Featured BEV's become "ticking time bombs" after Hurricane Ian in Florida

Tuition in the school of hard knocks. Yet this is not the first time ‘unidentified’ EVs have taken a salt water bath. Rich Rebuilds has bought flood damaged, Tesla EVs yet not reported spontaneous Tesla fires. In fact, Elon plans to boat across a Texas salt water canal in his planned cybertruck.

Amphibious EV trucks, who will be the first?

Bob Wilson

 

Ev's and natural disasters are interesting discussion points. While on vacation in South Carolina once, we experienced an emergency evacuation order. If your car wasn't charged, what do you do? Also after hurricanes how do you charge? In South Carolina many gas stations along evacuation routes have emergency generators to keep the gas flowing along the evacuation routes for refueling your car and for refueling in a hurricane aftermath.

Not only does lithium become flammable in water it can present significant environmental hazards if it is submerged in water and begins to react with it releasing dangerous chemicals into the environment.

Hopefully manufactures have thought this through and lithium battery packs are waterproof and can withstand being submerged

 

does apply to bev's only, or any vehicle with a battery?

 

Anyone interested in this topic probably ought to read Toyota's T-SB-0229-12, which describes proper safing, inspection, and repair of any Toyota model that could have been flooded. It applies to all of their models, EV, hybrid, or conventional.

It describes activities in that order: first doing what's necessary for "safing" the vehicle, then inspecting for damage, then undertaking repair.

Step 6 of "safing", for any model, is "Using a floor jack or GoJak® [i.e. without starting or operating the vehicle], move and store the vehicle away from structures and vehicles."

 

There have been <25 EV fires in the Flood region, (some groups say only 1 verified reliably)
some of which involved a person drying out the car then trying to charge it after it was flooded.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/weather/hurricane-ian-latest/florida-official-evs-starting-fires-in-hurricane-aftermath/amp/

It’s worth noting there have already been close to 8000 gas vehicle fires in the flood region , innumerable house fires (including non-EV electrical ones) and fires started by construction equipment including portable generators.

yes fires are a problem but as usual we are talking a small piece of the “fire” pie to distract people from real problems, hell there have been over 500 boat fires in the flood area, people need to get a life and put things into context.

Florida "State Fire Marshal" Tells Crazy Lie About EVs - CleanTechnica

 

I'm sure PHEVs can also get sparkly.

You EVangelists are getting slow in your old age.

The BEV "ticking time bomb" story is a low hanging curveball right over the plate that anybody who has ever lived in a post storm area should be able to knock out of the park with a souvenir sized Louisville Slugger.

Two Words:
Carbon Monoxide.

My finely honed Spidey Senses lead me to suspect that not quite as many people die from sloppy Darwinism from BEVs as they do with gas generators.
Not even the CDC manipulate the data enough to FUD that up.

BEVs have their "little challenges."
'Sploding isn't one of the bigger ones.

 

Kinda miss the days where people who had different ideas or just learning about a subject could just sit down and talk without being " crazy liars, racist, politically motivated, insensitive, misinformed, demons from hell etc etc etc."

Maybe the poor Fire Marshall is just doing the best he can, is overwhelmed and media decided they needed to make a story for a slow news day.

 

Wow !!!
ticking time bomb!
Lol
Yeah, no clickbait drama there.
Let's see, a bomb explodes. Thermal runaway? Not so much
.... or maybe the OP is hoping the plug-in Prius etc, are only allowed to drive in the middle of the desert - where no flash floods could ever happen? Or was this article just meant to be a Segway to show how even if plug in cars increased fires by more than double, they would still be way way safer per million miles - especially because gas explosions don't give you much opportunity to get away or survive.

Maybe after natural gas explosions caused by floods become less ubiquitous - maybe then we can set our hair on fire over plugins
Like Barney Fife used to say, "nothing to see here, move along"
.

 

Same thing you do if your car is out of gas.

Solution - be prepared!

Before the hurricane, drive somewhere that won't be affected by the hurricane. In other words, be prepared!

I have little or no sympathy for those who are not prepared for an easily foreseeable event.

 

It will be interesting when people start using their cybertruck as a 'boat'...per Elon. I'm sure it will work out *great*...nothing to see here.

 

Yep, no one's ever thought of that before.

 

Any vehicle.
Flooded electrical components can start corroding. Salt water can leave salt deposits behind. Either of those things can lead to shorts. A 12V battery has enough energy to start a fire from a short, and has done so for decades before EVs came back.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/24586/hundreds-of-maseratis-destroyed-by-exploding-car-batteries-at-flooded-italian-port
The article is from 2018, and Maserati only starting to put out EVs now.

