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Saltwater Flooding a Serious Threat to Electric Vehicles’ Batteries

January 25, 2025 | FlaglerLive | 4 Comments

Flooded cars in Clearwater, Fla., after the arrival of Hurricane Milton on Oct. 10, 2024. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Flooded cars in Clearwater, Fla., after the arrival of Hurricane Milton on Oct. 10, 2024. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

By Xinyu Huang

Flooding from hurricanes Helene and Milton inflicted billions of dollars in damage across the Southeast in September and October 2024, pushing buildings off their foundations and undercutting roads and bridges. It also caused dozens of electric vehicles and other battery-powered objects, such as scooters and golf carts, to catch fire.




According to one tally, 11 electric cars and 48 lithium-ion batteries caught fire after exposure to salty floodwater from Helene. In some cases, these fires spread to homes.

When a lithium-ion battery pack bursts into flames, it releases toxic fumes, burns violently and is extremely hard to put out. Frequently, firefighters’ only option is to let it burn out by itself.

Particularly when these batteries are soaked in saltwater, they can become “ticking time bombs,” in the words of Florida State Fire Marshall Jimmy Patronis. That’s because the fire doesn’t always occur immediately when the battery is flooded. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 36 EVs flooded by Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2022 caught fire, including several that were being towed after the storm on flatbed trailers.

Many consumers are unaware of this risk, and lithium-ion batteries are widely used in EVs and hybrid cars, e-bikes and scooters, electric lawnmowers and cordless power tools.




I’m a mechanical engineer and am working to help solve battery safety issues for our increasingly electrified society. Here’s what all owners should know about water and the risk of battery fires:

Emergency responders handle EVs that were immersed in saltwater during Hurricane Ian in Florida in 2022, including some that ignited.

The threat of saltwater

The trigger for lithium-ion battery fires is a process called thermal runaway – a cascading sequence of heat-releasing reactions inside the battery cell.

Under normal operating conditions, the probability of a lithium-ion cell going into thermal runaway is less than 1 in 10 million. But it increases sharply if the cell is subjected to electrical, thermal or mechanical stress, such as short-circuiting, overheating or puncture.

Saltwater is a particular problem for batteries because salt dissolved in water is conductive, which means that electric current readily flows through it. Pure water is not very conductive, but the electrical conductivity of seawater can be more than a thousand times higher than that of fresh water.




All EV battery pack enclosures use gaskets to seal off their internal space from the elements outside. Typically, they have waterproof ratings of IP66 or IP67. While these ratings are high, they do not guarantee that a battery will be watertight when it is immersed for a long period of time – say, over 30 minutes.

Battery packs also have various ports to equalize pressure inside the battery and move electrical power in and out. These can be potential pathways for water to leak into the pack enclosure. Inadequate seal ratings and manufacturing defects can also enable water to find its way into the battery pack if it is immersed.

How water leads to fire

All batteries have two terminals: One is marked positive (+), and the other is marked negative (-). When the terminals are connected to a device that uses electricity to do work, such as a light bulb, chemical reactions occur inside the battery that cause electrons to flow from the negative to the positive terminal. This creates an electric current and releases the energy stored in the battery.

Electrons flow between a battery’s terminals because the chemical reactions inside the battery create different electrical potentials between the two terminals. This difference is also known as voltage. When saltwater comes into contact with metal battery terminals with different electrical potentials, the battery can short-circuit, inducing rapid corrosion and electric arcing, and generating excessive current and heat. The more conductive the liquid is that penetrates the battery pack, the higher the shorting current and rate of corrosion.

Rapid corrosion reactions within the battery pack produce hydrogen and oxygen, corroding away materials from metallic terminals on the positive side of the battery and depositing them onto the negative side. Even after the water drains away, these deposited materials can form solid shorting bridges that remain inside the battery pack, causing a delayed thermal runaway. A fire can start days after the battery is flooded.

Flat silver batteries stacked in an array, connected by orange cables.
Most electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid cars use arrays of lithium-ion batteries like these.
DOE

Even a battery pack that is fully discharged isn’t necessarily safe during flooding. A lithium-ion cell, even at 0% state of charge, still has about a three-volt potential difference between its positive and negative terminals, so some current can flow between them. For a battery string with many cells in a series – a typical configuration in electric cars – residual voltage can still be high enough to drive these reactions.




Many scientists, including me and my colleagues, are working to understand the exact sequence of events that can occur in a battery pack after it is exposed to saltwater and lead to thermal runaway. We also are looking for ways to help reduce fire risks from flooded battery packs.

These could include finding better ways to seal the battery packs; using alternative, more corrosion-resistant materials for the battery terminals; and applying waterproof coatings to exposed terminals inside the battery pack.

What EV owners should know

Electric cars are still very safe to drive and own in most circumstances. However, during extreme situations like hurricanes and flooding, it is very important to keep EV battery packs from becoming submerged in water, particularly saltwater. The same is true for other products that contain lithium-ion batteries.

