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.
It was very, too, quickly claimed this was caused by a diesel vehicle. I don’t believe it for a moment.
A relevant comment lifted from YTer: @ghl3488
“Hi Geoff, we don’t know the cause yet but here is my take from a fire engineering perspective.
The car park looks as if it is of lightweight construction which generally requires a structural fire resistance of 15 minutes. The structure should not collapse within that period.
The mechanisms for fire spread in open sided car parks is generally well understood in the fire industry with and without sprinklers being provided. Of growing concern is the added problems of EV’s with higher fire loading and weight.
These factors will cause added problems from a firefighting perspective and will contribute to earlier collapse under severe fire conditions. Earlier than the 15 minutes required by building regulations. Of course 15 minutes is around the time of arrival and getting to work for the firefighters, just about the time when unannounced catastrophic collapse is probable in a well developed fire. Would you want to go in to fight that fire? We haven’t seen the last of these incidents.
As for the EV aspect to this fire, let’s wait and see what the outcome is, if we are ever told the truth of course. But bear in mind that these cars are present in underground car parks below buildings such as high rise apartment blocks or even hospitals.”
UK standards (being based on EU ones) are probably notionally somewhat higher. Nevertheless, the collapses didn’t happen until almost an hour after the initial fire.
2 takeaways from this incident:
1: Someone needs to evaluate those injured in the fire for HF and Phosphorus/Floride compound contamination. HF, if inhaled has no known antidote. It can cause tissue damage years after it is introduced into the body. From the CDC:
2: NEVER park your car in a multistory parking structure. Of the cars left undamaged in the Luton structure, most will never be recovered, as the structural damage to the car park will prevent safe entry into large portions of the structure, making recovery unsafe.
Two reasons why I won’t buy a milk float:
https://www.carscoops.com/2023/10/runaway-mg-ev-kidnaps-driver-whos-forced-to-crash-into-police-car-to-stop-it/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-67020502
It seems even charging your milk float outside and not parking it in your garage is no guarantee that you can sleep safe in your own home. The comical part of the EV fire in Cornwall is that the manufacturer can’t understand why it caught fire, it’s never happened before. I think the manufacturer should rename the company Pinocchio motors.
That’s not the point Emma and you and Firesafe need to get ahead of the curve-
Hundreds of high-end electric cars recalled due to battery fire risk (thedriven.io)
We get the lithium batteries need to be sealed up tight so the water doesn’t get in and start a chain reaction. That way the gasses can build up a really good head of steam before they burst out and cook the next one in our massed EV future.
“With cars, they’re subject to so much regulation – they’ve got to be crush-tested, they have to meet so many standards,”
Yeah but they forgot the pub test Emma and the fallacy of composition just like the windmills and solar panels.
Being sealed to keep water out is not evidence that these seals will remain intact until high pressures are reached.
These types of seals are usually designed to burst at only a few psi. Some are also designed to soften when high temperatures are reached, which will lower the burst point.
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.
At a quick guess, I would say that the explosions were very likely to be ICE vehicles with 50-80 litres of fuel on board. Both diesel and petrol with be explosive if heated in a confined space.
EVs will cause an inferno which is impossible to extinguish. That is a separate but extreme risk in this context.
1500 new vehicles and demolition and reconstruction of a concrete carpark !!! Saving the planet, one day a time !
It’s known that there were several EVs in the building. If they were in the building, they were involved.
Auto fuel tanks don’t explode. The refueling caps are designed to vent when pressure starts building up.
The explosions were probably tires exploding from the heat.
I suspect by the time you have a boiling fuel mixture it doesn’t take much to create explosive conditions: it’s not nicely confined in a distillation unit.. The Fire Brigade comments were that explosions were coming from tyres, fuel tanks and EV batteries.
The only inherently safe place for Lithium to exist in civilization is in Cuban cigars where is exists naturally in the tobacco.
One should think twice about parking your own car with EVs.
A word of caution: not all vehicle fires are initiated by electric vehicles! It is also easy for social media to spread a misunderstanding about cause There was a bus fire in Bradford, UK around 10th October 2023. The EV-sceptical commenting crowd are assuming that this was an electric bus. Several thousand Facebook commenters immediately joined in the scrum under a photo (and video) captioned “Electric bus fire”.. Reality may be simpler (diesel? arson?) or more complicated (hybrid?). Of course, there are some undisputedly electric bus fires, notably in France, but it is easy to fall into the trap created by a caption and 1,000 commenters forming a “consensus”.
Of course, doubtless there will be conspiracy theorists who suggest that XR are deliberately torching diesel buses…
Missing link for “scrum”: https://www.facebook.com/GardaCheckpointsDublin/videos/828328438783154/
Well indeed. I found that in the UK 126,000 out of 274,000 vehicle fires were deliberate arson or vandalism according to government data. That will preferentially be in poorer areas where such crimes (often following theft and joyriding)are prevalent, and tend to involve older vehicles and thus ICE engines. Insurance data reveal that hybrids are the most fire prone vehicles for accidental fires, so this MHEV fire is in line with that.
In the case of this fire I have looked closely at the evidence which is extremely strong that the origin of the fire was in the vehicle’s EV battery. You will find supporting argument in my other posts on the thread.
Read through the posts above. Video taken at the scene clearly shows that the fire started as an electric battery fire.
The vehicle involved was a diesel electric, but the video clearly shows the fire starting in the battery compartment, not the fuel tank and not the motors.
In 2020 there was a very similar large fire in an airport multistory car park in Stavanger, Norway.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/shocking-raging-fire-stavanger-airport-160000724.html
This town is one with a very high proportion of EVs and Hybrid cars, which were known to be in the car park. Nevertheless, it was concluded very early on that this fire started in an older diesel Opel. There was also a lot of speculation that the EVs in the car park had made the fire far worse.
However, the official investigation into the fire concluded “that electric vehicles had not impacted on the course of fire differently than what is to be expected in a fire involving conventional petrol or diesel cars.” Ref.Section 4.2 of https://risefr.com/media/publikasjoner/upload/2020/rise-report-2020-91-evaluation-of-fire-in-stavanger-airport-cark-park-7-january-2
The abstract to the report states the following: “Electric vehicles: Water analyses of selected metals relevant for batteries in electric vehicles did not show any lithium, and only low concentrations of cobalt. This indicates that batteries in electric vehicles did not contribute to pollution of nearby water resources. Observations during the fire indicate that electric vehicles did not contribute to the fire development beyond what is expected from conventional vehicles. Further technical studies of the batteries from the burned electric and hybrid vehicles are necessary to evaluate whether batteries from electric vehicles were involved in the fire.”
Notwithstanding the above, a presentation prepared by the same investigators states that, 15 mins after the fire started,”Bang from EV, danger of fire spread to 3-4 cars”, which suggests that a burning did indeed make the initial phases of the fire more intense. See slide 11 of:
https://www.ri.se/sites/default/files/2020-12/FRIC%20D1.2-2020_01%20FIVE%20conference%20presentation%20Multi-storey%20car%20park%20fire%2C%20presentation.pdf
Whether this was totally a diesel or petrol fire is somewhat irrelevant as EVs are known to burn hotter and longer. What could have been the outcome if there had been a significant proportion of EVs?
It was a hybrid diesel apparently