Hurricane Ian has turned electric cars into time bombs

“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,” Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief financial officer and state fire marshal, tweeted this week.

In his tweet, Patronis included a video of firefighters putting out a fire involving a Tesla. Meanwhile, someone can be heard saying that they had already used “1,500 gallons of water on this, and it’s still going.”

“Oh, and this will burn for days,” another individual can be heard saying in the video, before the first individual explains that the firefighters “have a good water supply,” and “they’re just going to do what they can to drown this vehicle.”

In a follow-up tweet, Patronis explained, “It takes special training and understanding of EVs [electric vehicles] to ensure these fires are put out quickly and safely.”