Firefighters don’t have many options when it comes to electric vehicle fires

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Firefighters in Port Moody got a bit of a shock on Wednesday after an SUV that was towed out of the ocean caught on fire. Turns out the vehicle was an electric hybrid, creating a challenge for fighters trying to put out the flames.

“You’re pulling a submerged vehicle out of the ocean, something happened and the vehicle sparked up and caught on fire,” says the city’s deputy fire chief Kirk Heaven. “Once the vehicle was out of the water, it sounded like a tire exploding and we could see flames underneath the vehicle. I never ever have seen this before.”

Heaven believes the salt water had some sort of reaction with some of its components.

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Fires are admittedly rare in these types of vehicles, but also burn extremely hot when they do start. And with more and more electric or hybrid electric vehicles on the road, it bears mentioning they can also be near-impossible to put out.

“Because the cars are so well-built and designed to keep that battery isolated, the problem is that when those flammable metals get burning, they’re hard to start but when they do start, they burn with very intense heat and very vigorously,” says Vancouver Fire and Rescue Cpt. Jonathan Gormick. “There’s not much we can do to extinguish it without very specialized extinguishing agents.”

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Those extinguishing agents differ with various types of flammable metals and fire crews certainly do not carry them for day-to-day use.

“You would find them (extinguishing agents) at a processing plant or someone that handled that type of material regularly. So really all we can do is protect the surroundings, protect people from getting exposure to the vapour or smoke and just cool the surroundings and cool what’s left of the car to try and slow the consumption a little bit,” says Gormick.

“Flammable metals essentially have to burn themselves out before anything can be done,” he adds. “Even water, lithium burns so hot, that it will separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, which is obviously fuel for the fire. So spraying water on flammable metal fires often has a counteractive effect.”

So the best course of action is often just to keep people away and let the fire burn itself out.