From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
All flights at Luton Airport have been suspended until the afternoon after a huge fire ripped through a terminal car park.
Flights have been halted until 15:00 BST after the fire at the multi-storey caused the building to suffer a “significant structural collapse”.
About 1,500 vehicles may have been in the car park and subsequently damaged, the fire service said.
Four firefighters and an airport staff member were taken to hospital.
They had been suffering from the effects of breathing in smoke. Another patient was treated at the scene.
The airport said its priority was to support emergency services and the safety of passengers and staff, which is why flights had been suspended.
The fire, believed to have been accidental, would have started in a vehicle that arrived at about the time the fire started, shortly before 21:00 BST, the fire service said.
Footage shared online shows huge flames and billowing smoke from the top level of the car park after the fire broke out shortly before 21:00 on Tuesday.
Bedfordshire Police has asked people not to travel to the area.
Earlier, the ambulance service said a member of the public and six firefighters had suffered smoke inhalation.
Vehicle alarms and loud explosions were heard, with one witness describing the speed at which the blaze had torn through the upper floor of the car park as “incredible”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-67073446
We’ll have to wait for the facts to emerge in due course to find out what caused the fire in the first place.
But the explosions reported, the collapse of the floor and the speed at which the fire spread certainly raise the suspicion that one or more EVs were involved.
Even if not, we do know that a car park full of EVs, which will be the case in a few short years time, would be lethal in the event of a fire.
Just imagine an underground car park beneath a block of flats.
Until the full facts emerge, EVs should be banned immediately from all multi-storey car parks.
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EVs should be banned.
There, fixed the last sentence.
Rishi might take the opportunity-
Rishi Sunak announces U-turn on key green targets | Green politics | The Guardian
Obviously we need a full enquiry into this and hasten very slowly just like I’ve been saying folks.
A diesel, they say…. As if.
I’m freaked by the charging point adjacent to my house – EVs parked ~1m from my vehicle
I read that also. Then I watched the video from the surveillance camera. From publicly available footage, you can’t tell what exploded, exactly, but it appears it did start with an explosion. The article I read tried to give the impression that it “just exploded”. I think not. Investigators need to be looking for bomb parts, because that’s certainly what it looked like to me. Why do the “news” articles twist themselves in knots trying to avoid saying, this was an attack?
Now we can’t tell if there was a specific target, and the rest of the garage was just collateral damage, or if the attackers had a specific want or need to shut down the airport, or anything in between, but it still has all the earmarks of an attack.
One of the videos shows a ceiling caving in followed by a fireball. I assume the fire started on an upper floor, somehow weakening the floor and then dropping all the now flaming cars down on top of additional vehicles. Even the video showing a fire near/from a car is not definitive in regards to which car is on fire.
I do have a question as to how a gas/diesel car.fire could destroy a concrete floor? Seems like the heat would go up and maybe destroy the ceiling, but the floor?
Diesel is only part of the story as it was a hybrid so there was also a lithium battery that they omitted to mention.
Might have been NiCd, NiMh or LiFePo. Only lithium ion is really nasty.
According to the manufacturer’s web site, it was a lithium ion battery.
Heat radiates in all directions.
As with 911 the answer is very simple. Steel does not keep its strength at elevated temperatures, and standard building practice is to clad reinforced concrete with enough insulation to keep it safe for about 45 minutes, After that a floor simply gives way under its own weight. Or vertical pillars warp and buckle. The 45 minutes is adjudged to be sufficient time to evacuate.
Fires in steel framed warehouses/factories/farm storage areas without fire cladding collapse much faster…
Nice bit of engineering research here
The plane that collided with the building removed all of the insulation from around the metal components. It’s a testament to the designers and builders, that the building lasted as long as it did.
Luton is a very heavily Islamic town. Israel is under attack. Many anti-Semitic demonstrations in the UK by the religion of peace. .
Maybe a link… Only maybe….
Other sources say it was a diesel hybrid.
I appreciate that not everybody who uses Luton airport lives in Luton, but if Luton is a heavily Islamic town, then would that not suggest that a lot of the cars in the car park might be owned by Moslem people? So what would Islamic extremists gain by such an attack? According to the 2021 census there were 246 Jewish people living in Luton. Causing a massive fire in a car park in Luton doesn’t seem like an anti-semitic attack. Or are you suggesting that it might have been caused by Jews?
I would not rule out any possible cause at this stage but what is to be gained by a terrorist group causing the fire and the damage if they don’t announce that they did it? The whole point of terrorist attacks, presumably, is to blackmail the authorities. You can only do that if you inform the authorities that you have caused the damage and then tell them you will do the same thing again if they don’t accept your demands. It would be like ‘Just Stop Oil’ protestors blocking the roads without any banners announcing what they want.
Luton saw it’s protests two years ago – the focus has moved elsewhere now. As to using a car bomb for this, I just don’t think that’s credible; firstly Heathrow or Gatwick are far more likely high-profile targets, secondly the passenger terminal is a more likely target than a car park, thirdly it’s in the wrong place, doesn’t behave like a car bomb and the damage is completely wrong for car bomb damage.
Aside from those little nit-picks the idea may be sound.
Any explosions were probably tires exploding from the heat.
Is this the car that started the Luton airport car park fire? Moment Range Rover explodes before £20m multi-storey structure collapses – sparking travel chaos for up to 50,000 passengers with all flights cancelled until 3pm
This is the moment a Range Rover exploded at Luton Airport, resulting in an inferno that caused a car park to collapse and sparked travel chaos for up to 50,000 passengers.
Five people were taken to hospital and Bedfordshire Fire & Rescue Service spent 12 hours battling the inferno at the airport’s £20million Terminal Car Park Two after the multi-storey site was engulfed by flames and caved in just before 9pm last night.
The blaze, which was finally controlled and extinguished by 100 firefighters just before 9am, was started when a diesel car suffered an electrical fault or leaking fuel line, investigators believe.
Would leaking fuel spontaneously ignite? Is there a history of diesel cars having this problem? As someone commented on a YouTube channel about this event- even if it wasn’t an EV that started it- the fact that there are going to be EVs in car parks- means when the fire reaches the EVs it’ll be far more destructive and difficult to put out. In one video – a fireman mentioned that some car parks don’t have sprinkler systems- but sprinkling water on a lithium fire won’t stop it.
The chances of a car, diesel or petrol, spontaneously combusting with no systems on is…. well, net zero
How about a Diesel Hybrid? Does that make sense now?
A battery makes sense
Yes a battery not protected against excess current by any fuses and with a very large capacity (not a lead acid battery then). 50kWhr released in a single minute would fit the bill nicely. Temperature of the whole thing up to 1000C in 30 seconds (red hot) then all remaining energy in one explosive type release. I have seen this before somewhere…
The shape and tail-light indicate it is a Landrover Discovery Sports
Guess what.. while, yes, it is a diesel car.. it also has a PHEV plug-in battery.
Explore Discovery Sport | Plug-In Electric Hybrid | Discovery (landrover.com.au)
Look where the flames are coming from under the car…
… then have a guess where the drive battery is in a Land Rover Discovery Sports.
ps. apparently the Land Rover Discovery Sports is also available with a petrol engine…
… but still with the mid size lithium battery positioned under the floor below the seat, on the left side (looking from behind)
(see pic posted by Paul Hurley further down )
Not quite. Ford, Kia and Hyundai all have had issues with seals around brake switches failing allowing brake fluid to make contact with the switch (which is for some stupid reason always has current, even when the vehicle is off) resulting in fires.
An open switch does not have “current” it has tension ( voltage ). A break switch only needs minimal current when closed. This should be protected by a suitably light fuse and should NEVER be able to cause a fire.
Agreed, there should be no reason for it to be under tension when the vehicle is parked.
Looks like crap design all round.
