NEW YORK: We all know electric vehicle fires require the use of a lot of water to douse them.
In the case of an electric Tesla Semi truck that caught fire following a crash earlier this month, US firefighters used some 190,000 litres of water to extinguish the blaze.
Besides water to cool the vehicle's batteries, California firefighters also "used an aircraft to apply fire retardant to the immediate area as a precautionary measure," said the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in a statement released last Thursday.
The crash involving the Tesla Semi took place in the wee hours of Aug 19 as the vehicle was travelling near Emigrant Gap in California, the NTSB said.
The semi-truck operated by a Tesla employee was headed from Livermore, California, to a Tesla facility in Sparks, Nevada.
The vehicle veered off the road while navigating a curve and struck a tree, before going down a slope to rest against several trees, the report added.
The driver was not injured.
But "the vehicle's lithium-ion electric battery system ignited after the roadway departure, resulting in a postcrash fire," said the NTSB.
It took nearly 190,000 litres to extinguish the flames and cool the vehicle's batteries, the agency said.
California firefighters also mobilised an aircraft to drop retardant around the crash site.
California suffers from numerous forest fires every summer, which are destructive and sometimes fatal.
The freeway was closed for around 15 hours so firefighters could ensure the batteries were "at a safe temperature for vehicle recovery operations," said the NTSB.
This was also to prevent the spread of the fire to surrounding forested areas.
When Tesla announced its second quarter results recently, chief executive Elon Musk indicated that large-scale production of Semis was still planned to start by end-2025.
The first such vehicles have been delivered to a few selected customers such as PepsiCo since 2022.
