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

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

Hello 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 subject.

An electrical automobile battery will burn for at the very least 10 hours and can’t be extinguished by standard firefighting strategies. The one factor the hearth division can do is transfer the burning automobile/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 automobile 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 response to my marketing consultant no residential strata constructing in Australia is designed to resist a ten hour hearth score. By extension the constructing can have sustained vital 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 usually on the backside of the automobile. The fireplace burns by a casing to the brine and the brine acts as a cooling and extinguishment agent. These would want particular hearth and warmth rated partitions and air flow. They’d should be close to exits so the automobile and its containment could be eliminated within the occasion of an incident.

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

Sort regards,

Georg

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