If the switch directly activates the brake lights, then it will need to carry enough current for that. Of course if the lights are LEDs, then the amount of current needed will be a lot less.
Diesel fuel, is difficult to ignite, even with a match.
Diesel doesn’t explode either, which is why diesel engines don’t have spark plugs.
Diesel fuel doesn’t explode at atmospheric conditions. The fuel in any Internal Combustion Engine must ignite, or you don’t get any energy out of it. In a diesel engine, it is done by compression. The appropriate mix of diesel fuel and oxygen, raised to the appropriate pressure, ignites. Which is why diesels have that distinctive “chattering” sound, that much compression takes some pushing.
Actually diesel engines compress the air, causing it to become very hot, then inject the fuel throughout the stroke. But that detail is probably not important to you. Very small drops of diesel in very hot air do burn, but there is never an explosion, just a change in gas volume.
How close to an explosion you get depends on the molecular components of the diesel and their boiling range. The very narrow boiling range associated with synthetic diesel made by Fischer-Tropf processes results in most of the fuel combusting in a very short interval. That means that engine timings and compression and mixture must be very precise, and also that there is no afterburn of heavier components to help provide power during the downstroke.
Actually, Synthetic Diesel Fuel, commonly known as Renewable Diesel, can be made by either hydroprocessing Fatty Oils (known as FOG) or by gasification of carbon containing feedstocks and Fischer-Tropsch conversion to hydrocarbon fuels. both these fuels have the same carbon distribution as conventional diesel fuel, essentially C11 to C20. The reason they burn faster in a diesel engine is because they have higher cetane rating which is a measure of the paraffin content of the fuel. Aromatics have much lower cetane than paraffins.
The chatter is the fuel-air mixture exploding, not so much the compression portion of the cycle.
You can throw a lit match into diesel at atmospheric pressure, it won’t ignite, it puts the match out
Put a jerrycan full of diesel on a bonfire if you want to know whether it can explode or not. Hint: stand back.
Put a jerrycan full of water on a bonfire, and it will also explode. For the same reason.
Diesel barely vaporizes at room temp so it won’t just catch on fire. Diesel needs some kind of wick to assist in the fuel vaporizing before it will easily light. There is no way a diesel fire will explode unless there is a lot of heat in the area to built up fuel vapor first.
diesel fuel do not ignite easy,it will not th¿ae fire even if you put a flaming match to it, itsi neee a heat source to produce gases that will ignite. may be the fir it is not so accidental as its been said
You can throw a match in a pool of diesel and bugger all happens. Now float some gasoline on the diesel and light that then you have a nice little blaze but no explosion. Drop a rebreather canister is a mix of diesel and water, nice explosion. Lessons learned on a Navy fire field.
It happens a bit fast in that video but looks to me like the ceiling came down onto ‘a car’ which then exploded
i.e. The roof came down first.
But that ‘roof’ would have been the floor/level above so what was it that caused the roof to collapse?
Was it a smouldering red-hot Lithium fire, which exploded the concrete and softened the steel rebar/girders/beams and brought the roof down onto a tank full of petrol -which exploded into a ball-of-fire as the video shows
Sorry no, diesel doesn’t do that.
Only Lithium burns hot enough and long enough to explode concrete, a conventional car fire would not have brought the roof down
Or aviation fuel of course.
I didn’t know that they were using thermite as aviation fuel. I wonder what kind of mileage they get?
Actually that was my point, although I got two down ticks, I was sort of making reference to 9/11. Seriously, though, what temperature does aviation fuel burn at compared with a lithium battery fire compared with diesel compared with petrol?
If it were just a diesel or petrol fire then why wasn’t it extinguished?
It burns hot enough to soften steel, which is what happened on 9/11.
It burns hot enough to cleanly section a 3ftx2ft steel girder at 45 degrees. which is what happened on 9/11.
Good points. Diesel under te right conditions – or AvJet – will burn spectacularly well. They don’t evacuate people from crash landed aircraft for nothing.
The temperature of a (conventional) fire has less to do with what is burning and more to do with the airflow into it. charcoal with a bellows can melt steel.
The problem with lithium polymer batteries is that the electrolytes that work well are oxidants, They produce their own oxygen, like adding nitro to a car engine. So they will burn hot without anything to fan the flames.
Not all that much. But you get there a lot quicker!
The video of the car park exit shows a section of the floor above together with cars aflame crashing through the ceiling when already well lit, with presumably the supporting steel melting and giving way. That it why it appears explosive. It is not the original fire which is captured in a separate video.
re: “the supporting steel melting”
Thermal effects weaken/reduce the tensile and compression load capability of steel (SEE the way a horseshoeing ‘smith’ uses a fire, an anvil and a hammer to form steel to conform to a horses foot); there isn’t any melting per se taking place.
Sorry, I was using shorthand. It becomes more ductile, which renders it liable to complete failure. Instead of metallic grains being interlocked, they start being able to slide over one another and merge. This reduces the strength of the metal, and it becomes more like a glass. There is a phase of plastic flow before formal melting. Ih you want to get more technical, consult the phase diagram:
What you said.
ooo.. nice phase diagram 🙂
You musta done Engineering materials at some stage 🙂
I would have to dig through a pile of old musty books to find similar…
…. been a long time !.
The steel doesn’t have to melt, it just needs to soften, which it does when it gets hot.
re: “But that ‘roof’ would have been the floor/level above so what was it that caused the roof to collapse?”
Punch-through sheer on a support column, much like Champlain Towers cause in the south Florida condominium collapse.
THIS has been the subject of much discussion the last year or more.
Steel framed building are very liable to progressive collapse in a fire. The whole steel frame softens and weakens and the bit with the most load on it collapses, that puts a hammer blow on what’s underneath, and that goes…and if the shock load is great enough, the whole building will go as happened in the twin towers, even though the steel below is not fire softened. Think of the difference between having a hammer resting on your toes or dropping it on..
Champlain Towers was because there was only about half the rebar specified in the design and the rest was rotting away due to years of infiltation of salty water.
Petrol and diesel cars do not explode, despite what Hollywood would have us all believe.
There would be multiple explosions every day in scrap car crushers if they did.
You are right , but scrap yards drain the fuel tanks and remove batterys
As a guy that has welded trailer hitches on to multiple vehicles with the gas tank right next to where I was welding, I will tell you that you I required the customer to have the tank full! The fumes are what ignite.
Of course that was back in the day when insurance companies would allow you to do such a thing.
As a kid, I watched my uncle solder a leak his farm tractors gas tank. He filled it up before he did it.
For a motorcycle tank that required TIG welding the tank would be taken off the bike and emptied and then I would leave a water hose running in it all night to completely flush it before welding on it the next day.
For bike tanks you can still have gunk in the bottom containing petrol. Better to fill it CO2 then even petrol vapour will not pop.
1%er bikers just drop a lighted match in to get rid of vapour before welding !!
You can never completely empty a fuel tank.
Petrol and diesel cars can explode, or at least end up as fireballs. Ask the late Niki Lauda.
That’s not an explosion, it’s a tank being ruptured.
I am afraid that in the right conditions diesel can and will burn long enough. At least to ignite something else that will bring the roof down. See 911.
That was kerosene.
It’s also not concrete. That was a steel building.
Each of the steel girders was encased in concrete to give it the required fire protection.
Not correct. Each steel girder, as well as the steel beams in the floor were encased in foam insulation.
By the way, concrete is a poor thermal insulator.
Here is an interesting video from a car expert that builds and races cars and has written and edited many magazine articles on cars. His conclusion is that the Rang Rover hybrid battery caused the initial fire which is consistent with other observations of the fire.
(119) Time To Stand Up To The Lies And Propaganda Of The Electric Vehicle Zealots – Destroy ‘Em With Facts – YouTube
The photo shows a Range Rover IN FRONT of an exploding vehicle – it wasnt the vehicle doing the exploding. It was driving down the access lanes – NOT PARKED. ITS BRAKE LIGHTS ARE ON! Someone was in it.
