Experts in rural firefighting say that electric vehicle fires require so much water that in some cases it’s better to just let them burn.
In a rural state like Wyoming, trucking in the water needed to fully extinguish the fire isn’t always the best solution.
“An electric vehicle battery fire is not a traditional fire,” Curt Yanish, a volunteer firefighter with the Sublette County Unified Fire District, told Cowboy State Daily.
Anticipating more electric vehicles (EV) on the road, Yanish said he’s been trying to keep up on how to fight lithium-ion battery fires and pass on what he knows to the other firefighters.
The batteries don’t need oxygen to burn, so there’s really no way to smother an EV battery fire.
All we can do is cool the battery to the point that the burning reaction stops. Our best tool for that is water,’ Yanish said.
How much water?
He said that typically an EV battery fire requires between 4,000 and 6,000 gallons of water, but he’s seen some incidents requiring as much as 40,000 gallons of water.
One of the difficulties in a vehicle fire, Yanish explained, is getting the water down to the battery, which sits on the floor pan under the seats.
“We would have to lift the car up so that we could see its underbelly, and then spray water on it,” Yanish said.
He said that Sublette County is trying to build up its equipment fleet so that each of its six stations has 4,000 gallons of water available.
Typically, the pumper truck, he said, would be first on the scene of an EV fire. The truck has 1,000 gallons of water. That would be followed by a tender fire truck, which carries 4,000 gallons. Sublette County has six tender fire trucks.
“We would call on all those and shuttle water to the scene,” Yanish said.
 Let it burn:
Yanish said it can take four to eight hours to use water to put out an EV battery fire, especially if firefighters have to use the full 40,000 gallons on it.
“We could simply push the vehicle off to the side of the road and it would be burned out in an hour or two,” Yanish said. “If it’s not threatening somebody’s house or something, that might be a better option.”