“When an electric car catches fire”…Spray water and pour it in the tank
As of the end of June, the number of electric vehicles distributed nationwide has exceeded 460,000 units, and electric vehicle fires are not uncommon.
Firefighters demonstrated how to extinguish a fire in an electric car when it is not easy to extinguish it.
Smoke rises when a strong impact is applied to the underside of the vehicle.
After a while, the flames soar and quickly spread throughout the vehicle.
Firefighters spray water constantly, but it doesn’t go out easily.
After more than 10 minutes of fighting, the firemen drop the entire vehicle into the tank.
However, smoke continues to rise from the water to see if the embers still remain.
<Park Sung-ho/head of the response team at the Gyeonggi Fire and Disaster Headquarters> “Since there is a part where the battery can recur, it is necessary to flood and stabilize the water tank or other parts…””
In order to respond quickly to electric vehicle fires, the Gyeonggi Fire Department set fire to three different electric vehicles and conducted fire drills in various ways.
Electric vehicles have a sealed battery pack inside the vehicle body, so fire extinguishing water does not penetrate well, and it is quite difficult to extinguish them due to high heat and harmful gases.
As a result, in addition to spraying water at high pressure from fire trucks, an extinguishing method was used to cover it with a suffocation fire extinguishing cover and plunge the car into the tank.
<Chosunho/Gyeonggi Fire Department Headquarters> “Since electric vehicle fires don’t have that much actual experience, we didn’t know what would happen, so we were careful to respond to them.”
As a result of this training, it was agreed that additional experiments and research are needed as electric vehicles are difficult to completely evolve just by spraying water.