Luton Airport car park ablaze 8

[Pud]

My money is on an EV battery self-immolation:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-67073446

Politicians like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.

 

[hokie66]

Of course. EV’s should be banned from being kept in proximity of other vehicles.

 

[waross]

An EV may have started it, but my money is on gasoline cars spreading it.
A fire near or under a plastic gasoline tank will not take long to melt the tank.
The escaping gasoline may rapidly cause the same failure in all adjacent cars and the dominoes fall.

--------------------
Ohm's law
Not just a good idea;
It's the LAW!

 

[TugboatEng]

Did the space not have a now outdated fixed firefighting system designed to protect the structure from fires started by petrol powered vehicles. Sprinklers and such?

 

[JohnRBaker]

Yes, those flames were NOT coming from a couple of EV vehicles...

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[Murph 9000]

In addition to the lack of a sufficient / functional fire suppression system, it appears that the structure was also deficient in terms of resilience to a large fire. Some reports describe the car park as "newly-built", suggesting that building standards may be lacking for fire protection in such structures. Of note is that it appears to me that the fire started among vehicles on the roof level of the structure, which may play into the lack of sprinklers (no overhead structure), but also raises questions about the strength of the structure as there would not initially be a case of fire weakening a slab from below.

BBC News: Luton Airport flights suspended after large car park fire

The Terminal Car Park 2 suffered "a significant structural collapse", Bedfordshire Fire Service says.

 

[Murph 9000]

Here's a Google Maps Street View link which shows the structure prior to the incident. It appears to be a steel structure with poured concrete decks. From a quick look at Google's imagery, I don't see any obvious signs of a sprinkler system in the visible structural bays.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/81UjsMxAxmZVLF347

 

[Hoxton123]

I have never noticed sprinklers in a UK carpark. No idea about regulations in other countries.

BBC TV news had an onlooker describing a car fire, then a jet of flame across the roof area. Seems to me like a fuel tank melting in the fire and releasing fuel.

I wonder if the RoRo ferries take account of possible vehicle fires?

 

[enginesrus]

The only way a cold parked ICE car can start on fire is because of some electrical fault. I would bet most all car fires are started by an electrical issue.
The next would be oil on hot exhaust. Gasoline needs flame or spark to ignite.

I liked the mention above about plastic gas tanks. Smart isn't it? A true engineering failure to use such in a car.

 

[MortenA]

ICE vehicles catches fires many times more often than EV. Get a grip on your selves. This is supposed to be a group for engineers - not people making a political statement about something they know nothing about.

This is just one reference (and not from an EV "fan" site):

https://www.thecarexpert.co.uk/are-electric-car-fires-really-that-common/

--- Best regards, Morten Andersen

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

it was a Diesel.

And the car park was relatively new. And there are rumours that fire suppression/limitation systems didn't perform. And there was structural failure when there shouldn't have been which allowed the fire to rapidly migrate through the floors.

Right you lot will know what required for a new modern car park. I presume there should be some sort of zoning and fire separation so that one car doesn't take the whole building out?

 

[hokie66]

The pictures I have seen seem to show fire primarily in a level below the roof, not on the top.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

The second top floor was where it started apparently and the top floor had migration towards one end. And it also migrated down the ramps at one end of the building.

Its not fully completed it still has rebar poking out the top.

 

[LittleInch]

A quick google shows that the base premise for fire design is that only one vehicle is involved, the fire services arrive quickly enough to contain it and the structure only needs to survive for 15 minutes to allow everyone to escape down the protected core fire escapes / stairs.

There is though some disquiet in the industry about more modern cars, including battery fires, but also more plastics and as someone else pointed out, plastic fuel tanks allowing spread of fuel along a car park level.

See

https://www.cross-safety.org/sites/default/files/2018-02/fire-multi-storey-car-parks.pdf

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[Pud]

From a man on the ground:

Liam Smith, crew commander at Leighton Buzzard fire station, said that when he arrived, the fire was mainly on the third floor.

But it quickly spread down to the lower floors when the third floor started to collapse.

He said there were "lots of electric vehicles potentially involved quite early on".

"We decided to go defensive, which is basically where we decide to externally firefight rather than send firefighters in, for their safety as well.

"The cars were parked very close, next to each other.

"So unfortunately that was probably the reason for the rapid fire spread."

Politicians like to panic, they need activity. It is their substitute for achievement.

 

[LittleInch]

I think that was probably quite wise really in a structure with only 15 minutes collapse timing and all people accounted for.

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

Due to having a two LPG cars I have read a bit about their tanks as well. They have a fair number of CNG cars around me as well.

The other things which are surfacing are.

Stop start systems and fires.

AGM battery's and the other modern types, and owners using internet theory's dealing with them and replacing them with cheaper alternatives.

 

[thebard3]

I've never seen the incipient stage of an EV fire, I'm not sure there would be enough heat generated to trigger a conventional sprinkler system. I don't see how water would be very effective in the EV part of the fire other than to keep it from spreading once it had become a conflagration big enough to start the sprinklers. If it spread to gasoline tanks, then water would mostly only move the burning fuel around. Cars seen burning on the upper level (roof) are probably just left to burn as I doubt there is any effective sprinkler system there.

Brad Waybright

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

 

[MJCronin]

https://news.sky.com/story/luton-ai... the fire,before spreading to nearby vehicles

================================================================================================

Luton Airport fire:

All flights suspended after massive blaze causes terminal car park to partially collapse
Four firefighters and one member of airport staff are in hospital after the fire broke out on Tuesday.

MJCronin
Sr. Process Engineer

 

[LittleInch]

Some bent metal there alright.

So maybe about 1000+ cars essentially destroyed @ say av £20K each is £20 million hit. For a new facility I wonder how much a sprinkler system would have cost?

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.