For EVs, this means evacuating cars out of the affected zone or parking them on high ground before flooding occurs. Smaller objects, like e-bikes and power tools, can be moved to upper floors of buildings or stored on high shelves.

If you own an EV that has been submerged in water for hours to days, particularly in saltwater, public safety experts recommend treating it as a fire hazard and placing it on open ground away from other valuable property. Do not attempt to charge or operate it. Contact the manufacturer for an inspection to assess battery damage.

Often, a flooded electric vehicle will need to be towed away for further inspection. However, since thermal runaway can occur well after submersion, the car should not be moved until it has been professionally assessed.

Xinyu Huang is Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Carolina.

The Conversation arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse and recognition of the vital role that academic experts could play in the public arena. Information has always been essential to democracy. It’s a societal good, like clean water. But many now find it difficult to put their trust in the media and experts who have spent years researching a topic. Instead, they listen to those who have the loudest voices. Those uninformed views are amplified by social media networks that reward those who spark outrage instead of insight or thoughtful discussion. The Conversation seeks to be part of the solution to this problem, to raise up the voices of true experts and to make their knowledge available to everyone. The Conversation publishes nightly at 9 p.m. on FlaglerLive.
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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. JW says

    January 26, 2025 at 11:17 am

    If Trump sees this, he would say: I told you so I don’t want EV’s!
    Unfortunately, investing in flood prevention causes a lot less damage (and your EV is only a small part of that) and we are not interested in that. We just let it happen and repair or rebuilt, as a County engineer once told me.
    This is the American way where ignorant politicians dictate what to do or rather not do because we don’t want to spend your (tax) dollars. We are a country of spending not (wisely) investing! And politicians fear for losing their job in the next election.
    Education for all of us is badly needed, but I am afraid it is too late with book banning and (world) history uncomfortable for our children and even most adults so we are going back wards, making America worse again.
    FYI, we may soon lose FEMA as well.

    2
  2. JimboXYZ says

    January 26, 2025 at 4:25 pm

    JW, look at the dates. 2022 & 2024, who was responsible for pushing the auto industry towards EV’s only. If you want to point a finger, Trump is the last name, BIDEN-HARRIS is who you need to to whine about. Water intrusion is nothing new, been around before Biden’s 80+ years of existence, yet he was hell bent to force the USA in that direction. Gavin Newsom & CA government went so far as to ban new car sales of ICEV’s by a certain year. His state, LA & SD, CA burning to the ground for forced evictions & land grabs, which also happened in Hawaii. Nobody has a sense of humor about massive fires. In 1998, Flagler & Volusia counties burned, 27 years ago, nobody wants to live thru that ever again. Musk, the EV guru that he is, even realizes that fossil fuel is a fact of life to produce EV’s & the power grids we are all on. Those solar farms that FPL is bringing on line throughout FL, There have to be battery facilities capturing that as stored energy. FL has drought months, not to mention the flood months for hurricanes. With the population growth a mass evacuation and nobody gets out of FL. This is a Biden-Harris problem, stop blaming Trump for the last 5 years of the effort to make Biden-Harris happen in the 1st place. Maybe you’d prefer to add massive county by county fires to a risk of life. Expect the insurance companies to jack premiums, if they even write policies that cover wildfires. As a hurricane is, it’s a one day & gone thing. The wildfires in CA have been raging since 01/07/2025, that’s 18-19 continuous days & we don’t hear anything about the containment percentage ? There’s your Biden-Harris mess of incompetence. Give them all of the credit they are due for this crap show. Trump-Vance are just the one’s being sandbagged by the last regime of Democrats that had a better idea, that wasn’t a better idea. Remember, we’re all better off just economically for Biden-Harris with $ 4.50/dozen eggs (sarcasm intended).

  3. SurroundedByIdiots says

    January 27, 2025 at 10:55 am

    Boy, who’s the rocket scientist who figured that one out?

  4. DaleL says

    January 28, 2025 at 7:32 am

    Out of 5,000 EVs damaged by flooding during Hurricane Ian, 36 caught fire. (Presumably battery only EVs, not plug-in hybrids.) Hurricane Ian caused flood damage to an estimated 365,000 other vehicles. The hybrid and plug-in hybrids also have lithium ion battery packs. How many of those vehicles caught fire? How many of those vehicle fires involved the gasoline tank?

    The story lacks perspective. Gasoline powered vehicles already have a high risk of catching fire. It is estimated that over the lifetime of a gasoline powered vehicle, there is a 1% chance of fire. According to this story, a flood damaged EV has less than a 1% chance of catching fire. (36/5,000 x 100% = 0.72%)

    https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/evs-outshine-gas-cars-in-fire-safety-heres-the-data-to-prove-it/

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