Not the brake lights. Just the rear lights and headlights. I think the car is already abandoned. Perhaps the photo and video were even taken by the driver.
It does look like the headlights are also on. So running lights makes sense.
It’s in an ill lit car park at night… sundown nearly 3 hours previously.
re: “ITS BRAKE LIGHTS ARE ON!”
Do European spec cars have a 3rd brake light high in the rear window like American cars are required to have?
Yes. There is a small chance it wasn’t working, but I doubt that the brake lights in the tail were all not working. These cars have driver alerts built in for bulb failures, and most are LED now anyway.
This is a photo of the Range Rover not long after the fire started.
A still from a short video linked in the article. Look at it close up and you see that the vehicle lights are on, and that the seat of the fire is low down on the left side with white hot flame below the chassis. It is quite likely that this is a MHEV diesel model, which has a lithium battery below the floor pan to provide the hybrid function. The lights would be powered by the regular lead acid battery. Many of these models have a separate auxiliary battery as well dedicated to restarting the engine in stop-start mode. That may also contain lithium, and is located in the engine compartment behind the passenger glove box (left side in UK!).
This suggests it is a lithium battery fire after all.
A further point about the MHEV hybrid. Its battery will almost certainly have been powering the car at the low speeds in the car park. It seems that the car was being driven when the fire occurred and it has presumably been abandoned in the middle of the lane. The diesel engine would not have been running.
This video from the Independent shows the same car
Yep. Same video in the Mail. Possibly taken by the driver for forwarding to emergency services.
The problem is, the fire is believed to have begun on the top, uncovered floor. This is a lower level with a ceiling. Whatever it is, that Land Rover Discovery didn’t start the fire.
No, the fire started on the third floor, not the roof. It’s clear the Land Rover was the origin.
Apparently the video was taken by someone else who had gone to the airport to collect relatives.
The eyewitness said they attempted to put out the fire using an extinguisher.
She said: “I was picking up my mother-in-law and daughter from the airport. They were arriving from Romania.
“When we first saw the fire we tried to put it out. I filmed a short video in case I needed to show airport staff.
“We went down to a lower floor to find a fire extinguisher as there were already two empty ones nearby.
“By the time we got back the fuel tank had already exploded and there was nothing we could do.”
The car park operator will have to answer for the lack of extinguishers – not that they would have been much use against a lithium fire. Which raises a different issue of making sure that the public are aware of the dangers rather than being futile have ago heroes or heroines.
Strange that she didn’t think to get her own car out.
This seems to follow from the battery location.
I agree, though bear in mind that in the UK the driver sits on the other side. But the engine layout remains the same. It’s only the steering linkage and controls that get moved.
The fire is coming from the front left corner. Every car that I am familiar with has the fuel tank in the back. This fire is not a fuel based fire.
The light coming from under the vehicle is also white. That’s too hot for it to be a fuel based fire.
According to this Land Rover web site, the battery is lithium.
https://www.landrover.com/electric/battery-technology.html
“inspire total driving confidence,”
Don’t think I’d be too “confident” basically sitting on top of a lithium time bomb. 😉
Examine that photograph of the Land Rover Discovery (not a Range Rover) carefully and you’ll see a number of things not consistent with the claim it started the fire.
The car is not parked, it is on the ‘roadway’ between bays. You can see a large yellow arrow painted on the ground directing cars where to go.
The cars front and rear lights, if not brake lights, are on. You can see the headlights lighting up the area in front of the vehicle. In a fire of that intensity everything under the bonnet would have melted and electrics destroyed.
There is no meaningful smoke coming from the vehicle, kind of essential to identify a burning vehicle.
Above the car there are structural beams, indicating this is not the top floor where the fire is understood to have started.
The orange and yellow glow of the fire looks contained, consistent with it emerging from a stairwell.
Car fires usually begin in the engine bay and normally burn evenly. There are no flames on the offside (right) side of the car yet the nearside (left) side appears to be a fireball.
None of this is credible. It looks like the car is either being driven past a doorway to a stairwell when the fire has burst through fire doors which are usually present, but often jammed open; or the driver has abandoned the vehicle, also not likely as few have the presence of mind to shut the door and usually stand by while their car burns or run about looking for help.
Looking at the still picture, it is quite obvious that it was the hybrid that is on fire.
First there is fire under the vehicle, and the angle of the red flames make it obvious that it is coming from the vehicle, not something beyond it.
The lights you see are not break lights, they are running lights. If you look closely you can see that the headlights are also on.
I did say they might be the rear lights or brake lights.
Doesnt require the vehicle to be parked for it to self ignite
The vehicle was abandoned by the driver when he realised it was on fire. The battery probably overheated supplying the power to drive up the ramps to the 3rd floor.
We have witness reports that the nearest fire extinguishers were already “used” when the video was taken.
I think that has been answered.
The car if it had automatic headlights enabled, would have switched them on when it entered the car park. Mine always do this.
Lithium fires do not smoke .
The lithium battery is below the left hand side floor under the (right hand drive) passenger seat.
I would imagine that if the car caught fire, the driver would simply run.
The fire did not start on the top floor.
My wife’s car has the same feature, however she can turn it on or off based on the position of the headlight switch.
Indeed a terminal car park
The local Fire Brigade keeps stressing that it was a diesel vehicle that started the fire. I wonder why. How do they know? Is this some form of kidology? Having seen the video, I know what my money’s on – ICE vehicles just don’t explode so suddenly and violently unless someone has planted a bomb in them. EV’s do, without assistance!
And maybe steel is not the best material to build multi-storey car-parks in in the 21st century… Concrete might have survived…
Hmmm… Not a popular opinion I see! Any reasons?
Concrete will be laced through with rebar. Once that heats – well, see the World Trade Center on 9/11.
WTC was a steel structured building.
And rebar is steel.
The Kings Dock Car Park fire on 31 Dec 2017 in Liverpool occurred in a car park constructed of reinforced concrete with open sides.1309 cars were burnt and the car park had to be demolished and rebuilt. Funnily enough it was a Range Rover which started that fire.
Yeah I read the fire investigator’s report – petrol engined Range Rover with an engine fault took several minutes before igniting. Similar set-up as well as, although it wasn’t started by one, several EV’s were ignited, causing the fire to be far worse than it otherwise might have been.
Oh, we had to get anti-EV in there somewhere, eh Richard? You’re desperate.
Only desperation here is yours.
Video evidence shows very clearly a Land Rover Sports hybrid burning from under the left side.
Close your eyes if you don’t want to see it. !
TFN shows signs of getting increasingly bitter, as his world view continues to fall apart.
No, this isn’t prejudice, this is fact. In a fire any lithium battery is going to be a massive hazard. Even if it didn’t start it.
And where BEVs are concerned, lithium batteries are the best tech we have, even though it’s pretty damned useless.
Just imagine what will happen when someone actually builds a grid scale battery, and one cell fails. Not a good idea, Australia has such a battery which provides the city load for 21 seconds, that is only a calculation, no battery can be fully discharged safely anything like that quickly. But a fire, that would be a really big explosion!
Reality is anti-EV? What Richard mentions is an absolute fact. EV fires are worse than ICE fires. They are hotter and almost impossible to put out.
By 2050, the UN are citing the use of mud and bamboo for construction in a newly released report
If they use them for car parks will they be resistant to EV fires?
No but a lot easier to rebuild. Again and again and again…
Concrete only survives and supports the weight of vehicles if strengthened with Steel Rebar. Problem is, much like the jet fueled travesty at the WTC, EV fires burn hotter than the melting point of the steel reinforcement leading to failure of the weaker concrete
The car park was concrete. Reinforced with steel. Without something with tensile strength you are reduced to massive arches with pillars everywhere. Think the Roman Colosseum
Steel just happens to be pretty good and very cheap. And allows huge flat floor areas with few pillars. Ideal for a car park.
