In what some dubbed “Carmaggeddon”, motorists were stranded for as long as 10 hours in 100+ degree temperatures when a truck carrying lithium batteries caught fire.
California Highway Reopens After Lithium Battery Fire Trapped Drivers
The New York Times reports California Highway Reopens After Lithium Battery Fire Trapped Drivers
A California highway reopened early Sunday after a fire involving an overturned truck carrying lithium-ion batteries trapped drivers in 109-degree heat for hours on Friday and Saturday.
The authorities responded early Friday after the truck crashed and caught fire near Baker, Calif., in the northbound lanes of I-15, a major highway that leads travelers to Las Vegas. Both northbound and southbound lanes were later closed.
The southbound lanes reopened shortly after 2:30 p.m. on Friday, according to the California Highway Patrol. At 3:40 a.m. on Sunday, the California Highway Patrol said the northbound lanes had been reopened as well.
The California Highway Patrol said earlier that it had cleared the backlog of stuck vehicles on the closed highway by rerouting them to nearby I-40, which the agency described as “the only alternative” because of the location of the closure on I-15. But that caused heavy traffic on I-40.
Lithium-ion batteries, which are used in many electronic devices, including e-bikes and electric cars, contain highly flammable materials. If ignited, the batteries burn hot and are very difficult to put out.
Some on social media said they had been stopped in traffic for six hours and expressed concern about running out of gas or electric cars’ running out of charge.
Thermal Runaway
“Hazard: Lithium ion batteries involved can escalate to thermal runaway, needing massive amounts of water to extinguish.”
The above from San Bernadino County Fire.
Baker Incident
From San Bernadino County Fire (Yesterday)
Morning Update: Baker Incident The northbound lanes of the 15 Freeway near Baker remained closed overnight. To manage traffic, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) alternated the north and southbound flow on the southbound lanes. Multiple attempts were made to move the container from the freeway shoulder to open land using heavy equipment from the County Fire’s Special Operations Division, including an excavator and a dozer. Ground improvements and grading were completed in preparation for relocating the container to a safe area for long-term mitigation and cleanup. However, the container’s weight, exceeding 75,000 pounds, has made these efforts unsuccessful so far.
Current Situation: The primary concern is the air quality due to the hazardous materials and chemicals involved. Air monitoring is assessing for hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, and sulfur dioxide. These chemicals pose significant health risks at elevated levels, with hydrogen cyanide and chlorine being particularly dangerous even at low concentrations.
Traffic and Safety Measures: CHP continues to enforce a hard closure of the northbound 15 at Harvard. All travel and road closure information should be referred to the CHP Barstow office. County Fire is closely monitoring the hazmat situation and air quality in coordination with CHP and Caltrans, who have authority over freeway closures and diversion routes.
Lithium Battery Fire Sparks Traffic Mayhem Across California Desert
ZeroHedge reports Lithium Battery Fire Sparks Traffic Mayhem Across California Desert
Drivers caught in the massive traffic backup were furious.
“A different sort of energy crisis, also caused by alternative energy (a lithium battery fire),” X user Josh Young wrote.
The dangers of the ‘green’ energy transition are not being disclosed to the American people by radical leftists in the White House. There is limited transparency and unaccountability.
What Happens When a Bike Battery Explodes
If you are looking for more reasons to avoid EVs, add thermal runaway and hydrogen cyanide explosions to the list.
And If you get in an accident, even if there is no fire or explosion, your car will be totaled if the battery is the tiniest bit damaged.
For what?
So you can pretend you are doing something for the environment although you aren’t.
Jeff? Jeff???? How many times did I tell you to abandon the lithium battery dream…
Now look at you … burnt toast!!!
“Hazard: Lithium ion batteries involved can escalate to thermal runaway, needing massive amounts of water to extinguish.”
News flash: Water doesn’t put out lithium fires. It results in a chemical reaction that creates a hotter fire. They need special “electrical fire” fire trucks filled with a special retardant that can smother those fires. Otherwise, the fire fighters are doing the equivalent of pouring gasoline on the fire.
Lithium-ion batteries are used to power cell phones, laptops, wireless earbuds, watches, portable power packs, medical equipment, and emergency power backups.
Was the purpose of the batteries mentioned in the news reports?
Surely AI can fix this??????? Surely
Destined for waste disposal in Asia? Part of Green New Deal.
to supply dc power to devices needing dc power. what is the purpose of the electricity in the wires leading to your home? A battery doesn’t have a single use case, and neither does the electricity in your home wiring.
