- What: 75-minute webinar focused on electric vehicle firefighting
- When: Nov. 10, 10 a.m. PT / 1 p.m. ET
- How to participate: Complete the form on this page to register.
As EVs become more common, departments are still asking what actually works at the scene. A new round of full-scale fire experiments puts evidence behind those questions.
Join Adam Barowy, principal research engineer with UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute, for a session providing important new evidence for fire departments developing or reviewing their operational approach to electric vehicle incidents.
FSRI’s Fire Safety of Batteries and Electric Vehicles research program used full-scale electric vehicle fire experiments to examine some of the most important operational questions facing today’s fire service, including identifying battery involvement, the effectiveness of conventional suppression tactics, firefighter exposure, the use of emerging suppression tools, reignition potential and safe incident termination.
We’ll cover:
- What full-scale testing tells us about conventional vehicle-fire suppression tactics when an EV battery is involved;
- Why water from a standard handline remains an important first-line suppression tool, and where its limitations begin;
- Fire behavior and thermal runaway considerations during EV incidents;
- Firefighter exposure to combustion products and the implications for PPE, SCBA, positioning and decontamination;
- What the experiments revealed about under-vehicle nozzles, fire blankets and other proposed EV fire-control strategies;
- Reignition potential and the challenges associated with determining when an EV incident is truly over;
- Post-fire considerations, including towing, vehicle isolation and continued monitoring; and
- What this emerging body of evidence may mean for fire prevention, fire protection professionals and Authorities Having Jurisdiction as EVs become increasingly common within the built environment.
Meet our panelist
Adam Barowy is principal research engineer with the Fire Safety Research Institute, part of UL Research Institutes. His work has included full-scale fire research, emerging fire hazards, energy-storage technologies and the development of fire-service tactics. Before joining FSRI, Barowy worked in commercial fire research developing UL standards and test methods and helped advance large-scale testing of energy-storage systems. Earlier in his career, Barowy conducted full-scale fire research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Register for this event by completing the “Register for the FireRescue1 webinar” form on this page.