Until it gets in a high intensity fire.
The general rule is you have no more than 45 minutes to get out before it all goes soft and crashes down.
Diesel doesn’t “explode” unless it’s under extreme pressure.
Well done to the Fire Brigade who seem to have had a team enter a structually unsafe building, search through 1500 destroyed cars and identify the one which started it in only a few hours! Amazing job……
Spurred on by a call to the Chief Fire Officer from a Westminster source to discuss his salary, pension and career no doubt
Can’t resist a conspiracy theory here, no matter how ludicrous, right?
It doesn’t sound ludicrus to me, think of the nudge unit.
I think the driver was driving to find a space when the Fire started, and he abandoned the vehicle in the middle of the car park and made good his escape when he noticed the fire. So he would have reported the fire and provided details.
No need to do a manual search, just review the security camera footage.
Or maybe they just checked the entry data and looked at CCTV? Probably that, yeah.
CCTV shows clearly a Land Rover Sports hybrid burning from under the front left side
Cover your eyes, close your mind even further, so nothing can disrupt your brain-washing !!
Diesel fuel has a Flash Point in the 150+°F range whereas gasoline is in the 30-50°F range or lower. It is highly unlikely that diesel fuel would do more than burn and would not explode in any way. Attributing this fire solely to diesel fuel is not likely. Diesel fuel is the preferred fuel for HD trucks specifically due to the high flash point of the fuel. It is the safest liquid fuel available.
Gasoline -45 .. that’s minus 45 degree F.
Source: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/flash-point-fuels-d_937.html
Safe maybe, but it didn’t stop the fatal Mont Blanc tunnel disaster, which was started by a DIESEL truck.
Concrete, as with all building materials, has its limits. Bare steel attains a certain level of survivability after encased with “fire-proofing” which does nothing of the sort, it only insulates the steel from the heat long enough for building occupants to evacuate. A concrete structure is in reality merely steel encased in concrete (it’s called “reinforcing bars” or “rebar” for short), which also lends some survivability, but at some temperature the concrete begins to fracture (mostly because of uneven heating) exposing the steel and ultimately allowing structural failure. Wood, while flammable, does retain structural properties for a significant time even while burning, and thus is still a commonly employed construction material. But the bottom line is, NO building material can withstand direct flame for long.
This has cover up written all over it
The video released by the blob, reportedly shows a diesel Range Rover on fire
It does NOT when you review the video / pics closer
The Range Rover is stood with its brake lights on (obviously then the driver is still in it) – the fire is coming from a vehicle in front of the Range Rover to its left, obscured from view by the Range Rover as the driver no doubt is trying to escape the car park by passing by the on fire vehicle in the car park one way system
This rush to blame a diesel vehicle smacks of a nut zero cabal cover up because, if proven to be a battery car causation, the project to peddle them to the masses, is over
I think it is a diesel MHEV. So they get away with calling it a diesel. But it looks very much to me as though the fire originated in the MHEV lithium battery under the floor pan.
re: “The local Fire Brigade keeps stressing that it was a diesel vehicle that started the fire.”
I want to see their written, fact-laden evaluation on that ‘finding’. This goes against what the knowledgeable *know* about diesel its ‘flash point’ et al.
As the pictures provided make clear, it was a hybrid that started the fire. A hybrid that according to the company’s web site, has a large li-ion battery in it.
The pictures also make it clear that it is the battery that is burning, not the fuel.
They can’t know anything other than from CCTV.
The car park can’t be examined by the fire service until all fires are safely extinguished and cool, the structure examined, and the floors made safe. That’s likely to be a week or so.
Yet they are confidently saying it was caused by a diesel vehicle. Bizarre conspiracy theories aside, why would the local CFO say that if he wasn’t confident?
Yep, a diesel hybrid Land Rover Discovery burn from the lithium battery.
Close your eyes if you can’t let your mind see it.
Like you, he probably didn’t realise that the Land Rover Discovery Sports was a hybrid with lithium batteries.
Either that, or he was told to emphasis the diesel half of diesel/electric.
True to form, TFN eagerly ignores the actual data, and relies on whatever the government says to determine which reality he should be connecting with today.
The video footage clearly shows that the car that started the fire is a diesel/electric hybrid. The government has chosen to emphasis the diesel part of the equation while totally ignoring the electric portion. They also ignore the video evidence that clearly shows that it is the battery that caught fire first.
Probably because they know that it was a diesel vehicle that started the fire and they keep having to push back a bunch of idiots who wish, for ideological reasons, that it had been an EV.
Yep, a diesel hybrid Land Rover Discovery burn from the lithium battery.
Easily mistaken for a normal diesel car.
Close your eyes if you can’t let your mind see it.
Well, it isn’t an EV. Nor is it s straight diesel vehicle. It is a mild hybrid. You can read about the implementation by Range Rover here:
https://landrover-magazine.jlrms.com/hybrid-evoque-so-what-mhev
And it’s clear that the hybrid battery was where the fire started.
TFN’s ability to ignore any reality the government tells him to ignore remains impregnable.
First off, it wasn’t a diesel vehicle, it was a diesel/electric hybrid. Also the data, which has been presented above, clearly shows that it was the battery that started the fire.
How do they know this . The building collapsed . Sure people have video but that model does come in diesel, petrol and petrol hybrid. Its not obvious thats its definitely a diesel from the outside, badging would be fairly discreet if it even has any
The tail light shape is the giveaway.
It is clearly a Land Rover Discovery Sports, which come with the “mild” EV lithium batteries installed, and either a diesel or petrol engine.
The current woke narrative is that we will all be driving electric cars by 2030. They want to play down the fact that it was lithium, just as the woke narrative is that we will all be nice peace loving Muslims by 2030, unless we happen to be Jewish in which case we will simply be dead.
“They had been suffering from the effects of breathing in smoke.”
I thought fire fighters wear ventilators.
That would be racist, or something.
I miss your point.
It was a joke. Since everything is racist these days.
Perhaps ventilator was the wrong word- what I meant was the breathing apparatus fire fighters will wear to avoid breathing smoke. Is that better?
In the USofA they are commonly known as “respirators”.
The smaller, cheaper ones only filter out particulates that can pose health risk. Larger, more expensive ones, in addition to the particulate filter(s) also contain activated charcoal or other chemical canisters to absorb dangerous fumes before the airstream is breathed.
The first (nearby) folks to respond might not have had the equipment. The suddenness and size of this event seems surprising. I’m sure we will learn more.
Respirators are standard equipment for fire fighters, as pretty much all fires create smoke. Usually a lot of it.
They conducted a ‘stand off’ policy. In other words fighting the fire without entering the building.
That’s likely to obviate the need for full respiratory gear and even minor smoke inhalation will likely be subject to a hospital visit. Health and Safety at Work doubtless demands it.
The full-face respirators carry a cylinder of compressed air to breathe, which is only any good as long as the compressed air lasts. Thus if a firefighter doesn’t feel the need for them, they won’t use them. All it takes is a sudden shift of wind, or maybe just an inconvenient eddy, and where they were breathing fresh air they are suddenly breathing toxic smoke. That will often send them to the hospital.
The ones you see fire fighters wear on their backs are good for about 30 minutes of air. They should also have an “escape” bottle good for about 5 minutes.
The seventy-five cent term is “self-contained breathing apparatus”, SCBA.
Doubtless it was enhanced smoke
Would you go so far as to say, ahem, supercharged?
I think I would
Are they available for all genders?!
Only for 2, the remaining 157 tend not to become firefighters. Too concerned with their TicToc trendiness
Identical to Scuba Tanks
How about the respirators I’ve seen body shop guys use when spray painting a car? Firemen wouldn’t use something like that, without a tank of air?
