More on the danger posed by Lithium Batteries
Last week I posted an article on the danger posed by lithium batteries following numerous claims which LMI Claims have lately been appointed to.
One of our claims specialists Georg Froeschl wrote to say:
Hi Allan,
I spoke to a constructing marketing consultant I exploit right here in Canberra (and have carried out so for almost 20 years) about this situation.
An electrical automobile battery will burn for a minimum of 10 hours and can’t be extinguished by standard firefighting strategies. The solely factor the fireplace division can do is transfer the burning automobile/scooter/bike/and so on. into an open area and let it self-extinguish. The level is that extra strata unit occupiers are searching for automobile and scooter/bike charging stations in strata constructing. In basements there’s usually 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.
According to my marketing consultant no residential strata constructing in Australia is designed to resist a ten hour fireplace ranking. By extension the constructing can have sustained important basement stage structural harm.
The mitigation proposed in our dialog was that every EV charging station is bunded with a brine answer as much as about 1.2 metres to encapsulate the battery which is mostly on the backside of the automobile. The fireplace burns via a casing to the brine and the brine acts as a cooling and extinguishment agent. These would want particular fireplace and warmth rated partitions and air flow. They would must be close to exits so the automobile and its containment will be eliminated within the occasion of an incident.
Clearly a retrofit to buildings can be costly and never shared enthusiastically by inside combustion engine automobile house owners. Regulation for basement / under-building charging stations is required urgently to acknowledge the hazards you check with. Our dialog concluded that no certifier would approve an set up (the place this regulation) and the design commonplace for any such mitigation set up must be addressed.
Kind regards,
Georg
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This is clearly a danger that as an trade we have to deal with and I hope this sequence of posts helps transfer the dialogue alongside.