Deadly Tesla crash in Spokane County used as a test case to fight electric vehicle fires

It was a quiet June morning on the Mewhinney farm near Fairfield when an explosion rattled nerves and set a fire.

Mark Mewhinney was teaching at the Vacation Bible School being held at their church while his wife, Chris, was home working in the garden.

“I heard kind of a boom but I didn’t think much about it,” Chris said, noting her neighbors often haul large equipment on Truax Road that runs by the farm.

Not long after, she noticed black smoke billowing up from the string of willows that her great-grandfather planted to line the property. Chris sprinted down her driveway.

“It was an inferno,” she said.

A car, wrapped in a ball of flames, was wedged six or seven feet up in one of her willow trees. A group of three men had just arrived and asked her to call 911 while they checked the pasture to see if the driver had been ejected.

When the men didn’t find anyone, it was clear the driver had died in the vehicle.

“That was actually very emotional knowing that whoever that is was dying,” Mewhinney said. “I’m a Christian, so I prayed for his family.”

Not long after, firefighters from Spokane County Fire District 2 arrived. They attempted to put out the blaze but it was a struggle.

Soon they realized why: The car was a Tesla.

“It was an odd fire because it went off like bottle rockets,” Chris said.

More than two months after the crash on June 26 it’s not just the memory of that horrible day that haunts the Mewhinney farm.

Thousands of individual battery cells still litter the tree that was split in half the by the car’s impact.

One in six new cars sold in Washington since January is electric or a plug-in hybrid. Gov. Jay Inslee is a huge proponent of the shift to electric vehicles, with a goal of no new gas-powered cars being sold in Washington state by 2035.

When it comes to car fires though, an electric vehicle with its thousands of individual battery cell modules poses unique risks to firefighters and the environment.

Not only are electric-vehicle fires more difficult to put out due to the batteries that explode in the heat, but they also emit toxic chemicals.

“The smoke that comes off of an electric battery is really, really nasty,” said Rex Strickland, deputy fire chief at the Spokane Fire Department. “Tons of heavy metals, lithium cobalt – really a lot of things that basically never go away and are incredibly carcinogenic.”

Once the fire is out, those damaged battery parts remain dangerous and must be treated as hazardous waste. They’re difficult to dispose of, posing environmental risks and logistical difficulties.

‘Big eye opener’

Spokane County Fire District 2 crews arrived on scene about 20 minutes after the crash to find the vehicle engulfed in flames, said Chief Eric Olson.

“The first thing that was really a big eye-opener for us is that we really didn’t have the ability to identify it as an electrical-vehicle fire,” Olson said.

The fire was more intense than a typical vehicle fire and difficult to knock down, he said.

Once it was clear the vehicle was a Tesla, crews knew they had to worry about toxins.

“The smoke from electric vehicles is highly toxic,” Olson said. “There was additional concerns about runoff.”

So Olson called in the Washington State Department of Ecology.

While the Department of Ecology declined to speak about this specific case, employees from several different programs discussed battery issues generally.

Ty Keltner with the spills program said his group typically receives a call from a local fire department or law enforcement when there is a concerning incident. The spills program will respond and assess the need for cleanup.

With electric-vehicle fires, that cleanup is often related to batteries or the cells within the larger battery.

The key ingredient that needs to be contained is lithium, Keltner said.

Megan Warfield, battery policy lead at the Department of Ecology, said the disposal of lithium ion batteries of all types, not just in electric vehicles, has been a growing concern.

The Washington State Legislature passed a bill on the environmental management of batteries that went into effect last month requiring companies producing and selling batteries and battery-containing products to participate in approved stewardship plans.

The bill also mandated Ecology to give the Legislature policy recommendations for the collection and disposal of electric-vehicle batteries by April 2024.

Currently, if someone needs to dispose of an electric-vehicle battery they should call their car dealer or manufacturer and inquire about a takeback program, Warfield said.

It’s important these batteries get recycled to maximize the use of the rare earth metals needed to make them, Warfield said.

However, if the battery is damaged, things become a lot more complex.

Damaged batteries are picked up by the towing or salvage company that responds to a car wreck. Damaged batteries are considered “dangerous waste” and thus have additional regulations on transportation, labeling, packaging and disposal.

“It just gets very tricky to move damaged batteries around,” she said.

Why so dangerous?

Damaged lithium-ion batteries are dangerous because they can easily enter thermal runaway, which occurs when the internal cells overheat and spontaneously combust.

A damaged battery being dropped, punctured, crushed, compacted in a garbage truck – as it might be in the normal waste stream – could cause it to catch fire, Warfield said.

Lithium-ion batteries are in numerous products, including power tools, e-bikes, phones and scooters.

When lithium-ion batteries are disposed of in a hazardous waste incinerator or landfill, those risks are minimized, Warfield said.

But in the case of an electric-vehicle fire it may be too late: Those batteries are often damaged and have already caught fire, causing a chain reaction.

There are a slew of risks with an electrical-vehicle fire including potentially toxic water runoff, smoke and other toxins, but it’s unclear exactly how serious those risks are, Warfield said.

“Those are ongoing investigations right now so we can quantify or at least accurately describe what those risks are,” she said.

The same goes for fighting lithium-ion battery fires.

When a fire was set in the home and garden aisle of the north Spokane Home Depot last year, the lithium-ion batteries in leaf blowers and lawn mowers were a huge problem that the fire department wasn’t quite prepared to face, said Spokane Fire Chief Brian Schaeffer.

“It’s a reaction that we can’t stop with normal firefighting tactics,” Schaeffer said of thermal runaway.

The department calls in the Department of Ecology to almost all fires involving lithium-ion batteries to manage the damaged batteries, he said.

The Spokane Fire Department changed its policy on equipment decontamination to ensure firefighter safety. Spokane fire leaders also purchased $1,500 blankets that can be used to cover an electric vehicle while it’s on fire to help extinguish the blaze and reduce the emission of toxins.

“It’s a patch to address the problem, but it doesn’t get to the solution to the fire in the first place or the complete solution to protecting our environment,” Schaeffer said.

It also helps protect firefighters from the toxic smoke.

The Spokane Fire Department, Department of Ecology and Environmental Protection Agency and other stakeholders did testing last year in which they burned a Tesla battery to measure toxins in the smoke and water runoff.

It generated discussion around the issue for involved agencies and led to working with national labs to do more scientific testing.

There is just a lack of testing and understanding around the dangers of fighting electric-vehicle fires and the disposal of damaged batteries, firefighters and Ecology agree.

The Mewhinneys’ cleanup, they say, is being used as a test case for Ecology to streamline procedures related to electric-vehicle crashes on private property.

“States all over the place are asking the same questions, exploring the same kind of policies,” Warfield said. “There’s a lot of federal money going into this, there’s a lot of state interest, it has just exploded on everybody’s radar around policies around EV and EV batteries.”

Farm scars

The Mewhinneys still have thousands of battery cells littering the dry creek bed that runs through their property. The cells look like shotgun shells, some burned around the edges, others broken in half.

They are working with Ecology, private contractors and the driver’s insurance company to get the area cleaned up and tree removed before water runs through the creek bed again.

“There has been a real spirit of cooperation,” Mark Mewhinney said.

Luckily, testing of the ground in the area did not show any contamination, he said. Current estimates are that it could cost between $100 to $150 apiece to clean up the battery cells, putting the total cost of the cleanup at more than $1 million.

The horror of the crash and inconvenience of the scene left one bright spot for the Mewhinneys – everyone involved learned from the experience and will be better prepared next time.

“It’s a good thing for them to figure it out because there’s the safety of a whole lot of people involved,” Mewhinney said.