Fires in car parks

What will? They seem to be a nightmare even for the fire services to put out.

I looked at this a little while back and there was no conclusive evidence that EVs are more likely to go on fire than ICE cars.

Now this may change with more EVs on the road and ageing fleets etc. But conversely, battery technology is changing to more stable chemistries.

Sprinklers won't put out an EV fire but maybe they'll contain the damage. So long as no other cars go up, and the structure of the car park is fine then maybe that's all that's needed.

Remember the fire at Douglas car park a few years back, where the fire spread across an entire level of the multi story car park?

I'm not sure there's any requirement to have fire suppression in a car park. The only requirement is to mitigate the fire until the car park is evacuated

Since they're low populated zones generally, there shouldn't be a huge number of people to evacuate

After that, the fire brigade will first attempt to stop the fire from spreading to adjacent populated buildings and if they can put the fire out safely then they will

Ultimately, cars and a car park are considered expendable. Everyone who owns a car is supposed to have insurance anyway.

So if your car goes up in smoke then too bad, so sad, talk to your insurer

As for children being trapped in the car there's a pretty simple solution for that, don't lock children in your car. The RSA even has a safety advisory telling you not to do that and they spell out fire as one of the risks

So perhaps a better public safety campaign would be to advise drivers of some good safety tips (get your car serviced regularly, don't leave any electronics on in the car when unattended) and advise parents not to leave their children unattended in the car

Yes, and there's a big concrete floor between them as well as sealed fire doors

Remember, putting anything bigger than a small fire out is the domain of the fire department

Things like sprinkler systems aren't really there to put out large fires by themselves. They just suppress the fire until the building is evacuated

A car fire, give the size of the vehicle and energy contained within, pretty much graduates to large fire instantly

A sprinkler system isn't going to put that out. You'd probably need a foam or gas based system, both of which can be pretty harmful to humans

For some comparison, I was working in a building years ago with a medium sized server room on the ground floor. There were large bottles of fire suppressant hooked up to ceiling mounted nozzles in the server room

Obviously a bunch of servers running hot could create a serious electrical fire and electricity and water aren't the best mix

Given there were usually a couple of people working in there, and there was a concerning number of health warnings on the suppressant canisters, I asked EHS what would happen if there's anyone in there during a fire

Their response was simple, they would leave the building. There's a time delayed trigger hooked up to the fair alarm and after a minute or two the system will trigger regardless of anyone being in the room or not

Apparently the suppressant probably isn't going to kill anyone but would knock them unconscious. This is assuming they're an adult in good health. Children, the elderly or people with serious medical conditions could suffer serious problems as a result

The justification was that there shouldn't be children or people in poor health in there anyway, and overall the suppression system would do less harm to the human body than a fire

However, you can't really put a system like that into a car park. It's far more difficult to control who's in there and there's always some idiot who left their kids in the car while they went to get a pack of cigarettes

So you don't have a hope in hell of putting out a vehicle fire without risking killing a bunch of people in the car park anyway. Back then to the simplest of life saving systems then which is to get all the people out

In other words, don't lock children in cars and don't ignore the f**king fire alarms

Lets get verifiable facts right as too many people seem to get their "facts" from tiktok. Frankly anyone who believes tiktok without doing a basic fact check it utterly stupid

1 - Luton fire was a 2014 Diesel Range River, The driver had just entered the carpark and was looking for a space when it went on fire. Hence it was in the "roadway" and the driver himself videoed it to have evidence of what happened.

2 - Glasgow airport fire was a diesel taxi. t was extinguished in a few minutes

3 - The white kia on a roadway that is also trending on social media was a 1l Petrol kia stonic.

In the UK there are over 100,000 vehicle fires a year. About 300 every day. About 65% are criminal / insurance related, but 35,000, or almost 100 EVERY DAY are general vehicle fires and usually caused by poor maintenance. Of those 35,000 non criminal/insurance fires in the UK in 2022, just 239 were electric or hybrid vehicles (UK fire brigade figures). In percentage terms that's 0.69% of the fires for a vehicle segment that comprises 2.88% of the UK vehicle market. (2022 Dept Transport figure) Putting it simply, in terms of a vehicle fire, an ev is more than 4 times safer then diesel or petrol.

