WASHINGTON – Firefighters in California had to make use of about 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish a burning battery in a Tesla semi-trailer after an accident, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
In addition to the large amounts of water, firefighters also used an aircraft as a precautionary measure to drop fire retardant within the “immediate vicinity” of the electrical truck, the agency said in a preliminary report.
Firefighters had previously stated that the battery had reached a temperature of 540 degrees Celsius throughout the flames.
The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash on Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it might investigate the fireplace hazard posed by the truck's large lithium-ion battery.
The agency also found that the truck was not equipped with any of Tesla's partially automated driving systems on the time of the accident, the report said. The systems weren’t operational and “could not be activated,” the agency said.
The crash occurred at about 3:13 a.m. because the semi was being driven by a Tesla worker from Livermore, California, to a Tesla factory in Sparks, Nevada. The semi left the road on a right-hand curve and struck a tree, the report said. It plunged down a slope and have become stuck on several trees. The driver was not injured.
After the accident, the semi-truck's lithium-ion battery caught fire. Firefighters extinguished the flames with water and kept the batteries cool. The highway was closed for about 15 hours while firefighters made sure the batteries were cool enough to recuperate the truck.
The NTSB said it was investigating all points of the crash to find out the cause. The agency said it intends to issue safety recommendations to stop similar incidents.
A message searching for comment was left Thursday from Tesla, based in Austin, Texas.
After an investigation that resulted in 2021, the NTSB found that fires in high-voltage batteries for electric vehicles pose a risk to first responders and that the manufacturers' guidelines for coping with them are inadequate.
The agency, which has no enforcement powers and might only make recommendations, asked manufacturers to develop vehicle-specific guidelines to combat battery fires and limit chemical thermal runaway and reignition. The guidelines also needs to include information on how you can safely store vehicles with damaged lithium-ion batteries, the agency said.
Tesla began delivering the electrical semis in December 2022, greater than three years after CEO Elon Musk announced his company would begin production of the trucks. Musk said the Semi can have a variety of 500 miles (800 kilometers) per charge when pulling a load of 82,000 kilos (37,000 kilos).
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