Fresno Fire Department launches EV committee

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- Cellphones, laptops, electric scooters, and electric vehicles to name a few, all include lithium-ion batteries.

"During the holiday time right now, and everyone giving new gifts to each other, this is one opportunity where folks may be new to some of this technology," said Joshua Stellars with the Fresno Fire Department.

Officials at Batteries Plus in Clovis say while these batteries have high density, they also have thermal runaway, which is the self heating aspect of the battery and can spark an explosion quickly.

"Just make sure you read the instructions because every application is different so if you don't follow it, the chances are you can run into trouble, catch fire," said Leon Cai, Manager at Batteries Plus.

This is also true when it comes to phone and tablet batteries.

"Basically here, you can see where its kind of protruding out, its swelling up here, so that's an indication of a bad battery," said Michael Rose, Senior Technician at Batteries Plus.

He says you want to keep the battery flat and avoid overcharging it to prevent a short.

But when it comes to electric vehicles, Joshua Stellars with the Fresno Fire department says we're starting to see more in Fresno county and around the world.

"The vehicles that we have with the internal combustion engines, those can be extinguished with one fire apparatus, our fire engines have 500 to 750 gallons of water on them," said Stellars. "The EV batteries that are in the vehichles, those fires are averaging anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000 gallons of water."

He says that's around 10 fire engines to put out one vehicle fire, when it used to be one engine, and that's why The Fresno fire department also started an EV committee that recently got a demo on different nozzles to use to fight electric vehicle fires.

"Its something to be proud of that we are being proactive and trying to get ahead of the curve on this, we're not just waiting for things to go bad," said Stellars.

Fresno fire's EV committee says this was just one of many demonstrations they plan to have.

Next year they will be getting a demo from Tesla themselves about more ways to fight EV fires.