THE MORNING RANT: EV Fire in Parking Garage Causes Terrifying Nighttime Rescues at a Chattanooga, TN Apartment Building

As cool as the “new urban” lifestyle sounds, with dining and entertainment options within blocks of your condo/loft, there have always been negatives. These include the hassle factor of multi-story apartment living, shared walls, street noise, etc. There’s now a new negative – the risk of a runaway thermal fire in the parking garage underneath the building you live in.

Some residents of an apartment building in a hip Chattanooga neighborhood had a terrifying night recently when an electric vehicle parked in the building’s garage spontaneously erupted in flames during the wee hours of the night.

“Electric vehicle started major apartment fire in Chattanooga” [WTVC – 12/17/2024]

Five people were hospitalized.

Per the Chattanooga Fire Department, “Residents were giving important information to the police, and officers were relaying those details to the crews conducting searches and making rescues. You can also see and hear the compassion the first responders have on the scene as they help people fleeing their smoke-filled homes in the middle of the night.”

Hook and ladder units had to be employed by the fire department to rescue some residents.

Heavy smoke made its way into the building where some residents needed assistance to escape. Some residents had to evacuate by climbing down an aerial ladder from multiple stories up. Residents expressed their gratitude for the firefighters response.

Obviously, the fire department’s primary concern was rescuing residents before they succumbed to the smoke that had engulfed the building. But there was also a raging inferno down below in the garage, as the burning EV began to ignite adjacent vehicles.

"There were multiple vehicles on fire," said Lindsey Rogers with the Chattanooga Fire Department. "The smoke from the vehicle fires made its way throughout the building, so we had half of our crews in the sub-level garage working to extinguish those car fires. We had the other half of our crews working to do multiple rescues."

The electric vehicle that started the fire was determined to be a Kia EV. Following the awful night that the residents endured, almost all of them soon learned that their cars had been damaged too.

Two other vehicles next to the EV burned, and most of the cars in the garage suffered heat damage, in the early morning hours of November 22nd. Fire officials identified the car that caught fire as a Kia.

The greatest peril in a multi-family building is fire. That risk has now been compounded by the fact that a trendy EV parked in an apartment’s garage might spontaneously erupt into an unextinguishable inferno at any time.

I know that I will be receiving the usual emails reminding me that there are more fires involving gasoline-powered (“ICE”) cars than from EVs. Of course there are, because there are so many more ICE cars on the road than EVs, and when ICE cars get in wrecks, the gasoline sometimes combusts.

But ICE cars just don’t spontaneously burst into flames like EVs do. There is essentially no risk that a parked ICE car in a garage will burst into flames, while there is a very real, greater-than-zero risk that an EV will spontaneously combust, and cause tremendous damage to everything around it. And above it.

For safety reasons and for insurance purposes, buildings with covered parking garages really need to start considering a ban on EVs.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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