There's talk in fire safety circles that EV charging will essentially be prohibited in covered areas - as this is the most dangerous time for an EV fire.

It would spell the end for destination charging for EVs in multistorey carparks.

It wasn't an EV, looks like a C Class Mercedes from this report: Photos show aftermath of Newbridge McDonald's fire as blaze leaves trail of destruction - Irish Mirror Online

I'd support that for high-speed charging, but not for lower-speed AC charging up to 7.5kW. It's far less risky.

It was a Merc C-class:

I didn't think it was, but it goes to show that misinformation spreads easily especially when it has a receptive audience. I personally think that people are happy to find fault in order to validate their own choices.

I've only recently changed to an EV but I note significant more aggression towards me on the road. I understand that is completely anecdotal and I am the common denominator but my style and speed of driving hasn't changed at all yet finding I'm being tailgated, bullied and having people do dangerous overtakes around me.

This "expert" must not know anything about electrical systems.

Statistically speaking it seems more prudent to ban diesel vehicles from the car park

While they're at it, they should probably ban all phone chargers and instead force everyone to use a safe electric certified USB wall outlet

The problem is not about EVs going on fire, it's the few that do are as good as impossible to put out.

A typical car fire takes 1000-2000l to put out. An EV can take up to 30000l according to Essex fire brigade.

evidence please

Yeah but there's also a question of what exactly the expected outcome is

In my view, if a car goes up in flames in an underground car park and ends up torching the apartment building above it, but nobody is hurt because they were evacuated in time, then I would call this a win

Apparently the fire department seems to think similarly given they don't seem to be going into underground or multi story car parks to tackle fires. Their objective seems to be to contain the blaze to a single building and mitigate collateral damage

And I'm fine with that, I don't think it's appropriate for firefighters to risk their lives to preserve a bunch of inanimate objects

So it doesn't really matter whether it's an EV or ICE car on fire. Once the fire is contained then they'll just wait for it to burn itself out, whether that takes 12 hours or a week

In general the most successful firefighting technique has been to stop the fires from happening in the first place. Think of all the additional building standards that have gone in regarding fire safety over the past decades

Part of the reason we're seeing more sprinkler systems is because furniture has become drastically more flammable. Turns out IKEA crap makes excellent kindling, I saw some report that the average time for everything in a room to combust was something like 45 mins in 1990 and is now closer to 10 mins.

Couple that with our tendency to charge our phones beside our bed using extremely poorly made chargers and it's easy to see why phone chargers are one of the leading causes of fire deaths

Hence my somewhat cheeky comment that the best strategy would be to ban diesel cars and phone chargers

In other words, you're trying to put out a candle when the roof is on fire 😉

It's unlikely a parked car will go on fire, but a charging EV has a heightened risk although the risk still remains very low. It will take only one or two incidents of an EV fire destroying an apartment block in Ireland to either change the regulations or more likely, make obtaining block insurance extremely expensive or impossible if charging is permitted.

The problem is that while they might occur a tiny amount of times the consequences are catastrophic.

EV companies will either have to change the chemistry to make them less flammable or have inherent fire suppression within the cells.

A fire suppression system will not cause any ill effects to a human being, I have been in rooms with the gas discharged, it's not pleasant but it didn't knock me out. The old CO2 systems were a different story but that gas can only be for extinguishers rather suppression now.

Agree 100%, the fire detection and alarm system will operate in the event of a fire. If the carpark is underground this will give ample opportunity the upper stories before the fire doors etc are compromised. Again, get out and get the FB out, no need for "heroes"

As more and more cars are replaced by EV's this problem will become even more significant.

But the statistics show the opposite - as more ICE cars get replaced by EVs, the number of vehicle fires that Fire Services have to deal with will be drastically reduced, given that they're much less likely to go on fire. Depending on which studies you look at for which country, and which side they count hybrids as being on, they are anything up to 60 times less likely to go on fire. And the technology is improving all the time.