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Barely a week goes by without the world being reminded of how dangerous EVs are that rely on large lithium-ion (LI) batteries for transportation and electricity.

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CALIFORNIA: The mainstream media couldn't suppress a story out of Baker, California, where a truck carrying LI batteries overturned and caught fire. A Climate Realism story described the situation this way:

(A) A long-haul truck carrying lithium-ion batteries for EVs and for emergency power supplies for EVs overturned on Interstate Highway 15 (I-15) between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The truck caught fire, forcing the closure of first one lane and eventually the entire highway.

As reported by several media outlets, such as KVVU-5 Las Vegas and the  Las Vegas Review-Journal , the accident caused a massive traffic jam, closing the highway from Friday through Monday.

“I mean, I've never seen anything like this,” Benjamin Leffel, an associate professor of public policy at UNLV, told KVVU-5 News. “Many have called it the worst traffic jam of their lives. I have to agree with them.”

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Due to the unique hazards and nature of the lithium-ion battery fire, firefighters were unable to extinguish the fire and were ultimately forced to push the truck 100 feet off the road and into the surrounding desert, where they then built a berm around it.

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As the Review-Journal   noted, “[burning lithium batteries is particularly dangerous, because they produce chemicals and toxic gases, making it essential to handle the situation with extreme caution….” As a result, the Hazmat team said, the fire would allow itself to burn itself out and did not provide a timeline for when they expected the fire to be extinguished.

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And that's just one truck in a fairly remote location with no fire hydrants near.

Following up on the story, enterprising  KTNV, Channel 13  in Las Vegas, spoke, on camera, with Las Vegas residents and the deputy chief of the Clark County Fire Department, discussing their concerns about the possibility of a similar fire occurring. ​on roads and highways in the city itself.

The deputy chief admitted that the department had spent a lot of time discussing how to deal with toxic LI battery fires and that dealing with such fires would be a challenge in the city.

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Of course, the Los Angeles-Las Vegas freeway isn't the only location where LI battery fires have proven to be a "challenge."

ELECTRIC BUS FIRES are breaking out everywhere, from  Paris  to  London  to all over the  United States  . As  one video shows  , the dangers posed by the fires have led to entire fleets being taken offline and sent back to the factories.

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And electric bus fires are not the only or most common and dangerous threat.

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NEW YORK CITY: E-scooters have become the scourge of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY).

The    New York Post   reported that Chief Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn said fires caused by LI batteries have “increased nearly ninefold from 2022, with more fires related to the batteries in the past two months than in all of 2019.” Indeed, in 2023, LI batteries were the biggest cause of fires in the city. As Fox News wrote:

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ELECTRIC BICYCLES caused a record number of fires, injuries and deaths in New York City last year. Democrats, who seem to have one-track green minds, continued to subsidize and push for broader acceptance of this device as a solution to global warming.

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In total, e-bikes caused 267 fires that caused 18 deaths and 150 injuries in the city, according to New York Fire Department (FDNY) data shared with Fox News Digital.

The figures represent the highest levels of any statistic, with e-bike related deaths increasing by 200%, fires increasing by 21% and injuries increasing by 2% in the city year on year.

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INDIA: E-scooter fires have also  caused deaths in India  . There are many individual incidents of scooters catching fire on the streets, but the largest and deadliest incident of an LI battery fire in India was when the electric scooters in a sales/showroom in Mumbai spontaneously combusted, killing eight people and another eleven ended up in hospital.

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SEA-GOING SHIPS: Then there are the electric car fires that have burned homes and charging stations, leading to recalls;  ships with LI battery cars  catching fire and sinking, with the crew unable to put out the fire – think about that, an  entire ship sinking  due to nothing more than an LI battery spontaneously igniting; insurers in the UK stopping insuring electric vehicles; and standards set for the distance between electric vehicles in repair yards and scrap yards.

In Australia, hazardous waste management companies say they need a coordinated plan to deal with LI battery waste and fires, with the batteries causing more than 10,000 fires a year.

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SOUTH KOREA: Last week alone, two electric car fires broke out in parking garages in South Korea.  One car was charging  when it burst into flames.