What is the nature of your question? How does the final use case of the batteries effect your understanding of the incident?
Unfortunately, the solution to Death by Lithium is not yet available on YouTube. It is on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/deeltd/videos/mercedes-aa-class-saturday-night-live/636973164175901/
And on X, previously Twitter
https://x.com/i/status/1749354855955636595
Too bad there is not something Nano they can do about the problem. Nano always seems to help, I don’t know how but it is often seen on TV. Nano this…. Nano that…. it is incredible.
Your bias has no bound. I really don’t understand why such hatred towards batteries. Why didn’t write when a oil tanker stuck under a bridge and melted the bridge above down just 3 months ago -the driver died too-? Or massive oil spills happen in oceans regularly? One incident over so many usage of lithium ion batteries gets your attention against anything battery operated. In proportional to its usage, these battery events (excluding cheaply produced and unregulated electric bike batteries) are far rare than oil caused problems. When you are blinded by bias, you only see one kind of events. For the number of EVs on the road, fire incidents far rare than gasoline powered cars in probability. It is true, however when a battery catches on fire, it takes longer to put it out. You keep bashing a technology when it is used to power EVs but same technology -even in grater numbers in terms of total power- powers your phone, your pc, or your home you you don’t seemed to care is really strange to me.
“For the number of EVs on the road, fire incidents far rare than gasoline powered cars in probability”
Is this really true? I don’t think Mish’s reporting is biased. It’s just that lithium batteries are still a backwarded technology, so ICE in all likelihood has an advantage as long as government subsidies are not involved. This will probably change when solid state batteries are developed
I just enjoy reading bad things about EVs… such as how they won’t charge in cold weather…
Why?
CUZ I AM SICK OF MY TAX DOLLARS GOING TO FUND THIS BULLSHIT!!! AND THE SOONER IT STOPS THE BETTER
Its just an excuse to make more money. An Ev isn’t green, its just sold as green and a whole lot of people want to beleive and won’t let facts get in the way of feeling good about saving the world, even if they aren’t. Don’t let your facts hurt my feelings..
Lithium batteries have some very good uses, however they are not green. Lead acid batteries have some very good uses, however they are not green.
There are no green energies, all energy production requires, mining,manufacturing,transport etc. We can make it better, but we won’t make it better by pretending its green.
technology helps people, technology kills people, its just a method, its not magic, it is controlled by humans. Humans are not perfect.
Perfection is not a feature of this realm.
ICE vehicles have a global infrastructure, for manufacture, use, and maintenance and recycling. EV vehicles are attempting to build a parallel structure, which is a great waste of resources for people worried about treading lightly on this earth that we all share.
There is not enough electricty in the grids of the world to power an equivalent system of EV vehicles to the size and distribution of ICE vehicles. That alone should make people wonder and read up, but they are not logical, they are emotional and want a dream world, that the rational understand is actually Clownworld. They are programmed by their phones and the content fed to them through their networks into an insulated dreamworld on which their ego and identity is built.
Its personally destructive to their ego and strata in society to try to disengage from their programming. So they won’t disengage and will struggle to understand the world and those around them who haven’t been programmed. Thus the schism in the world grows into a sea of insanity.
I would be interested if you started such a blog. Send link.
Chinese made battery
because we have offshored most manufacturing. its not that we can’t build for own needs in this country, its that the economics of manufacturing have been skewed to destroy domestic manufacturing via political policies.
Its a political problem involving economics that manifests as failures in our daily lives. From wages, to shortages, to price instability, to defense and war readiness. We’ve cut off our nose to spite our face, or more succintly we’ve cut off our noses to enlarge a tiny segment of our nations wallets.
Drill Baby Drill! Give me the wonderful smell of good clean diesel!!! Woohoo!
Reading how the Phoenix, AZ fire department had such a problem with EV fires that their solution was 1) Dumpster you place the flaming battery device in 2) You fill it with wet sand. Only way they found for the devices to not reignite. I’m sure this solution would scale to a semi-sized device fire. /sarc
dry sand would be better, lithium and other alkaline metals use the oxygen in water to aid in combustion. Thats why it takes hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to extinguish such fires.
The only way to extinguish them quickly is to starve them of oxygen by using a physical barrier to remove access to the atmosphere. Concrete has been used as well for this purpose. its rather difficult to add a fleet of cement mixers to every fire department along with the fact that concrete will not stay liquid infinitely, which poses even more logistical problems.
its a problem that was never really thought out when they scaled from laptop computer batteries to industrial sized batteries.
Solid State Battery is the only solution.