Number of sales means some of the EVs were Teslas, and at least four of the EV fires were.
Flooded Teslas are catching fire in Hurricane Ian's wake - Autoblog

"When Rich began to dismantle the car, he found that after sitting in salt water, the battery pack was waterlogged. Twelve of the 16 modules in the pack were good. One of the four that wasn't was so corroded it began exploding as he took it apart, he notes in a video."
What happens to electric cars that have been flooded?

Lithium metal reacts with water. Most of the lithium in these batteries isn't metal, but lithium compounds.

Li-ion batteries are fairly benign in a hazardous way. You shouldn't eat them, but it'll take more than an EV's worth to be dangerous to the environment. Well, not outside of the very immediate area. A pile of scrap stainless steel and lye will do some damage, and lithium hydroxide is weaker than sodium hydroxide. Cobalt and manganese are actually components in some vitamins.

Lithium in our water supply might be a good thing.
"Using data for 27 Texas counties from 1978-1987, it is shown that the incidence rates of suicide, homicide, and rape are significantly higher in counties whose drinking water supplies contain little or no lithium than in counties with water lithium levels ranging from 70-170 micrograms/L."
Lithium in drinking water and the incidences of crimes, suicides, and arrests related to drug addictions - PubMed

The cells are water tight. Cars aren't wrist watches though. Waterproofing all those components just in the unlikely chance the car gets caught in a flood that could damage them to the point of causing a fire is a non-small expense that will add weight to the car.

Then they don't do the 12V, and that starts the fire. The non-EV car and boat fires that have happened in the area most likely started as electrical.

Well, there was that BEV(Kona?) that blew up a garage. When thermal runaway does happen, the components of the battery start to break down, and the cells release a lot of hydrogen.

These fires likely weren't thermal runaway events, but electrical fires that started outside of the battery cells. The traction battery may not have had any part in the fire starting.

 

While that sounds great, I'm not sure how well it works out. If your car has a 250 mile range, and the hurricane is sweeping the length of the state, you have to drive more than 250 miles to find a safe place. Unfortunately, that 250 mile range drops off if you are in stop and go traffic such as a mass exodus tends to be.

It seems that you are saying that everyone with an EV needs to leave potential danger zones before the danger arrives. That sounds sensible. Just load up both/all of your BEVs and hit the road before they become congested. Plan far enough ahead that you can find a series of vacant superchargers along the way. Don't forget, you can't count on just leaving your BEV behind, since cars that are battered against buildings by the storm surge / flood waters are most likely to be catching fire as the waterproofing layers are damaged.

How well does that scale in the year 2030 when most cars are supposed to be running on electricity? Florida has 7 million registered cars. If even half of those need to make a 300 mile evacuation, that's a LOT of cars that will be sharing the road. If even 1% run out of power you end up with 30,000 cars on the road that can't be driven until they are towed to a charger.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe folks just need to move away from areas with yearly natural disasters?

 

i think that is the solution, but will never happen as long as federal money is pumped into rebuilding.

the other solution is darwinism

 

I tend to get far better mileage in stop-and-go traffic than I do at 55mph - at least 30% better.

I'm not saying that. I'm saying everyone needs to leave the potential danger zones before the danger arrives.

If you live at or near sea-level, you will be flooded sooner or later. If you live in the forest, your area will burn sooner or later. These seem foreseeable to me. I'd let people live there, but I wouldn't give them insurance.

 

... or build to withstand the hazards:

NPR: One Florida community built to weather hurricanes endured Ian with barely a scratch

Or just don't give them subsidized insurance. Make them pay actual market rates, to encourage resilient construction.

 

That works, but that community didn't have to withstand storm surge, just wind, rain and loss of power and communications.

Building to withstand storm surge basically means building an RV (so you can leave over land) or building a ship (so you can leave on water). Building a building to withstand 10-20 feet of sea water is not possible.

 

I think that this is the problem that they are most worried about. It would be quite a drain on the firefighter resources if they need to spend 6 or more hours tending to a car which is parked in (or floated into ) a garage and which then catches fire. There are currently around 60K BEVs in Florida, out of 7.5 million cars registered. While there are a lot of fires associated with gasoline, they are quickly contained or extinguished. It sounds like they are less likely to be triggered by a single event like a salt water storm surge.

 

That appears to have been intentional, by deliberate planning.

Other reports did picture flooded streets, but not reaching into the homes.

I'm seeing numerous references on how to build for storm surges. Elevation. Lower value uses (storage, parking) for spaces below flood level. Water tolerant materials and construction for quick flood recovery. Impact and battering resistance. For some certain spaces, even breakaway walls.

Just because a bunch of current construction styles ought to stop, doesn't mean that resilient methods are not possible.

Similar patterns apply to wildfire zones. Construction types, and fuel management around the homes, go a very long way in keeping homes from burning.