold by phrase of mouth. At the moment, StacheD Coaching is Durham’s full-time work. He’s additionally the captain of his native volunteer hearth division in Troy, Michigan.
As extra EVs hit the street, what worries Durham most isn’t simply the rising chance of battery fires—it’s their depth. “The severity of the hearth is important in comparison with an everyday automobile hearth,” he says.
“The standard automotive fires that you simply and I grew up with—the vast majority of these at all times begin within the engine compartment,” says Jim Stevenson, a hearth chief from rural Michigan who has taken Durham’s coaching. “So we mainly get there, we pop the automotive hood, after which we put out the hearth from there, and if it will get into the internal compartment of the automotive? Not an enormous deal. You spray it down with the hose, and it’s out very quickly.” With EV fires, Stevenson says, “it’s only a fully completely different monster.”
SHAWN HAZEN
An EV battery is actually a tightly packed array of 1000’s of cells, every of which ranges from roughly the dimensions and form of an AA battery to the dimensions of a authorized envelope, relying on the battery mannequin. If a single cell will get broken–reminiscent of by getting crushed, overcharged, or waterlogged–that cell can warmth uncontrollably in a course of known as thermal runaway. It can launch a lot warmth and flammable gasoline that it generates its personal hearth, which spreads to the opposite cells.
Older lithium-ion battery packs exploded “like a pipe bomb” when that occurred, Durham says; at this time’s battery packs have launch valves so that in thermal runaway they keep away from an explosion by as an alternative spewing flames in what Durham describes as “primarily a blowtorch.” The placement of an EV’s battery—beneath the automotive, between its axles, inside a protecting case—complicates issues additional. The batteries are a lot safer from collision harm than they’d be below the hood, however they’re additionally a lot tougher to achieve and douse in the event that they ignite.
The end result? Fires reminiscent of one at an Illinois Rivian plant in 2024, the place one EV caught hearth and roughly 50 vehicles parked close by ended up burning. Or one in Hollywood, Florida, in 2023, the place a Tesla was by accident pushed off a dock and burst into flames although it was underwater.
Durham worries that if an EV battery catches hearth in a high-speed crash, it’ll burn so intensely that first responders received’t be capable of save anybody contained in the automobile. Placing out a hearth in an internal-combustion automotive may take as little as half-hour and some hundred gallons of water, he notes, whereas an electrical automotive battery hearth might take upwards of 4,000 gallons of water and plenty of hours to extinguish—and far more for industrial vehicles. Certainly, when a Tesla Semi drove off Interstate 80 in Northern California in 2024 and burst into flames, first responders needed to douse it with 50,000 gallons of water and shut the freeway for 15 hours.
What’s extra, with EVs, it’s by no means completely clear whether or not the hearth is actually out. Vehicles might ignite, or reignite, weeks and even months after the battery is broken or a battery hearth is initially suppressed. Durham factors to at least one salvaged Tesla in California that burst into flames 308 days after it had flooded in a Florida hurricane. The automobile hadn’t initially ignited, however saltwater intrusion into the battery pack ultimately corroded it sufficient to supply a chemical hearth resulting in thermal runaway.
In accordance with Durham, the easy fact is that one of the best ways to handle EV fires proper now’s to allow them to burn—whereas ensuring to guard the encircling space, together with different autos and other people’s houses. Permitting the hearth to run its course will ideally additionally destroy any cells that may in any other case ignite later.
This goes in opposition to firefighters’ instincts. After they reply to EV fires, they’ll spray water “as a result of they need to do one thing to repair the issue,” he says. [But] … it’s not likely doing something.”
Stevenson worries about how bystanders will understand first responders ready out a blaze. “It’s going to be ugly,” he says, “as a result of the general public’s going to see us standing on the facet [of the] street simply watching it burn, which seems to be unhealthy for us.” However on the similar time, he provides, “we don’t have [an] precise manner of attending to the battery to knock it out.”
For now, Durham’s coaching focuses on the choices that first responders do have with EV fires. An necessary if easy one is utilizing a hearth blanket to cowl a automobile and forestall the blaze from spreading because it burns out. Though they hadn’t but acquired Durham’s coaching, that’s precisely what McGoldrick and his crew did once they responded to the burning Tesla final fall: After the power used a forklift to maneuver the burning automotive to an remoted a part of the yard, first responders lined it with a hearth blanket. The automotive reignited a number of instances over the subsequent few days, McGoldrick says, “however it was contained. We simply put it in the course of an open lot and mainly let it go.”
It’s a major cultural shift that first responders must make, Durham says, and there’s one other one, too: being extra-vigilant concerning the private protecting tools they put on from the primary second they arrive at a burning EV. There isn’t but sufficient info to match the toxicity of EV fires and people in gas-powered vehicles, however Durham warns that first responders might inhale excessive ranges of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and heavy metals from burning EVs.
Total, Durham says, he’s not in opposition to EVs, however he thinks there must be a change in perspective to deal with them safely. When an EV battery catches hearth, he says, “till that battery has been faraway from the automobile and shredded and totally recycled, it’s at all times going be a hazard.”
Maya L. Kapoor is an award-winning freelance journalist who writes about local weather change, biodiversity, and environmental justice.