I prefer hyrdocarbons.
Until batteries grow on trees… I am with you
Just need to harvest Zero-Point Energy .. .let’s get started!
every “solution” brings other problems, its the law of unintended consequences.
The industry is already transitioning to less flammable LFP batteries which wouldn’t support this kind of fire.
Probably worth questioning whether it was really appropriate to completely close an interstate for this. Battery fires don’t have a big explosion risk like gasoline truck fires do. The public safety clearance area should be much smaller. Firefighters can set a perimeter of a few feet and let the batteries burn themselves out.
Unless they’re in your living room, battery fires aren’t very high risk.
I keep mine in the garage.
The concern was lithium (or LiO2) fumes rather than fire. Maybe a heavy gas staying close to ground…
Get a Chinook from 29 Palms and airlift it away! (although you’d need 4 for 80,000 lbs)
Is this “accident” and the Park Fire are signs of declining competency (as well as race-to-bottom economics via regulatory capture)?
Use prescribed burns and timber harvesting to reduce severity of forest fires.
Categorize Li-Bat as hazardous cargo (maybe they are?) requiring experience / endorsements beyond a CDL.
PS – I’ll toss in the bridge collapse as well.
Dude never underestimate GREED.
Read the two Roberto Saviano books on the Italian mobs.
The Cammora are true scumbags screwing over their own p[people with various garbage scams and crappy building materials.
Why does everyone forget the criminal layer that pervades society.
““The rules of the game have changed. The number of players has increased. New cartels spring up quickly, devouring territories and entire regions. It’s crazy making, all these new cartels. More flexible structures, faster responses, familiarity with new technology, ostentatiously lurid killings, and obscure, pseudoreligious philosophies. It is altogether a new level of frenzy.”
― Roberto Saviano, ZeroZeroZero “
Yes, Greed. Greed is check by morals and laws. I’m fine with the Mob breaking laws, bribing, etc. Unfortunately, our gov’t is now the mob. Yes, I’m a late comer to this idea.
More info, thanks to Mish for the picture, cargo is labeled as UN 3536 which is a Class 9 Hazard (so not quite tomatoes):
Class 9 hazards are classified as miscellaneous dangerous goods, which include lithium batteries, asbestos, dry ice and other consumer commodities.
So much “green” stuff is uneconomical; supported through outright subsidies (cash) or regulatory subsidy (look the other way).
PS – what the hell is Snoop Dogg doing at the Olympics? He may be able to hold his breath after a took longer than any swimmer.
Oh, you haven’t even begun to see the mob DT is going to bring in…
Snoop is at the olympics because he was given a check to appear there. its called publicity. The French have a fascination with Negroes, and so a quirky negro was needed to excite the French population. Snoop ticked off all the boxes and a fee was negotiated.
It can be seen as shameful, or exciting, or just a guy doing a job and getting paid for it. Its just the way things are..
Better to worry over the things that impact your own life, than try to understand the nuances of propaganda for a circus created and maintained by the NWO.
“For what?
So you can pretend you are doing something for the environment although you aren’t.”
bingo!
Remember when you could drive down the local highway and throw cans of beer at the Joggers ( not the racist ones but REAL fad joggers)?
The good old days, sigh.
no one ever wasted good beer on foolish joggers. perhaps your memories have been impaired.
But the scam has made boomer J Kerry and Al Gore rich due to lucrative political consensus, not science. Oh, and oh bummer Obama too. . ,
“Everyone I know is either dead or in jail. I want to become a boss. I want to have supermarkets, stores,
factories, I want to have women. I want three cars, I want respect when I go into a store, I want to have
warehouses all over the world. And then I want to die. I want to die like a man, like someone who truly
commands. I want to be killed.”
― Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah
How are you supposed to get to vegas?
By plane fly in.
This triggered PTSD in me because 33 years ago, almost to the day, “A freight train carrying a corrosive chemical derailed on Sunday, forcing the closing of a 10-mile stretch of one of California’s main north-south highways”
That would be Highway 101. Closed for 5 days starting on 7/30/1991 after a train hit an overpass.
Yours truly was caught in the ‘worst traffic jam in history’ that resulted from that.
Have you pitched it to Netflix yet?
If you went Disney you would need to be a chick and make it Gay.
and the train needs to be derailed by “Ultra Right Wing:” terrorists, also need to have a crew of wise minorities racing to save the day, while white men get in the way and cause chaos until they are neutralized by re-education via snappy dialogue spoken in a dialtecial slang that makes sense to no one.
Suggest LIzzo as being the hero, and doing several musical numbers as she pulls train cars off the tracks etc….
