Hurricane Ian leads to warning over electric vehicles catching fire

With the death and destruction that came with Hurricane Ian last week also came a relatively new and potentially growing problem: electric vehicles (EVs) catching fire. Florida State Fire Marshal Jimmy Patronis highlighted the issue in a tweet thread Thursday.

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start. That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale,” Patronis tweeted. “It takes special training and understanding of EVs to ensure these fires are put out quickly and safely.”

It also takes plenty of manpower and water power. Last April, a Tesla Model S crashed in a suburb of Houston and started on fire. Eight firefighters ultimately spent seven hours putting out the fire, using 28,000 gallons of water to get the job done.

As the popularity of electric vehicles grows, firefighters nationwide are realizing that they are not fully equipped to deal with them. So they have been banding together, largely informally, to share information and help each other out.

Electric cars rely on a bank of lithium-ion batteries, similar to batteries found in a cellphone or computer. But unlike a small phone battery, the large batteries found in the Tesla Model X, for instance, contain enough energy to power an average American home for more than two days. So when an electric vehicle catches on fire, damaged energy cells cause temperatures to rise out of control and the resulting blaze can require a significant amount of water to put out.

The fire problem could get even worse as natural disasters like Ian continue to worsen and electric vehicles continue to grow in popularity. Upon taking office, President Joe Biden set a goal of ensuring 50% of new cars being EVs by 2030. In addition, multiple states have moved to require all new cars and trucks sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035.

NBC News and FOX Weather contributed to this report.