Our town...

Do you mean Babylon, Marduk?

Depends on the chemical, but it is an appropriate way to fight a liion battery fire though.

You're fighting thermal runaway. Water is very effective at cooling and helps control the fire and keep the heat down. US DOT recommends water spray.

Maybe. Water is cheap, available in quantity, and non-polluting. Since a battery fire is self-oxygenating, I don’t think putting it out is something you expect. All you can do is take away the heat both to contain the damage and to eventually stop the reaction.

I don't think so, but what else are you gonna do? Can't really submerge it in foam at a moments notice like you're supposed to

950,000 Capri Suns

(200ml per Capri sun, 5 Capri sun per litre, 190,000 litres water)

But it would take a long time to open each packet and spray it on the fire.

Lithium is a metal right? Putting water on a metal fire usually just makes the fire worse.

business first responder

"alright, is everyone here? this is an all-hands meeting. Where is Joey? Is he in the bathroom again? He's missed the last 3 meetings... Anyway. Top of the agenda, there's apparently a fire, right over there. Fires are kinda hot and so we have been sure to stay a good distance away, as to not raise the temperature of everyone's complimentary bottled water, handed out at this meeting.

Now it says here that we should tackle this situation as quickly as possible. Has anyone run the numbers by the finance team? We don't want to spend too much on this. The big-wigs upstairs never think about the big picture, and really I don't see why one fire is worth pivoting all our available resources. Samantha, yes?"

"Sir, the fire is growing at an alarming rate, shouldn't we just postpone the meeting and focus on the fire?"

"See, that's exactly the kind of thinking the execs have. But if we spend all our resources, cuts will be made, and jobs will be lost. Not mine, of course, but others. Did anyone do a PR analysis on us 'putting out this fire' versus just running a week-long 'we are sorry' ad campaign?"

(lol I just got the thought and ran with it)

I don't even think this is the right metric to use.

You aren't putting a lithium battery fire out with water. You're just keeping it at bay until the energy is all used up. The more energy, the longer it'll take.

We might need new ways to deal with these fires, but it's not like we can completely submerge a semi in water.

I wonder how encasing the object in a fire retardant foam would behave, although we gotta think about the toxicity of that too.

Edit: I wonder if you could even calculate the amount of water you'd need to hold it off upfront based off the battery size and current charge.

"But electric bad" is what this kind of news will make rednecks think, and they will over sentionalize the conflagration of an ev battery

Probably only shows up that way on lemmy.ml, which has a blocker for various things they consider slurs, which can become silly when you're dealing with words/phrase like "fire retardants." Looks normal to me over on blahaj, and the same over on lemmy.world

The purpose of the water is to cool the wreck and the area around it while the metal fire burns itself out, because waiting it out is the safest option for the firefighters.

Flooding the batteries with water is the best way to put out a lithium-ion battery fire.

For as much as people want their Musky circlejerks. This is really just a problem with the switch the EVs that people aren't willing to accept.

There is no way to really stop an EV battery fire.

The batteries in these cars are made up of several cells, packed into a watertight, fire resistant box. When just one of those cells goes it's over. It can create a chemical reaction that can ignite the cells without the need for oxygen, pure heat will set them off.

The only real way of dealing with them is to let them burn themselves out, and even after that they aren't safe and could reignite.

189.27 metric tons of water, so yes, rounded up, 190 tons.

Or roughly 2.5 average swimming pools and for those ex-redditors out there: 1.6 million bananas