Lithium Fire Is No Joke

Craig Rucker
Craig Rucker is a co-founder of CFACT and currently serves as its president.

Lithium burns so hot and bright they use it to make flares.

Once they get going, lithium fires can be almost impossible to put out.

Witness the spate of car carrier fires that tend to burn themselves out when firefighting efforts fail.

When hurricanes struck Florida, homeowners evacuated to safety in their long-range, fast-fill-up, internal combustion cars, abandoning their EVs in their garages. When tidal surge submerged the EVs’ electrical systems, they went up uncontrollably and took the house with them.

CFACT senior fellow Bonner Cohen reports at CFACT.org about devastating fires at California battery storage plants, including the destruction of California’s Moss Landing facility. Taxpayers subsidized Moss Landing to the tune of $500 million, hoping it would back up intermittent offshore wind turbines.

Bonner reports that in addition to being incredibly difficult to extinguish, these battery fires release huge amounts of toxic metals into the air. Alongside the threat to human health from direct exposure to airborne microparticles of heavy metals, levels of cobalt in the agricultural region’s soils near Moss Landing are 100 to 1,000 times above normal, Hogan points out. “And they will linger there for a century or more,” he added.

The fire risk of electric vehicles and battery plants is all too real.

We are unprepared.

This article was originally published by CFACT.