The car park

Going slightly off topic but also staying generally on topic... I spent Saturday night/Sunday morning aboard an overnight ferry from France to the UK and, as how my usual geeky brain works, as we were boarding with our vehicle and parked up alongside the lorries and RVs etc belonging to our fellow travellers, I got to wondering how they deal with EVs for fire risks etc while on board? 

If you're using the rail tunnel its a bit different as there is a service tunnel running alongside that's used for escape in case of fire etc (I'd love the opportunity to cycle the 26 mile length of the service tunnel but that's another story ) but obviously if you're out in the middle of the channel and one of the EVs on board suddenly catches fire in the hold, how is that dealt with? 

Needless to say, I familiarised myself with ALL the safety notices in my cabin on the topic of the evacuation process, assembly points and lifeboat locations etc before getting my head down for a few hours kip!  

And just to re-emphasise the points made above, whist there are differences in the risks between ICE and EVs, the probability of a fire occurring due to an ICE currently appears to be higher than with an EV.

Or in other words, cars are (and always have been) dangerous cargo whatever their fuel source. 

Just as I suspect (to go further off topic) there will be people nervous today about rail travel after the news from Spain, and hence choosing to travel by road, despite the fact that the road risks are about 100 times higher than rail risks. Familiar risks don't make headlines. 

Oooh interesting mapj1 thank you for the link! I see though that it was withdrawn with an amendment now which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mgn-653-m-amendment-1-electric-vehicles-onboard-passenger-roll-onroll-off-ro-ro-ferries/mgn-653-m-amendment-1-electric-vehicles-onboard-passenger-roll-onroll-off-ro-ro-ferries--2 Some more random info to fill up that geeky brain of mine! 

Lisa Miles said:

aboard an overnight ferry from France to the UK and, as how my usual geeky brain works, as we were boarding with our vehicle and parked up alongside the lorries and RVs etc belonging to our fellow travellers, I got to wondering how they deal with EVs for fire risks etc while on board?

Have a look at the LASH FIRE - Webinar 'Fire on ro-ro deck' videos for lots of fun stuff about recent research. 

The nay sayers like to highlight that most EVs are of recent manufacturing date, while the ICE vehicles (esp those involved in fires) are older and likely in a poorly maintained position.

Half truths go faster!

mapj1 said:

you probably have not read https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mgn-653-m-electric-vehicles-onboard-passenger-roll-onroll-off-ro-ro-ferries/mgn-653-m-electric-vehicles-onboard-passenger-roll-onroll-off-ro-ro-ferries 

but that has the current UK official position. I note that the recommendation is that any badly damaged EVs are placed on weather decks. Part of me wonder if that is just because it makes it easier to flood, or also because perhaps it makes things easier to push over the side if things get really out of hand, as are occasionally  the instructions for certain types of very dangerous military cargos, that they be cut loose as a last resort... 

Mike.

This probably needs to be revised

The % of EV is growing thus more EVs will be on the average RORO Ferry

Some Ferries are packed so tight that trying to move any vehicle becomes a logistical game of Tetris

EV now making there way into Lorry, Tractor and Panel Van markets thus they will also start to appear on the Ferry.

With the above in mind consider your last or a ferry crossing from Dover to Calais

or

Possibly

Scotland (KennaCriag to Islay (Port Ellen or Port Askaig)

The ferry to Islay is vital for the community but it does mean your car on the ferry could have a lorry on one side and tracktor on the other with maybe a tanker lorry infront (Tanker may carry fuel or flower or products for the Whisky Distillery). The main point is this ferry service is used to carry just about anything.  

As stated before, 

I am not trying to vilify the EV but fires do happen in car parks.  There initial cause could be by 
Malfeasance
Mechanical fault
Electrical fault
Vehicle fault

Hi Lisa

You are always welcome to go off topic on any of my discussion threads.  As an engineering community the more we talk the more we can expand our horizons and make things better.

All I ask is that people are polite and respectful in this purely academic debate.




