By Paul Homewood
h/t Caffe Anvils
I am told that there was another major carpark fire, in December 2017 in Liverpool.
It was evidently a major event, as Merseyside Fire Service published a report a few months later.
It is interesting to compare it with Luton.
First of all, the timeline:
In the Kings Dock fire, it took two hours from the 999 calls for the fire to have become so dangerous that firefighters were withdrawn.
At Luton, the local fire chief, Andy Hopkinson, maintains that when his crews arrived within ten minutes of the 999 calls, they were faced with “a rapidly developing and escalating fire, involving a large number of vehicles spread across a number of floors”.
Secondly the Liverpool fire was spread by running fuel fires – in other words, fuel escaped from burning cars, which caught fire, thus spreading the fire to the next car in line. Fires spread to the floor below, as the burning fuel descended the drainage system.
There is a third issue as well. The Liverpool fire report noted that the first hour only saw two rows of cars affected. This implies that the fire could only spread to the next car close to it, consistent with running fuel. Footage of Luton shows that the fire spread quickly over large distances by explosion.
Clearly the Liverpool fire had little in common with Luton, where the fire spread much more rapidly, and where the there is footage of one of the floors actually collapsing, bringing the burning vehicles from above with it.
The only possible explanation is that the Luton fire involved one, and most probably more, EVs, which turned a slow developing fire into the catastrophic event we have all seen,
One final comment.
The Merseyside report noted the absence of sprinkler systems, and it appears that Luton’s car park also did not have any sprinklers working.
While these would clearly be invaluable in an ordinary car fire, they would be worse than useless in a lithium battery fire.
I can only repeat – if a fire occurred in an underground car park full EVs below a block of flats, it would be a disaster.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 12, 2023 at 02:30PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 