The nightmare scenario that’s moving too fast for the building and fire codes.
The mechanism of a burning EV usually starts off like a regular ICE car fire; it’s not the battery that’s burning, it’s the body and contents. That part is usually well wrapped up in 20 to 30 minutes, and is a challenge, but not insurmountable. In the US and Canada, underground garages are usually sprinklered, so we’ve got a chance to hold the fire in check until it can be manually extinguished. Notwithstanding the more spectacular garage fires (one at Jacksonville Airport today, in fact), car fires in garages are a pain but not horrible. I’ve had two in my career. The low ceiling is the worst part - keeps the smoke low and heats up, so it’s way warmer than a usual car fire. Spalling of the concrete is a concern for later - it’s not an immediate problem. Just make sure you can approach it from the upwind side (not an option for an underground garage, then it’s picking the right stair).
There are currently tests going on to figure out if the sprinkler density we’ve used for the last 50 years is still applicable. Steel cars and plastic cars don’t burn the same, so the expectation is that we’ll see beefier sprinklers in the near future.
The EV issue is that after the rest of the car burns, we still have a battery doing it’s thing for the next couple of hours.
Operationally, it’s get hose lines onto the areas surrounding the burning EV. Adjacent cars and the structure are the concern, keep those cool. Get the cars next to the EV away. Clear the smoke out of the garage. Get the fire in the battery knocked down enough that we can get a tow truck into the garage and pull what’s left of the EV outside. Be ready on the tow truck’s route out of the garage to stop and address the EV if it acts up. Figure out what we’re doing with the water now in the bottom of the garage.
The turnout gear and hose lines that are used are very likely going to need to be disposed of due to contamination from the smoke. Not an immediate problem but something to worry about (minimize the number of guys in there and how much/which hose you’re using).
All in all, more work and a longer day. And good stories for later.
I heartily endorse this post! As a sort of honorary canine myself, I love dogs, but Pekinese are not dogs. They’re a species of rodent with the ability to utter exceptionally loud and unceasing high-pitched yips. My next-door neighbour had one once. Then suddenly one day it disappeared. I don’t know what happened to it, but I’m sure there were many influential forces interested in having it disappear and celebrating the event when it happened.
On what? One of the building types here was painted stucco on expanded foam, 1 or 2 upper levels, brick or concrete at floor level.
Taller building were supposed to have non-flammable cladding, but that was a lie: there are buildings build all over the world with flammable cladding.
Perhaps the most memorable one was the Grenfell Tower fire in London some years ago. They tried to pretty-up the building with cladding. Turned out it was flammable and the whole place went up in flames.
What pissed me off when that happened was that there was no excuse. Any competent engineer or fire safety officer would have been reading about the previous cladding fires on tall buildings internationally, and would have registered that further checks and investigation were necessary.
The Grenfell inquiry found corruption and incompetence, but that was a given. If I knew that further checks and investigation were necessary, just from reading newspapers and in-flight magazines, people who were paid to be responsible should have known too.
This makes me wonder whether it would be possible to rig a phone with a self destruct mechanism — a pin and a remotely activated charge that pokes the pin into the battery, maybe? Or if not a remote activator, a dead man switch that requires the passcode daily or some such. Obviously it would be wildly dangerous carrying around a small incendiary device constantly on the verge of meltdown, but paranoia can be a powerful motivator.
Makes me think of Star Trek when they overload a phaser. Not reality of course but not sure how much damage poking a hole in a phone battery would do. I think you’d get more of a fizzle as it burned up. Its danger is more setting other things on fire and burning down a house.
It burned. And it released a lot of magic smoke. But it burned in a way that would be dangerous to anything near it, and also, in a way that would totally destroy whatever was in the phone.
Agree that flammable cladding is a problem worldwide. And as the 9/11 attacks showed us, given enough accelerant damned near anything burns.
Around here standard residential low-rise and mid-rise (~3 to ~20 floors) construction is poured concrete floors and pillars with concrete block exterior walls. Exterior finish is stucco then paint over that. Glass or glass + aluminum curtain wall is not the norm for these.
Steel frame with curtain wall becomes common in even taller residential buildings and in office buildings and hotels.
A Class D fire extinguisher is appropriate if you’re attempting to extinguish a fire of lithium metal. That’s not what’s happening with a lithium ion battery fire.
The extinguishing agent in the yellow Class D extinguishers is sodium chloride - yes, table salt. It works by melting over burning metal and excluding oxygen. Great on a pile of magnesium turnings. Doesn’t do a thing for a battery fire where the fire is inside a case (can’t reach the fire), cells are venting (knocking the salt off), and the electrolyte that’s burning contains its own oxygen (so it’s still going to burn under the salty blanket).
I’ve come across a number of tech factories that are storing/charging batteries in substantial quantities where they have Class D extinguishers because their insurance provider told them to. My head shakes every time.
I read the question as whether it would be easy to make the phone self-destruct, not whether it would be easy to rig it to take out people at the same time. I think the first is true, even if the second isn’t.
Yes, that was my intent. If one is forced to surrender one’s phone to some third party, is there a way to leverage the inherent instability of the battery to make the phone kill itself so they can’t get any information out of it, etc etc.
It sounds like the answer is yes, but it would be inadvisable for all but the most needful of such an extreme measure.