An oil tanker skidding on black ice, in a rear end collision, can be worse.
Oil is typically transported by pipeline or rail. You’ve also invoked a double failure – black ice plus need for emergency braking.
I’ll wager Mr. Li-Ion simply fell asleep and went off the road.
Still, maybe we raise the requirements for drivers. Like airplanes, work in pairs with hazardous cargo or require a “doze camera” to shut down the truck after a couple nod-offs (but shame, the trucker will lose efficiency not driving when tired).
or simply a team of drivers, rather than a single driver….
black ice is racist..
With all the lithium consumed by the so called Biden Harris administration (gee, funny, when have we ever spoken about a VP like this) along with the ancient muckety mucks of the DNC elite, I would not be surprised if we saw several spontaneous combustions … Nancy was there stammering then poof, up in smoke.
I think body fat is required along with the alcohol.
sounds like a NWO dinner party…
No technology is without problems. ICE running on fossil fuels has had some fairly large accidents and fires.
EV’s will not be replacing ICE any time soon in a meaningful way.
New generation ICE engines still hold some promising advantages from higher efficiency capture when burning fuel and multi fuel capability. They are coming to the market as soon as some durability and environmental qualifying factors get worked out.
The basic design engineering features for these next motors is already proven and well beyond theoretical concepts.
Ian MacDonald says Hydrogen in Hopeland. Scifi is always fairly close.
The particular engine Company I have put money into can burn Hydrogen.
However their primary fuel being designed for is a common Fossil fuel.
Still highly speculative but far from sci-fi land.
So far have gotten it right that EV was not going to fulfill the hype.
Also have it right that next generation engines are coming to market.
Hopefully my choice of companies proves out as number three on the hit parade.
Hydrogen is not a fuel, its an energy transport mechanism that has relatively low energy density or carrying capacity when compared to hydrocarbons which also contain hydrogen but are much better fuels.
Gavin Newsom did that.
Certain segments of the government are experimenting with battery packs. I’ll only say one thing and it’s true of all battery packs, that if even ONE cell is out of spec the entire pack is trash. The way they are put together for balancing and cooling does not allow one cell to be taken out and replaced.
Very expensive.
Naw, you relay around groupings of cells that don’t perform to spec as aging occurs unevenly. Plus fuses on every cell I think. Agree they are not maintanable but failures occur and capacity drops … no big deal.
More than you want to know here:
http://large.stanford.edu/publications/power/references/docs/tesla.pdf
False, I build them. There are no fuses on cells, and the job of the BMS is to balance the cells to .001/V of each other. When a cell goes out it creates a dangerous situation that can result in a battery fire.
Open pit lithium mines in Chile, minor miners digging by hand in deep cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, batteries assembled in ecologically damaging factories in China. EV drivers think they’re saving the planet. I don’t know how they can sleep at night.
Its all about global depopulation.
Ever read C. M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons. Predates Idiocracy and I am fairly certain everything was stolen except the blatant racism of the original.
you do have the rec reading list today!
You have no idea of the breadth I read and view. Originality is very rare these days.
Most posters on these sites are US centeric and have very few interests. The more layers you see the more you truly comprehend.
I noticed that a Melon a truly Gray man made the news the other day.
Shocked me as real power remains hidden and plays the illusion card of deep state or billionaire names and inherited wealth.
No need for political originality. Locke and Federalist papers said it best ; also see Stalin, Lennin, Pol Pot, Mao, …for bad examples.
There is a great radio play of the marching morons,available as an mp3 on archive.org. I’m still chuckling after listening a couple weeks ago. it was brilliant.
Activists are the useful idiot army of the ruling class.
I just rewatched The Missouri Breaks. Lot’s of child miners in that film.
Brando was awesome too.
I have an electric scooter in the front room..hope it doesn’t explode. Did you see the video of the guy (possibly in China) in the elevator carrying in his e-bike battery ? It exploded and cooked him alive..check Salty Cracker on You Tube for more.
I had that video when I wrote the post. Forgot to put it in. Added to post now. Thanks
My idiot town adopted escooters just when Paris was banning them and NYC was complaining about all the fires. Two years later they are gone. Rumor was a number of fires.
How does any government official not due a simple web search on something so dangerous?
if it interferes with his check from the escooter company, its rather easy to ignore. Politicians don’t work for you, they work for the highest bidder..
Great video … and folks are putting these power packs in their attached garages … so far, so good/lucky with Tesla; not sure of BVD quality on powerpacks.
They voted for it