Car Park Fires
By Paul Homewood
h/t Caffe Anvils
I am told that there was another major carpark fire, in December 2017 in Liverpool.
It was evidently a major event, as Merseyside Fire Service published a report a few months later.
It is interesting to compare it with Luton.
First of all, the timeline:
In the Kings Dock fire, it took two hours from the 999 calls for the fire to have become so dangerous that firefighters were withdrawn.
At Luton, the local fire chief, Andy Hopkinson, maintains that when his crews arrived within ten minutes of the 999 calls, they were faced with “a rapidly developing and escalating fire, involving a large number of vehicles spread across a number of floors”.
Secondly the Liverpool fire was spread by running fuel fires – in other words, fuel escaped from burning cars, which caught fire, thus spreading the fire to the next car in line. Fires spread to the floor below, as the burning fuel descended the drainage system.
There is a third issue as well. The Liverpool fire report noted that the first hour only saw two rows of cars affected. This implies that the fire could only spread to the next car close to it, consistent with running fuel. Footage of Luton shows that the fire spread quickly over large distances by explosion.
Clearly the Liverpool fire had little in common with Luton, where the fire spread much more rapidly, and where the there is footage of one of the floors actually collapsing, bringing the burning vehicles from above with it.
The only possible explanation is that the Luton fire involved one, and most probably more, EVs, which turned a slow developing fire into the catastrophic event we have all seen,
One final comment.
The Merseyside report noted the absence of sprinkler systems, and it appears that Luton’s car park also did not have any sprinklers working.
While these would clearly be invaluable in an ordinary car fire, they would be worse than useless in a lithium battery fire.
I can only repeat – if a fire occurred in an underground car park full EVs below a block of flats, it would be a disaster.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
HSE do not care about the huge risks from LI-ion battery fires/explosions. Because doing so would conflict with the government’s Net Zero policy. Large Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) get approved without the risks to the public or the environment being taken into account. We are the mercy of stupid, ignorant politicians of all major parties.
In general I believe that MSCP designs mainly have to consider pedestrian exits eg stairwells NOT property within , but some aspects of structural stability in the event of a fire & are NOT mandated to install sprinkler systems.
The IMF have published an amazing “Chart of the Week: Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion: August 24, 2023”. This massive so-called “subsidy cost” is based on a very speculative paper in Nature that does not stand much serious examination. The Nature paper is based on the estimated cost of damage due to global warming according to the IPCC published models. The so-called “implicit subsidy” is a carbon tax value that these authors believe should be applied to fossil fuel burn to cover their calculated costs of climate damage and millions dying from the higher temperatures. Climate-models cannot lie, cannot lie, cannot lie…..
I’m sure that India and China will rush to join the queue to cut these “implicit subsidies” for their emissions because a computer model says so.
What is truly concerning is that a body like the IMF will publish such junk-science which can be used to influence governmental policies. This is typical of economics modelling, with lots of fuzzy-logic and uncertainty; they also use meta-data from a group of selected people in some of the models. The value of $185/ tonne CO2 comes with an error range of $44 to $413 / tonne. In my opinion the whole modelling process is little more than science fiction.
Clownish decadence.
‘a carbon tax value that these authors believe should be applied to fossil fuel burn to cover their calculated costs of climate damage and millions dying from the higher temperatures’
Should you stop burning fossil fuels, London will be a ghost town in less than a month.
BTW, who gets this ‘tax?’ Government. Which solves what?
“Y’all are damaging the climate, so give us money.”
“The IMF have published an amazing “Chart of the Week: Fossil Fuel Subsidies Surged to Record $7 Trillion: August 24, 2023” ”
At least the UK has a clear conscience on that.
As our sole Green party MP has twice been reminded:
One is tempted to suggest that owners of EVS should never park them in a garage that is connected to, or is part of, the house.
A ‘proper’ investigation will need to record reg or VIN nos. of all vehicles & their locations, to determine vehicle type, when assessing method of spread.
It’ll take weeks to get owners with keys, back from holidays to move their undamaged vehicles, and at whose risk- given lack of structural integrity.
It could take minutes, cctv records every car reg
The war on fossil fuels is insane. Why?
1. Fossil fuels do NOT accumulate in the atmosphere as the IPCC assumes they do. Emissions from fossil fuel use are completely absorbed by Earth’s biosphere in less than six years. The 100-year accumulation is a small fraction of the IPCC’s crazed estimate that lacks scientific foundation.
2. The source of growing atmospheric CO2 is irrelevant because it has no discernible impact on changing climate. First, in Earth’s long history of carbon-based life forms (that would include all animals and plants), atmospheric CO2 has been more than 15 times higher than today. One of Earth’s coldest climate episodes occurred between 430 and 460 million years ago. It started when atmospheric CO2 was about 4000 ppm (roughly ten times the current figure). As temperatures plunged 10 deg. C over about 15 million years, atmospheric CO2 was GROWING to 4500 ppm! When climate warmed during the next 15 million years, atmospheric CO2 was FALLING by 1500 ppm to 3000 ppm. This is just one of many counter-examples to the invalid theory that claims changing atmospheric CO2 is a strong climate change force. It is not.
