Battery Boom!

This happened during a cold winter some years back. A guy from work was tightening up the battery terminals on his plow truck. He dropped a wrench and it just happened to land on both the negative and positive terminals. The wrench welded itself to the battery, shorted it out and the battery exploded. The guy’s hand needed medical attention. He’s lucky he didn’t lose any fingers or eyes in the fiasco. 

So now I maintain a battery bank of a dozen batteries in my basement. Each battery is bigger and has a lot more energy than that guy’s plow truck battery. You really really really do not want to short out the whole battery bank. With that in mind all my metal battery tools have rubber handles or are wrapped in electrical tape. 

Electric cars have more electrical capacity than my modest home battery bank. Not only that they have lithium batteries which are more dangerous than lead acid. When an electric car catches fire it’s a bad time indeed. 

Regular car fires are bad enough. There’s gasoline, of course, but the rubber tires and plastic body parts burn energetically. That pales compared to an electric car. Typically it can require tens of thousands of gallons of water and many hours to extinguish one. 

I’m glad I retired from the fire service before electric cars became common. There are special extinguishers being developed but they aren’t in common usage. In the mean time I’m using a rule of thumb when it comes to electric car fires. If I can see the car that’s on fire -I’m too close and need to back off. 

-Sixbears