Something is very wrong about this fire.
For it to spread like that,
1. Sabotage - Terrorism
2. GROSS incompetence
3. Corners cut building it, inspectors paid to look the other way.
4. Malfeasance during upkeep and inspections.
These storage packs are modular. Each one should have it's own kind of built in fire protection system, which is basically..... worthless. Once it touches off, ISOLATE it and let it burn out. Let's call it a connex box full of batteries, wired in series / parallel, feeding an inverter, feeding a transformer, feeding probably a substation, going onto the mains, 230KV, or did it hit the 500K, 768KV bus? Id have to look at the blueprints to see, not that inquisitive, and lazy tonight so don't know.
My point being, lets say a connex has 50 batteries in it, and one or two of them go woof. You pull the bus tie on that bitch, close it off and let the fucker burn. That one battery is probably going to cause the other 49 to sympathetically touch off as the short circuit current thru the bad one, overheats them and they overheat, short and curl / crowbar themselves. Never mind the hydrogen / Lithium Hydroxide blowtorch shooting out at 1800 degrees or whatever it is, and the copper now going up as well. anyways.
the entire connex is involved. let it burn, you isolated it from the others, it should self contain until it burns out. You will NOT put the fire out, it's burning internal to the battery itself, unless you disassemble the actual battery, (Hint: you won't, you can't) , it's going to burn. Let it burn.
NOW......
if the thing is built properly, the fire is contained, the flames should be directed to a safe direction, it should stay in the one area.
sometimes the thing might be blowing at another unit, or they are put in modules.
ok so you may have 3 or 4 of them in a 'pack'.
Ok, FINE you burn out 4 of them.
the rest of them should be firewalled from each other, or airgapped, there should be walking distance between them enough so the fire won't overheat and touch off the other ones.
Well what about the massive short circuit?
That is why they should have circuit breakers on them, that is why EACH ONE. should have expulsion fuses on it, or at least on the transformers, so if you do cause a massive short, you don't overcurrent and overheat / blow up the rest of them from the short circuit from the fire. You boom boom the expulsion fuses and isolate the rest from it so it can't be electrically taken down. Even if I crowbarred the main bus coming out of the place, it should have relayed out long before it got to this mode of criticality. Even if the 'close in' relay set malfunctioned or was set wrong, the TDR system should have taken it out with the next down the line set of relays. Even if your stupid technician left the matchbook cover in the contacts after his last optest, the backups still should catch it. There is so much redundancy to prevent JUST such a thing as this happening.
In my 40 years of working in the power industry, ive seen plenty of electrical malfunctions and fires, and short circuits and explosions, AND. protection devices doing just what they are designed to do... very impressive indeed !!! .. this 'event' had help.,
Protection? Doesn't seem like that happened here?
WHY?
Looking back over the past 3 or 4 years...
There have been wayyyy too many fires...
at gas plants.
at switch yards.
at food processing plants
at energy facilities
at energy storage plants
at food growing places, ie chicken farms etc.
at gas pumping stations.
at power battery plants.... this is another lithium fire.. how convenient.
Yet you hear NOTHING of them once the day or two has passed.
It used to be that fires like this, stayed on the news cycle for weeks and months until we found out exactly what happened and who did it.
Now, nobody cares,
It's sabotage, we are being attacked from within... and it's being suppressed. WHY?
With all the safeguards places like this have, for a fire of this magnitude to happen..... it had help. PLENTY of help.
Looks like the FBI has been busy once again.
This is just too convenient, there is too much stuff that would have to go wrong at just the right (or wrong) time for this to get this bad.
it had help.
The smoke is nasty, it will dissipate, in reality with the shit put in the air by the LA fire, it's negligible.
The wildlife in the area.. as long as firefighting water does not get into the groundwater, which it seems won't happen because they didn't try to drown it, like they generally (mistakenly) tend to do, they just let it burn itself clear. it would be alkaline if it did. Think Lye, Lithium Hydroxide, the Copper and it's salts aren't too nifty, the Cobalt aint too purty either. The maganeese and stuff, not fun. The cyanides from the plastic burning, ehh.. you should be good.
Was the company who owned the batteries in trouble? Someone smell an insurance scam possibly? With most the insurance companies leaving CA to begin with, lets add one more reason for them to do so. Nobody will want to live there, nor be able to afford it even if they did.
will be interesting to see if they actually DO investigate this or if it just falls to the wayside like so many other news worthy stories that get buried and forgotten. ooh the cardassians are on... quick turn the channel !!!!
Aaron
Author
Topic: Big lithium battery fire in CA (Read 12764 times)