If atmospheric CO2 were really a climate change force, then there would have to be a causative relationship between changing atmospheric CO2 and changing climate. The IPCC claims such a relationship exists and that rising CO2 will cause “catastrophic” climate warming. Rubbish!
Don’t take my word for it, take the clear evidence in nature. Every theory must be consistent with observation. Therefore, climate change theory must support the geologic evidence nature provides that gives us a very long history of planetary atmospheric CO2 and climate (specifically temperature).
We also have reasonably good observed evidence since 1880.
In both cases, the correlation coefficients between changing atmospheric CO2 and changing global average surface temperature hover between zero and less than 0.20. Correlation coefficient should be at least 0.70, preferably closer to 1.00 for the changing climate to be correlated with changing atmospheric CO2. The clear evidence in nature (“observation”) informs us that the two measures are uncorrelated.
No correlation means no causation is possible.
End of story. All the rest is noise.
“Net Zero”, “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming”, “fossil fuel” demonization, all are simply noise because they are based on an invalid premise.
A very expensive noise.
This travesty must be stopped… and any politicians trying to gain by supporting “climate change” initiatives should be booted out of office for being terminally ignorant.
Our resources are too precious to squander them on pipe dreams and other silly programs (support for unreliable and costly windmills & solar panels to generate electricity).
Fantastic summary Bob. EVs are there to reduce CO2, so are battery factories, windmills, heat pumps, carbon capture, big scale hydrogen and fracking avoidance. All doomed to failure and so costly to the man in the street. Looks like EVs are already well out of the blocks!
“Running fuel fires, due to failure of plastic fuel tanks, in early stages of vehicle fires can be expected. It is estimated 85% of European vehicles have plastic fuel tanks.”
” due to failure of plastic fuel tanks, ”
My GUESS is that this was the biggest contributory factor (excludng initial ignition) at the Liverpool fire and the Luton fire
It is only a matter of time before there is an EV fire on a car ferry. I believe one Norwegian carrier has already banned the carriage of EV’s. The risk cannot be denied, and it’s going to cause awful difficulties for the phasing out of petrol and diesel. If Government’s don’t do it, the insurance companies will.
If a car park fire, such as this or the Luton one is found to be caused by an ev does the insurer of that ev become responsible for the whole cost of the incident? If so that is going to cause a good deal of head scratching if not downright panic among insurers.
Insurers are relaxed about EVs on ferries. See my comment at: https://wordpress.com/comment/cliscep.com/147083
“The risk cannot be denied”
Sure it can. Search the interweb, and you’ll find all sorts of claims that EVs have a drastically lower change of catching fire than ICE vehicles (and hybrid EV/ICE are roman candles).
1. I don’t trust anything they say,
2. EV fires are extremely more difficult to manage than ICE fires, to whit: “It only takes one.”
3. ICE vehicles can be shipped with no fuel onboard, which radically changes the risk.
My uncle was a fire investigator for Northumberland Fire Service. It was something I was interested in doing for many years and used to talk to him a lot about it. One thing he would always say is that two fires are never the same, so to understand things, you need to consider;
– the initial cause of the fire, such as a naked flame coming into contact with a combustible material, overload of electrical cabling, unexpected combustible gas in a location where sparks are likely, etc.
– the location of all associated combustible materials, e.g. woods, plastics, resins, chemicals, oil based materials, etc
– air gaps between combustible materials
– any forms of suppression
– air supply, renewal, and direction
– fire resistance of surfaces with items on fire
– secondary fuels becoming available due to their containment becoming breached in a fire (e.g. that fuel can in your garage you keep for your lawnmower)
So, although the timeline between the Liverpool and Luton fires are different, the reason for it could be down to a number of variables. Given that the contractor that built Luton’s car park went bust, calls into question whether corners were cut during the build. Was the correct materials used, installed correctly, how were safety features tested, what processes did they recommend to contain fires, did they do a risk assessment before deciding not to include sprinklers, etc.
There will be a full investigation done on this fire, given its extent. Knowing how in depth these investigations are done, gives me confidence that lessons will be learnt.
After the Kings Cross Fire in in 1987 that killed 37 people. There was a thorough investigation with recommendations to be implemented.
One of those was improved underground communication a contract was awarded and a new system introduced at great expense. But when the underground bombing in 2005 the underground communication system was found wanting. One of the problems was the aerials used were to short. Longer aerials would have cost penny’s more.
So I am not confident that the correct lessons will be learnt.
Immediately after the Kings Cross’ fire, the man in charge (Dr Ridley??) resigned. Before that he ran the Tyneside system, very successfully. He also ran the works that put a rail service under the water between Hong Kong island and Kowloon.
Excellent person – who used to travel to work on Tyneside by bus!!!