There are different types of mask. Half-face cartridge mask is for particulates, organic vapors or whatever cartridge is attached to it. They don’t protect the eyes.
Full-face can be a cartridge mask. They can also be SCBA (Self Contained Breathing Apparatus.). SCBA has the air is from a tank carried on the back or air supplied via a hose with the air tanks (maybe a compressor?) located outside the area where the mask would be worn.
I was trained on their use and was issued each but I wasn’t a I wasn’t a fireman.
(We at times worked around chlorine gas, lime dust, fluoride fumes, etc.)
Not knowing what kind of fumes from the burning materials are being released, I doubt they would be relying on a cartridge mask. Probably all SCBA used when needed.
These are the BA sets used in UK
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.fZq2yDTZbZNy6k6SdMvhiwHaEf%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=50a31451e935076876fc42b8d2dada580e5ee2ea7aed77f5e4744e59586db426&ipo=images
They look to about the same thing I described for here in the US.
Perhaps another example of “Two nations separated by a common language”? 😎
I know of a preacher from the Midwest who went to a congregation in the UK. In the US he used a term more acceptable in the US that “butt”. He told them to get off their “fannies”. As I was told, the snickering was almost audible.
(I believe what is called the “Snickers Bar” is called the “Marathon Bar” in the UK for that reason.)
Called ‘breathing apparatus’ (BA) in the UK. Yes, they do; but fires are unpredictable and this one seems to have developed fast. It’s easy to get caught out in the early stages, even in open-air environments.
Don’t forget to build the car park with flammable siding.
Or, just ban battery vehicles from them
Make sure the investigation stretches out to 2030 for any findings.
Kier Starmer has looked at this incident carefully over 15 mins and concluded diesel is way more dangerous than Li ion and will now ban them from 2024 – you will strap yourself into a mobile crematorium, or catch the bus
A Lithium Ion powered bus?
One of those caught fire in an accident the other day…
I’d think that dismantling this collapsed car park will be a huge and dangerous problem.
Indeed . . . the IPCC should set a concentration limit of EVs per m^2 parking area that can be obtained, oh, by let’s say 2030 so that we don’t reach a catastrophic tipping point.
You obviously haven’t seen the concrete breaker or steel shears in use on a big excavator. A small hammer does nothing, but these chew anything!
?
The EV charging stations were not on the top floor, so if the fire started on the top floor it wasn’t a vehicle being charged. Regardless of what sort of vehicle ignited first, any EVs in the mix will make it much worse. EVs do not play well with fellow EVs or with ICE. Dangerous by themselves and deadly as a playmate.
The EV charging stations were in Car Park 1 next door, not in this one, Car Park 2. As far as I’m aware, this car park hadn’t had any charging stations installed yet. However there were ‘lots’ of EV’s near the source of the fire, according to a fire service spokesman.
This fire will slow EV sales a bit more.
Probably but it’ll destroy any chance an EV owner has of getting insurance – no new insurance, no renewal will finish the EV market.
Govt. will become the insurer. Never miss an opportunity to expand the scope of political (elite) control. Of course, the cost will be borne by all – because it is the right (green) thing to do!
Or, just as bad, the gov’t will require insurers to cover EVs at no additional cost to the insured. Via huge subsidies, of course.
Why?
They have explicitly stated that it was caused by a diesel car.
Are you saying people should therefore stop buying diesel cars?
If not, what are you saying?
Video shows it was a Land Rover Discovery Sports.
Which is a HYBRID with lithium batteries under the front left (from behind)
This is exactly where the flames are coming from.
Just keep your eyes closed so the facts don’t hurt your tiny little mind.
As usual, TFN prefers to believe whatever the government tells him to believe, rather than risk his innocence by looking at the actual data himself.
Jo Nova makes this comment at her blog: “Let’s try to imagine what kind of sprinkler system would contain those EV Fires — drop down inflatable glass fibre shells or like jet sprayed asbestos. Let your imagination run …”
It was pointed out several months ago here on WUWT that placing a burning EV into a sealed fire containment box of some kind would result in the buildup of high pressure explosive gases inside the box, effectively creating a bomb of considerable explosive power.
It was also suggested here on WUWT that special EV parking structures could be built with individual EV fire containment compartments for each parked EV which can be sealed in the event of a fire.
But this approach has a similar problem. If a fixed in-place fire containment compartment holding a burning EV is sealed, it too becomes a powerful bomb as the EV fire progresses.
Somebody has developed a fire fighting system exactly for this type of fire – a Hiload 6×6 Rapid Intervention Vehicle with equipment to deal with EV fires quickly. https://www.goodwood.com/grr/road/news/2023/4/the-6×6-hiload-is-a-fire-engine-for-electric-vehicles/
https://www.fleetnews.co.uk/news/latest-news/2023/04/25/specialist-vehicle-developed-to-tackle-ev-fires
This company say they have developed an EV Containment Unit (EVCU) that uses the principle of water turning to steam to suppress fire development around the vehicle and continually cool the battery compartment to help prevent thermal runaway.
They stress this is not a submersion unit because EV battery manufacturers advise not to submerge the batteries as this can initiate or accelerate thermal runaway.
https://www.fire-containers.com/
Richard Page: “Somebody has developed a fire fighting system exactly for this type of fire – a Hiload 6×6 Rapid Intervention Vehicle with equipment to deal with EV fires quickly”
From one of the articles:
============================
“Electric cars are far less likely to catch fire than combustion engined ones filled with flammable petrol. But when they go, they really, really go. A phenomenon called thermal runaway means a chain reaction within the battery’s cell chemistry starts a fire that’s extremely difficult to stop with conventional firefighting techniques. This problem is exacerbated in difficult to access areas like multi-storey car parks – a common recharging point for EV drivers.
To that end, this is a fire engine developed specifically for that task. It’s called the Hiload 6×6 Rapid Intervention Vehicle. It has been created by a York based company called Prospeed Motorsport and it’s a heavily modified Toyota Hilux pick-up truck.
The Hilux donor car is thoroughly transformed with a new chassis enabling a 6×6 wheelbase, capable of carrying a 3,000kg payload. It’s longer than a regular Hilux, but barely any higher, so it can still get into tight access spots like car parks. The Hiload’s 6×6 off-road capability means this is a go-anywhere machine.
Its secret weapon is an extinguisher system designed specifically to tackle electric car fires and thermal runaway. Called the Coldcut Cobra system, it fires water primed with an abrasive material at 300 bar of pressure, the idea being the abrasive punctures through the battery casing allowing for the water to penetrate throughout the cell. It’s a very neat alternative to the old practice of simply dumping thousands of litres of water on a flame-engulfed electric car.
For now, the Hiload 6×6 is being trialled with Czech emergency response services and at least one EV manufacturer. Will we see these on UK roads in the near future?”
============================
So the secret of its claimed effectiveness against EV battery fires is to puncture the battery cell thus allowing water to penetrate the cell.
Has this approach — battery cell penetration using an abrasive water jet — has it been tested independently of its use aboard a quick response fire engine to determine if the technology is actually effective in controlling an EV battery fire?
If so, what are the results of these independent tests of the abrasive water jet technology?
What happens if more than one cell is already involved when the quick response fire engine arrives on scene? What happens if more cells become involved as the evolution of the fire progresses? How are the particular cells already involved identified, and how is access to these cells gained independently of other cells which are not yet involved?
The abrasive water jet penetration approach would also have the collateral effect of releasing some volume of chemicals from the involved cells — and possibly from uninvolved cells too if these are breached unintentionally in the course of fighting the fire — and then distributing these chemicals over a larger volume in and around the burning vehicle.
Would the combination of these primary and collateral effects help or hinder the overall progression of an EV battery fire? Or in the end, would the combination of effects only slow the evolution of the fire, but not control it?
