Luton airport fire report is available

Interesting info about the initiation but how many subsequent lithium fires made the fire situation impossible to suppress.

Interesting info about the initiation. I wonder how many subsequent plastic petrol tank fires made the fire situation impossible to suppress.

So they're saying the electrical fire was hot enough to take a tank of diesel above it's flash point and maintain that heat as it ran down a cold concrete slope? Yes, the fuel lines are on the N/S of the vehicle but there's (IMO) a lack of understanding of vehicle systems in that very simplistic report. Plastic fuel tanks are nothing new and the fact the vehicle was still capable of being driven under fire condition suggests to me that the fuel lines were still intact.

I would add that I've seen vehicles recovered after an engine bay electrical fires (and yes, an L494 diesel was one of them) the fuel lines had melted (on the L494) but there were no signs of a fuel fire, the fuel tank was intact above it's metal shield and still had a significant quantity of fuel in it. Other vehicles with similar damage, some after collisions did not lose the fuel tank integrety due to fire - to be fair, if it was a large fire, it'd have gone straight to the recovery compound. . It's almost like someone wants it to be a ICE vehicle....

That's what the BBC et al. were ramming down people's throats long before the vehicle was even identified.

Won’t make a scrap of difference to the EV haters who will now claim a conspiracy.

Tim

Don't multi-storey car parks have dry risers for fire-supressant foam.? I've been amazed how quickly a small canister of foam carried by one firefighter can put out one vehicle fire. I've no idea what the limit is of cars on fire to exceed the capacity of a dry riser and crews. But the point is any water or foam only helps Li fires, nothing routinely available will extinguish any li fire.

Except of course water, which is what the car makers and the people who have to fight them actually recommend and use! Eg:

Didn't we do this to death before?

nib

Thanks for these extracts. I wonder if TNP would like to comment?

J^n

The interesting thing to note is that the BBC were apparently claiming it was an ICE vehicle before anyone knew what model of Range Rover it was, or even if it was a RR.

Natch.

Not hatred, just reasonable fear

Some of us have seen lithium batteries catch fire...

Water does not extinguish lithium battery fires. As we who have tried it can testify.

It simply does not make sense as described.

Believe the report, r believe science and engineering and experience.

Hard one that.

Presumably someone had a plate number, but for privacy reasons did not spread it around.

OK, one of the reasons for wanting the report, was for a virtual look under the hood of such a car.

Unfortunately, this picture is done by the thing similar to AJAX, which might be called "Fetch" or something. It is intended to make it hard to share content with people. These are labeled in traces as "blob" when Fetch does it.

blob:chrome-untrusted://image-magnify/b8550ef4-f26c-403a-8706-6bfb4314525a

You can try looking for the under-the-hood shot here. Scroll down a bit.

Not exactly the same car, but just a concept I have in mind. Perhaps the fuel rack is underneath that central covered area.

Interesting. Thanks for the link.

To me, the most important part of that report is section 18.6, which concerns sprinkler systems (or lack of them). There are numerous comments in that section and in other parts of the report (eg pages 7 and 8). All point to the necessity of sprinkler systems being fitted. It's six years since the The Independent Review of Buildings Regulations and Fire Safety concluded that the regulations were not fit for purpose, and still nothing has been done. Perhaps the insurance industry should make sprinkler installation compulsory before they insure a building. Looking at the historical car park fires listed on pages 95 - 98, it must have cost them a fortune in payouts for damaged buildings and cars.

For all the good a sprinkler system would do in the case of a BEV fire, you might as well get bystanders to gather round and piss on it.

The plate number was E10 EFL, as seen in the various photos. However E reg is for 1987-8, and so that being on a modern car means it's a private plate that you can move between vehicles. At the time, looking that up it was a red 2014 Range Rover. If I look up today it's a gold 2016 Range Rover Sport, MOT expired a couple of weeks ago:

That could also be why the plate is redacted from the report, as the owner of the current E10 EFL could be identified as the person who 'caused' the fire.

Because of the private plate, we'd need to find out what vehicle E10 EFL was attached to at the time of the fire. This is something in the DVLA database but not easy for the man on the street to access.

You can search on that reg and various Twitter/etc discussions come up from the time of the fire with people saying what vehicle that was, via their DVLA searches at the time. Also the pictures in the report are clear enough to identify it from the body shape.

Of course, any evidence is not welcome to those who have made up their minds and only hear what confirms their existing bias.

Theo

You're missing the point. The spray won't put the BEV fire out, but it will help to prevent it spreading to other vehicles nearby, whether BEV or ICE. It's a simple matter of trying to stop a chain reaction.