By WILL SABEL COURTNEY
A Tesla Semi crash in California last month required firefighters to dump 50,000 gallons of water on the burning wreckage of the electric tractor-trailer in order to extinguish the fire, the National Transportation Safety Board announced on Thursday — and authorities were even forced to call in air support to waterbomb the vicinity to keep the fire from spreading.
The NTSB’s preliminary report states that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection used an aircraft to drop flame retardant on the “immediate area” of the burning electric truck, in order to prevent the fire from spreading to the nearby forest. The California Highway Patrol said the inferno’s temperatures climbed as high as 1,000º Fahrenheit, according to the Associated Press.
The Semi was being driven by a Tesla employee, and was en route to a company facility in Sparks, Nevada — home of Tesla’s massive Gigafactory battery manufacturing facility — when the crash occurred, according to the report. The NTSB says the vehicle’s Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, or ADAS, were not operational at the time of the incident.
According to the NTSB, the Tesla truck was approximately 30 miles from Lake Tahoe traveling eastbound along Interstate 80 when the crash occurred at 3:15am on August 19, sending the Semi into a conflagration. Authorities were forced to close the highway, which serves as one of a handful of ways in the area through the Sierra Nevada mountains, for 14 hours while working to extinguish the blaze and attend to the wreck. The Tesla was then taken to an open-air location and kept under observation for 24 hours to make sure the batteries didn’t catch fire again. (Re-ignition can be a problem with lithium-ion fires, as their makeup effectively gives them all three parts of the so-called “fire triangle” needed for a blaze to occur.)
50,000 gallons, for reference, is equivalent to a pool that’s 50 feet long and 24 feet wide, with a 3–8 foot depth gradient. That’s noticeably bigger than the average household inground pool, which typically range from 20–40 feet long and 10–20 feet wide, according to Angie’s List. For reference, a typical tanker truck used by a fire department, such as the Pierce BX Tanker, holds 3,000 gallons of water.