Suppose for purposes of argument, the water jet technology works to some extent if the response vehicle can arrive quickly enough after an EV fire is detected.
How soon does the quick response fire engine have to arrive on scene for it to be effective in controlling an EV fire? Does a trained EV fire response crew and its fire engine need to be maintained inside each EV garage in case an EV fire occurs?
At any rate, an honestly-conducted series of tests against several EV models would demonstrate whether or not this approach works, and to what extent it works. But will any of us ever see the test reports if their results are either negative or inconclusive?
If we don’t see the results of any real-world testing of the water penetration technology and of the quick response fire engine which uses it, we can rightly assume that the fire engine and the technology it uses are being employed as a band-aid solution for the problem.
Or worse, as a means for falsely claiming that EV fires in parking garages can be properly controlled and extinguished before a truly catastrophic fire event occurs.
I stumbled across this by accident so posted it as an interesting article. If you’d bothered to read it before having a go you’d have seen it’s currently being trialled by Czech forefighters and an EV company. All other questions should be adressed to the manufacturer, whom I have no connection to, not me just because I happened to post a link or 2. Please feel free to let us all know, here on WUWT, what you learn from the manufacturer at some later date as we know just as much as you do at this point and would be just delighted to know more.
Ugh firefighters. Does anyone win a prize for ‘the most inappropriate mistake that would have been corrected if the edit button still worked’ award?
Richard, per your request, I’ve done some further research on the Cobra Cold Cut firefighting system and have written another comment about it here.
The claim that ICE cars catch fire more often than EVs is not based on accurate real world data.
Among other things:
They don’t adjust for the different ages of the two fleets. ICE’s on average are much older.
They don’t adjust for the differences in which the two fleets are driven. ICE’s on average are driven much further and more often.
Hopefully not.
Oh dear, you puncture the cells to allow the water to get to the lithium? This then releases a lot of hydrogen, making the whole thing a bomb. Now that is a really good idea!
In my comment above, I asked a number of questions about how the Cobra Cold Cut firefighting system is supposed to be used against battery fires in electric vehicles.
The system fires water primed with an abrasive material at 300 bar of pressure, the idea being that the abrasive punctures through the battery casing allowing for the water to penetrate throughout the cell.
Per Richard Page’s request, I’ve found some more information about the Cobra firefighting system, which is produced in Sweden.
The system uses a hand-held lance which can be fitted with different nozzles and heads for different firefighting purposes. Here are two pictures of the Cobra Cold Cut system hand lance:
The manufacturer has posted a Use Case for the Cold Cut System on EVs fires here. In the manufacturer’s Use Case write-up, this statement is made:
“With knowledge and training, EV battery fires can be controlled. Watch the film below summarising the method of extinguishing EV battery fires with Cobra.”
The referenced YouTube video is here, Use of Cold Cut System against an EV fire. The steps outlined in the video go as follows:
1: Read the incident and make a risk assessment.
2: Is the battery involved in the fire?
3: Extinguish the interior fire.
4: Scan with thermal imaging camera to find thermal hot spots.
5: Deploy Cobra.
6: Check temperature continuously.
7: Continue with Cobra if necessary.
8: Monitor the vehicle for 15 minutes.
The video ends with: “The method of extinguishing EV battery fires with Cobra is based on the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB) report “Demonstration of extinguishing method of lithium-ion batteries”.
In addition, these two articles from CTIF, the International Association of Fire and Rescue Services, claim that the Cobra system has been tested successfully against demonstration EV vehicle fires, and that it has also been used successfully in firefighting service to fight a real-world EV battery fire in a parking garage:
New revolutionary method tested extinguishes lithium-Ion EV fires in ten minutes with minimal water use
New cutting extinguisher method for EV fires performed successfully in real vehicle fires
If these two CTIF articles are to be believed, EV battery fires can be quickly and successfully fought if the tools and the methods described therein are available for use.
My first cut opinion here is that if the Cobra equipment can be brought on scene quickly enough to deal with an EV fire in a parking garage before it spreads to other vehicles, it might be possible to avoid a general conflagration in the garage like the one which occured at Luton Airport. Maybe. Possibly. If everything goes right.
Land-rover produce diesel hybrids so it’s too early to rule out lithium batteries as the initial cause of this blaze.
I use the Eurotunnel trains to take my car to France quite often and have been concerned for some time about EVs being allowed on these trains. It could be disastrous if an EV ignited while a train is under the English Channel.
War of the Worlds: The Burning Train Scene
Take the car and passenger ferry instead silly.
Only if the car-passenger ferry doesn’t allow EVs aboard. Or if EVs are still allowed, maybe you can carry a full immersion survival suit capable of keeping you warm in the cold waters of the English Channel if you are forced to abandon ship before any lifeboats can be launched.
I believe the data shows hybrids to have higher risk of fires than ICE or EV. Placing a bigger capacity, higher-than-normal voltage battery close to a fuel tank does appear to increase risk – who’d have thought it?
It looks very much like the hybrid battery was the source of the fire.
I have been warning LD Lines about an EV fire on the car deck for more than a year now.
The reply is “we are looking into it”….well when they get a new Herald of Free Enterprise style accident then we will likely be looking into a new “Estonia” disaster.
One thing for sure, if it was caused by an EV, we’ll never know the truth. The gov’t will stick a ‘D’ notice on it, as they did with the Hillman Imp.
I’m backing the deplorables-
It’s OVER. The Luton Airport Fire just KILLED the EV market. Here’s why. – YouTube
It’s never the act that gets the elites but always the cover-up.
In the United Kingdom, a DSMA-Notice (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) is an official request to news editors not to publish or broadcast items on specified subjects for reasons of national security.
Was this the D notice? Why the Hillman Imp?
When the Imp was built, crash tests showed that it failed catastrophically in a frontal collision. Yet, it was still produced and sold. That information, was not available in the UK, but readily available in America.
The Hillman Imp was a dreadful car with a superb 875cc engine.
In 1970s I got an undamaged engine out of a front end smashed car, put Weber carbs on & built a bike around it ( top speed on the M4 =147mph ).
Its steering was also, to put it mildly, unreliable.
The report will be filed with Bliars WMD dossier in a dark, sealed room
If we can never know the truth then how can we be sure about anything? You didn’t think this one through, did you Bob?
What has ‘anything ‘ got to do with this incident?
TFN is in full blown, government induced denial regarding the known facts of this case.
You could open your eyes and see the video of the Land Rover Discovery Sports flaming magnificently from its lithium battery.
Or you could just remain wilfully blind like you do with everything else.
There is this thing called statistics….which can be very revealing….insurance co.s love them…the authorities are very interested…so what is the fire statistic for EVs versus FF vehicles?
If the statistics show a problem….EVs may need heat sensors connected to an alarm system. Beep Beep Beep
The auto trade hasn’t thought of it
But the prescient artist of our age, Louis Prima, gave us forewarning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reW24AkZYzs
The official line is that fires are more likely in ICE vehicles, which is only true if you compare absolute totals of both. When you take out all of the HGV’s, large vehicles, etc and compare like with like, then ICE cars and small vans are LESS likely to self-ignite than EV’s, about 2.5 times less likely. It gets even worse when you compare the age of the vehicles – EV’s are likely to be 5 years old or less so when you compare that with ICE vehicles you find that EV’s are about 12 times more likely to self-ignite than an ICE vehicle of a similar age. If this were common knowledge (as opposed to having to go digging for it through fire reports going back several years) you could imagine it having an effect on EV sales and insurance.
I have no doubt what they omit is the likelihood of spontaneous combustion.
There are lots of ICE fires, the vast majority of them arson, especially after being stolen.
The most frequent method of ICE combustion is someone deliberately setting fire to the interior, with or without a propellant.
