TALLAHASSEE, FL – Officials in Florida are warning the owners of electric vehicles to exercise extreme caution after firefighters in the state have been inundated with numerous EV fires – and even explosions – stemming from lithium batteries damaged by water after last week’s destructive passing of Hurricane Ian.
Hurricane Ian – a Category 4 storm – tore through Florida’s west coast last week, causing over 100 deaths and more than one million residents to lose power.
Batteries in EVs that have been waterlogged amid Ian’s passing could see water penetrating their lithium batteries and causing corrosion that can lead to sudden and unexpected fires and worse, according to a tweet issued on Thursday by Jimmy Patronis, the Chief Financial Officer of the state of Florida.
“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis said, sharing a video of firefighters battling a smoking Tesla. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”
Patronis noted that EV battery fires can be notoriously difficult to put out in a follow-up tweet, sharing another video of fire personnel combating another blazing EV; a bystander in the video can be heard saying that the crew had used “hundreds of gallons of water” to try and put the fire out.
“It takes special training and understanding of EVs to ensure these fires are put out quickly and safely,” Patronis noted. “Thanks to [North Collier Fire Rescue] for their hard work.”
It is currently unknown exactly how many EVs in Florida have been damaged or outright destroyed due to Ian.
The battery-powered vehicles have become more and more popular in recent years as the administration of President Joe Biden has been continuing their push to encourage a “green transition” by the public to zero-emission cars, with a goal of 50 percent of all automotive sales being EVs by 2050.
However, some have been critical of the Biden Admin’s initiative for the country to go all-electric within a relatively short span of time, including Myron Ebell, the director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, who says that currently EVs are “expensive and often unreliable.”
“[The EV push] is really kind of a con job,” he said in July. “It may be a good deal for some people in some places under some circumstances. But by-and-large right now, it’s not a good deal.”
Currently, EVs account for over 5 percent of all new car sales in the U.S., and a Consumer Reports survey indicates that 36 percent of Americans are “planning to buy” or are “seriously considering buying” an EV.
Christopher Boyle is an investigative journalist, videographer, reporter and writer for SEARCHEN NETWORKS® as well as other independent news and media organizations in the United States. Christopher works on a wide variety of topics and fields, has been featured in print and online in a variety of publications, from local to national, and helps keep a keen-eye on what’s happening in the automotive world for Auto Buyers Market.