‘Out of control’ fire aboard a massive car-carrier ship spotlights the calamitous consequences of electric vehicles

 Olivia Murray - American Thinker

Are these little “eco-friendly” batteries the catalysts for massive environmental calamities? I’m not a gambler, but if I had to wager, I’d suspect…yes. 

"There were 3,783 vehicles on board, including 498 battery electric vehicles, a Tokyo-based

spokesperson for K Line (Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha), which had chartered the vessel, said."

. . ."Update via CBS News:

The Dutch coast guard said Thursday that the cause of the fire was unclear and that only about 25 of the vehicles on the ship were EVs, but in the audio of an emergency call released by Dutch broadcaster RTL, someone can be heard saying "the fire started in the battery of an electric car."

"Given the details of this specific incident and what we know about EVs, all signs point to the culprit being…an electric vehicle! When EV batteries catch fire, they burn hotter and longer than most fires and the fire is “impossible” to snuff out, so mitigation strategies instead focus on “cooling”  (instead of extinguishing) the vulnerable or burning apparatuses. A prominent blog on fire science gives us the working knowledge of an EV battery blaze:

A high-voltage battery is made up of many cells packed tightly together inside a watertight, fire-resistant box. When a single cell fails, it is essentially a small explosive that produces a tremendous amount of gas and heat (1,200 degrees F) in tenths of a second. The failure is an exothermic chemical reaction that does not require oxygen from the atmosphere to sustain itself. The heat released from each individual cell is transferred to the neighboring cells, which causes them to fail as well.

Once a battery cell fails, it is impossible to extinguish the failed cell as the chemical reaction inside the cell happens far too quickly. The only way to stop a thermal runaway is by directly cooling the cells involved to ensure that the failed cell does not cause the cells around it to also fail.

 Don Surber (substack.com)  "ITEM 2: Tech Crunch reported, “Ford slashes the price of the F-150 Lightning EV pickup.”  Oddly enough, there is not a big market for battery-operated trucks. I bet they are great for hauling Bud Light to Gay Parades and Drag Queen Story Hours."