No one lifts the bonnet of a car to set it on fire, it’s futile.
Sticking a rag in the fuel filler cap and lighting it can work with a petrol car but it usually ignites the fuel vapour which ejects itself as a flame until exhausted. No point in trying that with a diesel, it just won’t work.
The only way it would work with a petrol car would be if the rag was long enough to reach the petrol and it wicked up out of the tank. There’s not enough oxygen in a tank to support a flame, much less an explosion.
The only way to get a flame is if there were a large fire under the tank that was causing the petrol inside to boil.
You can look it up (NTSB ICE vs EV fire statistics). In short, ICE vehicles are about 100 times more likely to catch fire.
The statistics don’t take into account that there are more 30 year old ICE vehicles on the road than EVs, nor that owners are more likely to perform repairs/modifications to their ICE vehicles. That often leads to fires.
It also doesn’t take into account that ICE fires are much more easily extinguished.
Your last line makes the real point.
That ‘100 times more’ claim is a new one – I’ve seen alarmist sources state that “ICE vehicles are more likely to catch fire than EV’s” but never put a number to it. 100x is ludicrously high even for the most alarmist of alarmist sources though, where did you find it?
I have to counter my own point. I looked this up again. While I found several links that confirmed what I wrote, Car and Driver did some of the same calculations that you folks do here a lot. They looked at how many ICE vehicle fires that would represent a year using the “NTSB” or “NHTSA” data that would equate to over 4,000,000 car fires a year vs the nearly 200,000 that “actually” occurred. (There are 270 million passenger cars registered in the US.)
Car and Driver contacted the NTSB and NHTSA and were told they don’t track vehicle fires. The statistics I read from several sources appear to have originated with… the New York Times who was using information from AutoInsuranceEZ, who were not responding to Car and Driver queries.
So, I did a bad thing. I’m sorry. I have a lot more faith in Car and Driver than I ever would have in the NYT. I should have done some simple math checks.
The only good thing to come out of my error is that I get to relay the info to my Tesla-owning friends who tell me their cars are safer than mine.
No probs. There is a huge amount of disinformation peddled by vested interests in the EV industry. It’s almost as if they wouldn’t sell if customers were told the truth…
Thanks for checking and reporting on it. WTG
ICE vehicles fires are more common, but there are about 230 million ICEVs in the US fleet with an average age over 12 years. There are only a few million EVs with the oldest being younger than the average ICEV. The people who say ICEVs are more likely to have a fire divided the number of fires for each type of vehicle by the number sold in the last year, not taking into account the enormous fleet of existing vehicles that provided most of the fires.
How many child labor hours went into this fire incident?
Will there be segregated parking after this with an EV park and ICE-only park?
Wow, vehicle apartheid
separate but equal, or do the EV’s get to park closer?
I have read that the weight of EVs has not been taken into account for already built parking structures. Thousands of cars and each with an extra 1000 lbs (?) of batteries is a significant weight increase.
The weight problem can be solved by making the parking spaces 20 to 30% wider.
That might help to slow down how quickly a fire spreads.
Of course that will mean the car park owner is going to be making that much less, since the car park won’t hold as many cars. So the owner will have to increase prices to compensate. But why should that matter, we’re saving the planet. Aren’t we?
Apparently charges at the Luton Airport car park run to £67.50 a day. I’d have thought parking somewhere safe and taking a taxi would be cheaper. The train runs right to the airport too. Perhaps passengers wish to avoid the people of Luton which has a much changed demographic over the last few decades. Drove through once, and thought I was in Pakistan.
Many current vehicles being sold weigh about as much as larger EVs. Further, there are small EVs. I doubt parking structures are going to fail because of weight.
Fires pose a more impactful issue.
My understanding from the article I read is averages are used to determine loading and the average size EV is heavier by hundreds of pounds than an ICE vehicle. You know, it’s “modeled” 🙂
With EVs being so much more expensive, maybe they are figuring on the percentage of mid-size and compact EVs to be higher compared to ICE?
Sure their are full sized ICE vehicles that weigh more than mid-sized EVs. So what?
When you compare vehicles of the same size, EVs are always heavier.
The car park is only 3 years old, so you would hope they engineered it for current vehicles. But perhaps they tried to do it on the cheap. It is a real licence to print money. Charges are around £20 an hour or £67.50 a day so revenue is likely over £70k a day, or £25.5m a year. The project to expand the parking was part of a £20m airport modernisation, so it paid for itself in the first year.
How often is the car park full?
Capacity was 1,900 vehicles. I’m assuming a low average occupancy of 1,000 to make the sums easier. They do offer some discounts for booking online in advance.
Depending on the time of day and time of year, I’ve seen car parks near airports that were almost empty.
It’s not high holiday season (lots of package holidays fly out of Luton) so use is certainly not at peak levels. Threats of strikes may also have deterred some travellers. Plus it was already nearly 9p.m. with few flights departing later. There were around 1,500 vehicles inside. So I think 1,000 is probably a low estimate. OTOH, perhaps I should allow more for discounts.
Diesel fuel does not combust easily. You can throw a cigarette into a puddle of it. I suspect this is an attempt to avoid bad press for electric cars . There are many things wrong with electric cars . They weigh much more than a standard car and thus wear out the road surface faster. The destruction caused by mining the minerals, using fossil fuel equipment, and the simple fact that we do not produce enough electricity to charge up all the cars if we are all forced to do so. There is no ramping up of the supply ,and we are already experiencing the shortages. The electric car is a bust !
Remember that a key part of the plan is not to force all car owners to switch to EV, it is to force as many of the riff-raff as possible to give up personal transport ownership. For the greater good, don’t you know.
Investigators believe the blaze was started when a diesel car suffered an electrical fault or leaking fuel line.
The fire then spread as a number of electric vehicles burst into flames in a domino effect, one firefighter suggested. As many as 1,500 vehicles are feared to have been damaged.
Is this the car that started the Luton airport car park fire? Moment Range Rover explodes before £20m multi-storey structure collapses – sparking travel chaos for up to 50,000 passengers | Daily Mail Online
20C maxm temp at Luton and the flash point of diesel is 52C so not natural ignition and it wouldn’t go bang like that even if a hot engine started it. So you’d suspect a bomb in the diesel car unless the diesel fire heated an EV battery close by and bang. In any case EVs trashed the carpark just like the Felicity Ace and the image of a Grenfell Towers or 911 future.
Electrical fault, most likely with the hybrid battery that would have been powering the car while driving in the car park at low speed.
I’m not in the UK, but where I live there are many vehicles on the roads such as seen here:
cargill835.jpg (4368×2912) (horsefeedblog.com)
Many times the truck will have dual rear wheels — called a “dually”.
fuel_maverick_dually_222.jpg (1200×600) (iconfigurators.app)
Hamas with EVs comes to mind.
Why?
The local fire chief was quick to rule out any fire set on purpose, probably precisely because of the risk of misconstruing the situation given the population of Luton – but more definitvely because we have clear evidence that this was a vehicle fire, most probably in an MHEV lithium battery and not caused by any terrorist act.
The electric car industry needs to solve the fire problem.
Or not. I’m perfectly happy with them giving up entirely, crushing the whole lot and going back to selling ICE vehicles.
Give it another 100 years.
Li-FePO4 (lithium iron phosphate battery versus the more common Li-Ion) batts look to be less volatile shall I say:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery
Li-FePO4 have a lower energy density than the Li-Ion chemistry used generally in EVs. So a lot more weight and space for the same energy capacity. The more weight, the more enegry needed for the same range. The more energy needed, the more weight and space required. It’s a vicious circle.
Li-FePO4 is a good solution for “house loads”, but not for propulsion.
.
re: “Li-FePO4 have a lower energy density than”
Yeah, all that and more at the link I posted.DDG and goog searches reveal even more.
re: “Li-FePO4 is a good solution for “house loads”, but not for propulsion.”
