NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 37

across Europe, where many fire departments have already converted their
ladder trucks into small cranes to help
them deal with train derailments, said
Wilson, who recently spoke at an EV
conference in the Netherlands.
"They don't have to worry about
sitting on it for very long in case it reignites-they can load the box on a tow
truck and drive it to the tow yard and
it's good to go," he said. "But the logistics
for us in the US are a little bit more difficult because most fire departments don't
have cranes. It doesn't seem feasible."
Short of dropping a vehicle into a
mobile tank of water, Diaz speculates
that "in the future, the fire service
could have tools available that we can
hook up to a plug in the vehicle and
transfer the energy out of the battery."
He envisions that some fire departments may have specialized EV teams
that could be deployed to draw energy
out of the battery, similar to how
HAZMAT teams are currently trained
to drain gasoline from a tank.
While some de-energizing tools
currently exist, almost all of them are
manufacturer-specific and only work
if the battery is intact and undamaged,
not split open on the highway, Hutchison said. Third-party manufacturers
have made some strides to develop a
universal de-energizing tool to work on
any battery, but again, only if the battery is not critically damaged.
Karner is skeptical that first
responders will someday have tools
to de-energize damaged batteries at
a crash scene. He said the technology
could theoretically exist, but the feasibility is questionable.
"Draining the battery is not a matter
of seconds. It's probably not even a
matter of minutes-we're talking an
hour or hours to do that," he said. "On
top of that, the list of issues just goes
on and on. How do you decide if the
damage is severe enough that it's necessary to drain a battery? That will destroy
the battery, so now the insurance people
are probably getting involved. Who is
going to be trained to do it? Do you do it
at the intersection, or on the side of the
road on private property? My opinion
is that you move the vehicle to a place
where it can be dealt with in a more

orderly fashion and use some precautions along the way."
Short of being able to drain its
energy, simply knowing how much
stranded energy is left in a damaged
battery would go a long way toward
helping responders decide what risk
it poses and if it is safe for transport,
Wilson said. "But we have no way of
knowing what the charge level is of
that battery pack when we show up on
a scene," he said.
That leaves responders, tow truck
drivers, salvage yard owners, and

ion's penchant for reigniting without
warning, like a trick birthday candle,
NFPA recommends that an EV with
a damaged battery be stored at least
50 feet away from other vehicles and
buildings. This recommendation could
be tough, if not impossible, to follow
in urban areas with limited space,
Hutchison said. But it's the only safe
strategy at the moment.
Karner believes that, as EVs proliferate, sophisticated third-party facilities
dedicated to housing and de-energizing
damaged vehicle batteries after acci-

ONE EV EXPERT SAYS FIRST RESPONDERS, TOW TRUCK
DRIVERS, SALVAGE YARD OWNERS, AND OTHERS ARE OFTEN
UNSURE OF THE POTENTIAL HAZARDS POSED BY DAMAGED
BATTERIES. SHE CALLS THE SITUATION "A CASCADING
EFFECT OF RISK TRANSFER," WHERE A POTENTIALLY
LETHAL ENERGY SOURCE REPEATEDLY SWITCHES HANDS
BUT WHERE NOBODY KNOWS THE EXTENT OF THE RISK.
others unsure of the potential hazard
they are dealing with, Hutchison said.
She called the situation "a cascading
effect of risk transfer," where a potentially lethal energy source repeatedly
switches hands and yet "nobody knows
the extent of that risk."
A viable solution to that problem
doesn't appear to be on the horizon,
either. According to Hutchison, even
in labs with the best equipment, determining how much energy remains in
a damaged battery continues to be a
challenge. She tells of instances where
batteries were fully burned-to the
point they looked like piles of rubbish-and a couple hours later, when
researchers touched the piles with a
pole, they sparked. "These were professionals who had done a lot of testing
on batteries, who were confident that
there could not be any remaining
energy in the battery," Hutchison said.
"And they were wrong."
The challenges don't stop even
when the car has been transported
to an impound. Because of lithium

dents will emerge to fill this need. Until
that happens, however, fire departments and salvage yard operators are
coming up with their own solutions.
Shortly after the Mountain View Tesla
crash and subsequent reignitions, Diaz
issued a memo to his firefighters detailing a new strategy. Once at the tow
yard, firefighters are to build a dam
around the damaged EV and flood it
with water, where the vehicle will sit
submerged for up to three days to prevent reignition.
"The battery is going to continue to
go through thermal runaway even if it's
submerged in water, but I know that
if you flood it with water and isolate it
so that nobody gets near it, the water's
cooling ability will not allow ignition to
occur," Diaz wrote.

THE ROAD AHEAD
Feasible strategies to handle severe
EV crashes may need to come sooner
than later, because the world is about
to experience a dramatic surge in the
number of EVs on the road.
N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL

| 37


http://NFPA.ORG/JOURNAL

NFPA Journal - January/February 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - January/February 2020

Contents
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Cover1
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Cover2
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 1
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 2
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Contents
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 5
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