Ron DeSantis works hard to prepare his state for impending hurricanes.
He gets Floridians ready for the unexpected challenges that are coming their way.
And Ron DeSantis warned about this nightmare that hurricanes will create for electric vehicles.
Electric vehicles pose a major threat during hurricanes
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis works overtime to prepare his state for the impact of a devastating hurricane.
Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend region on the Gulf Coast bringing torrential rain and winds up to 130 miles per hour.
Storm surge from the hurricane’s wind caused the sea level to rise all along Florida’s Gulf Coast.
DeSantis warned electric vehicle owners to move them out of the way of the storm.
“If you have an EV, you need to get that to higher land,” DeSantis said at a press conference. “Be careful about that getting inundated. It can cause fires.”
When saltwater gets into the battery of an electric vehicle it can create a fire weeks after it happened.
Those fires are a nightmare for firefighters to put out because of the massive amount of energy stored in the batteries.
“You’re in an area that is in the eye of where there can be storm surge, you have an electric vehicle — just know that when you have saltwater intrusion on that, those can catch on fire,” DeSantis explained. “Those are very difficult to put out.”
He said that during Hurricane Ian in 2022, 36 electric vehicles caught on fire.
A home burned to the ground after an electric vehicle caught fire during that storm.
Electric vehicles are becoming a new challenge for hurricane recovery
There are more than 250,000 electric vehicles in Florida according to data from the Department of Energy.
When saltwater enters the battery of an electric vehicle it creates a chemical reaction that creates an “extreme fire risk,” according to the Coast Guard.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that saltwater flooding the lithium-ion batteries they use can “pose major safety concerns to passengers, emergency responders, and recovery personnel.”
Putting out a fire in an electric vehicle can take more than ten times the amount of water as a normal vehicle fire because of how hot the fire burns.
Florida firefighters were not prepared for the work it took to put out electric vehicle fires in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian in 2022.
They can spend more than half a day fighting them.
And they can reignite again weeks after the initial fire.
Florida tow truck driver Tim Baker told ABC News after Hurricane Ian that he stopped towing water-damaged electric vehicles.
“They have the potential to catch fire pretty much any time,” Baker said.
He had an electric vehicle go up in flames spontaneously after he towed it back to his lot.
DeSantis and state officials have started to stress the need to move them out of harm’s way before a storm.
U.S. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) warned Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, one of the chief proponents of electric vehicles in the Biden-Harris administration, that electric vehicle fires were diverting Florida’s resources from disaster recovery.
“This emerging threat has forced local fire departments to divert resources away from hurricane recovery to control and contain these dangerous fires,” Scott wrote in a letter.
The push to go green with electric vehicles is creating an unforeseen nightmare for the country to deal with.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
