Also just to add to this. You do realize there are thousands of fires started by electricity every year right? It's called lightening. There are hundreds of fires stared on the Tahoe and El Dorado national forest every summer started by lightening. If your so afraid of your house burning down then move. Your sounding like an entitled asshole. Living where you choose to live comes with that risk. It's a concession you habe to make to enjoy living that way. I fucking can't stand people who think they can live in the forest and have no risk. You pay insurance don't you? Probably higher premiums than other given your location. Let it burn and rebuild.
Who said I live here and think I have no risks? I bust my ass to be able to live here, worked shitty jobs for years to make ends meet in order to stay in Tahoe. I finally got a breakthrough at a decent job, saved for 5 years, and bought an extremely overpriced home thanks to the VA bill changing lending limits last year, so I think it’s reasonable to want to protect that as much as possible. I have boogie bag packed 3/4 of the year because you never know when it could all go up in smoke.
I have military experience in hazmat but decided not to pursue it as a career post service. I know chemical fires have different risks, burn points, and mitigation requirements but again I’m not an expert.
I’m also not afraid to admit if I’m wrong. I take back a call to Ban EV use off-road, but I strongly feel users should be educated on the risks and have a way to extinguish a fire caused by their battery systems. They also should have enough material on hand to combat the amount of combustible material they are transporting. I hope Jeep, GM, etc are taking this into consideration when designing their vehicles.
I’ve spent a few hours reading about lithium batteries and fire suppression systems. As you can probably verify with your firefighting experience, water isn’t the ideal way to extinguish lithium fires, and a foam or dry chem extinguisher would work best. Water can reduce the heat surrounding the fire, but at high enough temperatures, the H2O can breakdown and cause a negative chemical reaction with the lithium.
I think what’s happening with the Tesla accidents are the accident causes one battery cell to rupture and burst into flame
(say through a physical puncture), that spreads to another, and it expands exponentially. The engineers are filling every empty space with batteries to improve mileage, so when they go, they go out in spectacularly huge fashion. I believe thermal runaway is the term to describe this chain reaction.
I stand by my original concern, however, that these vehicles present a new and unique risk we haven’t experienced before in the off-road community. I’m also going to add a second, larger extinguisher to my Jeep.
