You can watch the Energy Response Unit demonstration and officials’ remarks in full in the video below:
A Seattle Fire crew shows off some new equipment the department says can quickly knock down a certain type of fire and help keep your lights on.
With a lot of our electrical equipment moved underground, firefighters can’t exactly go down into an electrical vault with hoses to put out a fire. Traditionally, those fires are allowed to burn for as long as it takes to burn themselves out, and the equipment has to be de-energized before firefighters can get in there. So, Seattle Fire worked with City Light to create the new Energy Response Unit, the first of its kind in the nation, making it the only department in the country that can start to fight the fire before the juice is shut off.
It carries a massive amount of liquid carbon dioxide – more than enough to handle any fire, says Seattle Fire Captain Chris Greene – which becomes a gas as soon as it’s released into an electrical vault, starving even a high voltage fire of oxygen in just seconds. Greene says recently “we snuffed out a 3,000 volt arc a month ago. 3,000 volts! That’s what this thing can do…They ain’t never seen anything like that?”
Greene tells Northwest Newsradio it can also be used on lithium ion car batteries, but not necessarily on I-5. “On I-5, we wouldn’t be using this to suppress that,” Greene says, “but all of the tools needed to handle that emergency, those EV fires, those are handled with all the equipment and the training that these people have on that rig.” Greene says EV fires in parking garages are more problematic, and that’s where he says the Energy Response Unit would “shine”. He also tells us that would include an EV fire in the Highway 99 tunnel.
Fire Chief Harold Scoggins says underground electrical fires are often high voltage fires in confined spaces. “These types of fires are rare,” Scoggins says, “but can cause catastrophic damage to the infrastructure, potentially causing widespread power outages, and none of us want to see that.” That damage caused when crews have to allow the fire to burn out on its own can also be incredibly expensive to repair.
The new unit comes with enough reach at 600 feet of hose and nozzle as well as more than enough CO2 to hit any electrical vault fire in town.