Firefighters were able to extinguish the fire without damage to surrounding vehicles and without compromising the integrity of the facility itself, towing the car from the garage to ensure no further damage was caused.

The other incident had more than 100 innocent victims. As  The Wall Street Journal   described the incident in which an electric Mercedes spontaneously combusted, acting like a bomb and taking out surrounding vehicles:

It took only seconds for an underground South Korean parking lot to go up in flames. The culprit: a Mercedes-Benz EQE electric vehicle that was not charged.

The fire destroyed dozens of cars in the neighborhood, burned another 100 vehicles and forced hundreds of residents into emergency shelter as the buildings above the parking lot lost power and electricity.

No one died, but it took eight hours for the fire to be extinguished.

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Those are just the “small” fires. Time and again, battery warehouses, manufacturing facilities and backup power plants, consisting of aisle after aisle of LI batteries built to supply power to the grid for relatively short periods of time to counteract the up/down variations of  wind and solar outputs, have been engulfed in flames erupted, not extinguishable for days, sometimes with fatal consequences for firefighters and toxic emissions into the air, resulting in evacuations.

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SOUTH KOREA: A fire at a battery factory in South Korea in early June resulted in the deaths of 22 workers and the hospitalization of eight others.

This was almost a third of the total workforce at the time the battery cells started to explode.

The fire was so hot that the roof of the building collapsed before the fire could be extinguished.

Fire official Kim Jin-young told Agence France-Presse that “most of the bodies are severely burned, so it will take some time to identify them all.”

SAN DIEGO: Just two weeks earlier, on May 15, 2024, a fire broke out at a large backup LI battery energy storage facility in suburban San Diego.

The batteries began to explode in a cascade.

The fire, which burned for six days and smoldered for another five, spewed toxins into the air throughout the period.

Roads were closed to and around the factory, local businesses and homes were evacuated and a 'stay in place' order was issued for a nearby prison.

NEW YORK STATE: Before the fire, New York-based LS Power boasted that the Gateway project, which opened in August 2020, was “the largest battery energy storage project in the world.”

Unless and until the project is rebuilt, all that backup power will be offline, meaning traditional power plants have to perform the counteracting of the variable outputs of wind and solar systems

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AUSTRALIA: In fact, the threat of major factory/storage facility fires has been recognized and ignored for some time by authorities promoting green technology.

As I detailed in a previous CCW post, in late July 2021, a fire broke out at one of the largest battery factories in the world, a partnership with Tesla in Australia.

The factory caught fire during testing and burned for days, with firefighters initially unable to tackle the blaze as they had no breathing apparatus to protect them from the toxic fumes. Authorities told local residents to stay indoors and close windows and other vents.

At the time of that fire, CNBC had already covered more than 40 such spontaneous combustion incidents at battery factories or battery storage facilities in the past decade, most of which have occurred since 2019.

ARIZONA AND CHINA: A fire at a battery factory in Arizona in 2019 seriously injured two emergency workers, and in China two firefighters were killed when a battery module connected to solar panels on the roof of a shopping center burst into flames.

SOLAR SYSTEMS ON ROOFS: And in August 2021, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) reported that the battery modules of approximately 12,000 residential solar panel systems had been recalled by manufacturers, in 2020 and to that point in 2021, due to the danger of combustion.

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In 1965, Ralph Nader's book    Unsafe at Any Speed ​​was  published   as an indictment of the alleged dangers of the Chevrolet Corvair.

Within a few years, production of the car ceased and it was touted as an example of advocacy to keep consumers safe in the decades that followed.

This is despite the fact that there is no evidence that the rear-engine Corvair caused injuries or deaths that could not have occurred in an accident with any other car built during that period.

Subsequent testing by both the United States Department of Transportation and independent automotive testing laboratories indicated that the Corvair was not particularly dangerous by the standards of the time.

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When I was little, we had a toy/game called lawn darts.

The CPSC banned its sale long after I stopped using it.

The reason: In the previous decade, 6,100 Americans had visited the emergency room for lawn dart accidents, with more than half of those injured being 10 years old or younger.

Those were the good old days when consumer protection meant something.