Nikola Trucks Catch Fire Again
At the electric trucks corporate headquarters, a Nikola semi-truck caught fire this past weekend. This marks the second time in recent months that a fire started in a truck at the Phoenix-based company. A month to the day, a fire started with another semi-truck. The coincidence does not fall lost upon the company, leading to them suspecting foul play.
Firefighters were on the scene of the fire this past weekend and stumbled upon a very interesting sight. They found that the vehicle that caught fire before was the one on fire this time too. It seemed to the firefighters that the truck had another thermal runaway in which the batteries still in the vehicle reignited.
Luckily, No Damage Was Done to Any Nearby Buildings.
The fire still raged on quite a bit, burning at about 800 degrees. The firefighters had to use a deck gun like tool in order to use hundreds of gallons of water rapidly in order to put the fire out. With the growing popularity of electric vehicles, fires started as a result of the vehicle type are growing in frequency and intensity. Firefighters are having to learn new techniques to put these fires out, as they are not always like the typical other fires they are used to.
According to an interviewed firefighter, a typical car fire for a non-electric vehicle takes less than an hour to put out and requires only one tank of water. The same firefighter explained that electric vehicle fires take hours to fully put out. They take so much longer because the batteries have to cool completely before they know that the fire is safely done.
Otherwise, the batteries could reignite and light the vehicle up again. Because of the amount of time and water these fires can take, sometimes they have to simply secure the area to ensure all buildings are safe from burning and let the fire burn out on its own. Putting out the recent Nikola semi-truck fire took about 12 hours total and required a slightly different process. They were able to cool the batteries enough to allow them to be broken down and removed. They then handed the batteries off to different authorities and the batteries were taken care of. This process was very time-consuming, but beneficial as they removed the source of the fire, hopefully preventing further issues. An investigation is underway to look into the suspicion of foul play.