Today, but maybe not tomorrow as for motive applications (note I said maybe.) Not professing to be omniscient I can’t begin to pin down what to expect in battery advancements, but, I’m willing to bet the final, ultimate direction is not batteries, which is what most people seem to ‘expect’ (for the near future anyway). There are advancements in other technical areas, but this board is not ready to discuss it, as has been witnessed in the past.
How dare we point out the problems with proposed solutions. Don’t we care about the planet?
Mods – this energywise twit has posted the same comment six times already. Can you do something?
Calm down dear, technical hitch sorted
The mods could probably add another six if you asked really, really nicely.
No way that was the cause.
I drive a diesel pusher motor home and in the navy I was responsible for emergency diesel generators and fire safety.
If a fuel leak sprayed on the exhaust manifold, a fire can start. Except the fuel lines are on the other side of the engine from the exhaust manifold.
A fuel leak or engine fire are pretty hard to miss. Not something you walk a way from because you are late for a flight.
This event is the end of BEV.
I was at a nuke plant before we loaded fuel load. Twice all the
edit above: Twice all the phones rang at about the same time. There was an emergency some place and the hospital was preparing to receive the injured. The media jumped to the conclusion it must be the nuke plant.
Today the question is ‘did a BEV cause it?’
Kit P: “No way that was the cause.”
Here is a video purported to be the moment of the explosion which initiated the fire:
https://twitter.com/wallstreetsheet/status/1712122385254486496
As I look at this video, what I see is that the explosion isn’t occuring in the parking level where the camera is located.
Based on the behavior of the ceiling in the level where the camera is located, it appears to me that a major explosion occurred in the parking level immediately above this level.
A diesel vehicle, even if it was a PHEV hybrid, could not possibly produce an explosion of this magnitude and destructive power.
Which now spawns another question. What was the source of the explosion? Was it an EV, or was it a planted bomb?
Bomb!
Floor (ceiling above) collapse. Or bomb from upper floor causing upper floor to collapse??
The speed of propagation of the blast front after the ceiling is breeched would indicate just such a conclusion. An exploding EV battery couldn’t produce that kind of blast front. A tank of gasoline cooking off in an ICE vehicle located directly above that section of the ceiling coudn’t produce enough blast energy quickly enough both to breech the ceiling and also produce a blast front which moves as quickly as the one shown in the video.
There’s video of this moment from outside the car park which makes it clear that the upper floors were already completely ablaze.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1711875340614644195
Your picture shows the first floor, I don’t remember how tall the parking deck was, but it was more than two floors and the fire started on the top floor.
What you are seeing is the result of the upper floors collapsing, that was not the start of the fire.
Your are correct. If the video is taken from the first floor, a sudden collapse of the floors above could produce a ceiling collapse sequence, and a subsequent quickly- moving blast front, like the ones seen in the video.
You can see the exit barriers.
re: “Here is a video purported to be the moment of the explosion which initiated the fire:”
LOOK LIKE the moment the upper floor CAME DOWN and a large flame front propagated outward from that.
That video is taken at the exit which is two floors at least lower than the floor where the fire started. It shows the floor above collapsing through, bringing the conflagration above with it. It has nothing to do with the original fire, which was not initially explosive.
The statement in the tweet appears to be correct: the fire started in the lithium battery of a diesel hybrid.
Yes, if the video is from the first floor, a sudden collapse of the floor above could produce a ceiling collapse sequence, and a subsequent quickly moving blast front, like the ones seen in the video.
You can see from the video, that it is taken from the first floor.
Batteries burn, they do not explode.
re: “Batteries burn, they do not explode.”
Tesla battery pack cells ‘going off like fire crackers’: (start at 6:37 for firecracker effect)
https://youtu.be/WdDi1haA71Q?t=397
An explosion is just a very high speed burn.
An explosion requires something to contain the burn and to then release it suddenly. Battery packs are designed to rupture at low pressures in order to prevent explosions.
The misinformation started almost as soon as the fire, “wasn’t an EV, can’t be an EV” etc. The investigation will blame something else, and NOTHING will change until a high profile figure, hopefully a politician, suffers a loss comparable to the family in Cornwall a few days ago who lost their house and all their possessions due to one of these death traps. Hopefully there won’t be anyone inside the vehicle as many of them don’t have a mechanical linkage on the door latch and can’t be opened from inside if the power fails.
No mechanical linkage between door handle and door latch?
How the heck did that ever get past the safety inspectors?
The Macmaster does love making a song and dance, keeps the clicks coming.
He’s not wrong, just overly dramatic. What clown would shut the doors of a dead EV, with a sunroof, on a hot day? Nor do I believe that sunroof doesn’t have a blind.
Agreed the video has an air of being ‘staged’, I think maybe it was a reconstruction of an earlier event when he didn’t have the camera running and he over-dramatised a bit, but the central point is the same. You can get trapped in the damn useless things.
Explosion? Has anyone checked the whereabouts of Carmine “Hot Fingers” Mensanensa?
I was a cop, not a fireman, but we were always on the scene of burning cars before the fire service.
What started this fire is entirely academic. It’s what caused the floors to collapse and spread the fire that’s the problem.
I worked in the worst areas of Glasgow in the 1980’s where joy riding with other peoples cars was just an evenings fun for the local shits. It was the worst area in the UK for it. I have been to more car fires than I have had hot breakfast’s. The evening fun invariably ended with the toerags torching the car to destroy any evidence, it was standard practice.
One of the video’s of this car park fire showed multiple burning projectiles being fired into the sky. I have never once seen that. There were multiple explosions, I have never seen that either. In fact, I can’t think of a single ICE car fire I attended where the fuel tank wasn’t intact. They were usually still full unless a rag had been stuffed in to start the fire, in which case the fuel usually burned out the filler hole in a jet about a metre long. Diesel fumes don’t burn.
I have also never seen an unattended car spontaneously combust although I know it can happen. My neighbours car was parked right next to one when it did. The burning car was totally destroyed, my neighbours car was badly scorched and written off by the insurance company, but it did not ignite.
The idea than petrol/diesel and plastics/fabrics generate enough heat to melt tarmac, and then melt the steel beams below is utterly ludicrous. Car parks are designed to withstand burning ICE vehicles.
My understanding is that thermal runaway in an EV burns much hotter and for much longer. Could that have been the source of structural collapse of the steel framed building? It’s the only thing I can think of.
Multi storey car parks at Gatwick and Heathrow are festooned with CCTV which record every move of a vehicle, and ANPR cameras. Very handy when you want to find your car after a week playing golf and drinking beer at Trump’s Aberdeenshire course. Tap your Registration number into a console and every car park, every floor and every individual bay is scanned for it.
Every car registration number is scanned on entry and exit. The precise location, make, model and owner of the car can be tracked from entry to parking.
I seem to recall the car cargo ship fire within the last year was speculated over as to the cause. The authorities were reluctant to reveal the presence of EV’s on board until they were forced to reveal theM.
I suspect this will go the same way.
HotScot, you are a former policeman. See my comment above in response to KitP.
It’s likely that once the fire took hold temperatures in the heart of it will have risen to very high levels. It was estimated that in the Liverpool car park fire they rose above 1,000C. It would not be surprising if a similar level wasn’t achieved here. That would have led to very high pressures inside petrol tanks as the fuel boiled (and indeed, diesel too would be vapourised at such temperatures), and explosions when tanks ruptured. Quite enough to propel some bits a fair distance.
The refueling caps are designed to release pressure rather than let it build up.
Gas and diesel tanks are more likely to become flame throwers rather than bombs.
You are assuming that the fire leaves those devices unaffected. They’re designed more for a hot sunny desert day rather than a fire at several hundred or 1,000+ degrees C.
They are plastic, at 1000+C, they vaporize on their own.