California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.
Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.
The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.
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.
And water has great heat capacity, with a nice phase change, too.
From reading other links in this post, it sounds like pollution (runoff) is a concern, which is unfortunate.
The water is non-polluting, the battery chemicals not so much