Final week I posted an article on the danger posed by lithium batteries following various claims which LMI Claims have lately been appointed to.

One in every of our claims specialists Georg Froeschl wrote to say:

Hello Allan,

I spoke to a constructing advisor I take advantage of right here in Canberra (and have carried out so for almost 20 years) about this difficulty.

An electrical car battery will burn for at the very least 10 hours and can’t be extinguished by typical firefighting strategies. The one factor the hearth division can do is transfer the burning car/scooter/bike/and so forth. into an open area and let it self-extinguish. The purpose is that extra strata unit occupiers are in search of car and scooter/bike charging stations in strata constructing. In basements there’s typically no area for autos allotted besides the allotted parking to every unit. For bikes and scooters the preparations appear to be at greatest advert hoc.

In accordance with my advisor no residential strata constructing in Australia is designed to resist a ten hour fireplace ranking. By extension the constructing may have sustained vital basement degree structural harm.

The mitigation proposed in our dialog was that every EV charging station is bunded with a brine resolution as much as about 1.2 metres to encapsulate the battery which is usually on the backside of the car. The hearth burns by a casing to the brine and the brine acts as a cooling and extinguishment agent. These would wish particular fireplace and warmth rated partitions and air flow. They’d must be close to exits so the car and its containment might be eliminated within the occasion of an incident.

Clearly a retrofit to buildings shall be costly and never shared enthusiastically by inside combustion engine car house owners. Regulation for basement / under-building charging stations is required urgently to acknowledge the hazards you discuss with. Our dialog concluded that no certifier would approve an set up (the place this regulation) and the design customary for this sort of mitigation set up must be addressed.

Form regards,

Georg

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That is clearly a danger that as an trade we have to handle and I hope this sequence of posts helps transfer the dialogue alongside.