Come on everybody let’s help inspire the future

Sergio Fernandez said:

I am not trying to vilify the EV but fires do happen in car parks.  There initial cause could be by 

Oh absolutely. I'm just mindful that there is a lot of alarmist talk about EV fires at the moment, some just due to fear of the new and some rather more mischievous (for a variety of reasons, whether political, financial, or just for the fun of being provocative). So as engineers I think it is helpful if we try to get such discussions to be evidence based, and make sure that we don't inadvertently fan the flames.

And don't forget to balance the number of car park fires against the cost of safety measures...which is exactly what the parties involved in researching this issue will be doing. Safety engineering is often a thankless profession. (In fact, it's nearly always is a thankless profession - no-one ever notices the level of risk going down, they only notice the cost of projects and project delays going up.) 

There's a reason that events like Grenfell take so long to come to changes to regulations and guidance, which will be the case here too - any changes to solve one problem can have unintended detrimental effects on another. Including for example the possibility that tower blocks, or car parks in this case, get closed as unsafe, which would be as equally unacceptable to society as the occasional fire is.  As an example, a really interesting question would be how many people have died in collisions (car to pedestrian) in multi-storey carparks against how many people have died in fires (I suspect very considerably more die in collisions), it would be perfectly possible to bring in fire preventative measures that make that situation worse e.g. by reducing visibility of moving vehicles through the introduction of fire breaks.

If you're really interested in this issue (which from your various posts here you clearly are) I'd strongly recommend a dive into the literature of risk management, it is a really interesting area (at least, I think so, which is why I work in it!), but it's definitely one where nothing is ever easy. And it is very often about politics and money as much as about technology and other mitigations - for example if we genuinely wanted to reduce deaths due to vehicles we would reduce road speeds (far, far more important as a risk than car park fires), but as a society we don't want to do that. Which is fine, every society has to decide for itself the level of risk it accepts. Same here, any measures to reduce fires will need to evidence how many lives will be saved vs the inconvenience (including extra cost) of installing them. (Again, hence why the fallout from Grenfell is still rumbling on.)

In the end personally I just have to trust that others are looking at these issues, because I know enough to know that I don't know enough to even start thinking about them. (As it happens I do very very occasionally have to lead fire safety risk assessments for construction projects of the type of scale we're discussing here, for new railway station build projects including car parks, I don't touch that side of the work with a bargepole other than to check that experienced fire risk assessors are involved.) Now if you wanted to start a discussion about how to stop people being killed at level crossings, that I definitely could join in to!

Apologies if this comes across as "we shouldn't be bothering ourselves with this, leave it to the professionals", that is most definitely not my intention. It's definitely a good thing in the IET to promote looking at how these types of incidents are reacted to and why mitigation measures are chosen. What would be very interesting and useful would be to try to get a speaker to an IET LN or TPN talk on how these safety measures in car parks are changing - and why some of them aren't. That would be a good approach to the "why don't they just..." questions, which would result in lots of learning opportunities.

Andy Millar said:

genuinely wanted to reduce deaths due to vehicles we would reduce road speeds

One only has to look at the Daily XXX headlines for the cost of traffic queues to realise how 'competitive' the safety market is. (Other anti-woke scandal sheets available;-)

See Rasmussen's "Cognitive Systems Engineering" accident trajectory diagram (fig 6.3, p149) showing how we bounce along the boundaries of acceptability and safety.

We could indeed go back to having vehicles preceded by a man person with a red flag, but that measure would be about 122 years too late. Doubtless some of the flag bearers would be run over and killed. That might be by cyclists or horses.

We would also have to add to the equation that ambulances might be slowed down, but as a special dispensation they might be allowed to have an athlete running with a flashing blue flag.

Be careful what you wish for!

We could indeed go back to having vehicles preceded by a man person with a red flag, but that measure would be about 122 years too late. Doubtless some of the flag bearers would be run over and killed. That might be by cyclists or horses.

We would also have to add to the equation that ambulances might be slowed down, but as a special dispensation they might be allowed to have an athlete running with a flashing blue flag.

Be careful what you wish for!