For fire and rescue services worldwide, the rise of electric vehicles (EVs) represents a significant operational shift.
While the benefits of electrification are clear, the hazards presented by lithium-ion batteries demand a fundamental rethink of how incidents are managed, not only at the point of fire suppression but long after crews have left the scene.
Lithium-ion battery fires behave in ways that challenge traditional experience and doctrine.
Thermal runaway is not a conventional combustion process; it is a self-sustaining chemical reaction within the battery cells.
Once initiated, through collision damage, internal failure, fire impingement or immersion, thermal runaway can propagate cell-to-cell with little external warning.
Neil Pederson
Temperatures can exceed 1,000°C. Fires may burn intensely, extinguish and then reignite.
Large volumes of water are often required for cooling, creating secondary environmental hazards through contaminated runoff containing heavy metals and toxic compounds such as hydrofluoric acid.
Yet many current procedures still treat EV incidents as a variation of conventional vehicle fires, rather than the distinct hazard profile they represent.
Increasingly, serious EV-related incidents are occurring after fire service involvement. Reignitions on recovery vehicles, fires in police compounds, salvage yards, workshops and ports are becoming a global concern.
From a fire safety perspective, this raises critical questions about who owns the risk once the vehicle leaves the incident ground, how it is managed in recovery and storage and what protections exist for crews and secondary sites.
Without robust containment strategies, the answer is often “very little.”
This gap exposes fire services to reputational risk, recovery partners to unacceptable danger and communities to secondary fires that were entirely preventable.
Fire safety is built on hierarchy of control, elimination, substitution, engineering controls, administrative controls and PPE.
Neil Pederson
With lithium-ion batteries, elimination of the hazard is rarely possible in the short term.
What is achievable is engineering-led containment.
This is where systems such as the Electric Vehicle Containment Unit (EVCU), Electric Vehicle Recovery Unit (EVRU), and Fire Safety Containment Unit (FSCU) represent a step forward in fire safety management.
Developed by Fire Containers Limited, these units were designed specifically around real-world fire service challenges, by professionals with decades of frontline operational and command experience.
The EVCU provides fire services with a safe, structured option for managing EVs that have been involved in fire, serious collision or water immersion.
Once an EV is placed inside the EVCU, it is fully isolated within a fire-resistant containment environment.
If thermal runaway initiates or re-occurs, the event is contained, preventing fire spread, escalation or exposure to personnel.
From a fire safety standpoint, the benefits include reduction in firefighter exposure during prolonged cooling and monitoring, elimination of secondary fire spread, controlled cooling using water-mist systems and capture and recycling of contaminated runoff, addressing environmental protection obligations.
Crucially, the EVCU allows crews and incident commanders to manage time safely, monitoring battery behavior over extended periods without committing resources or placing personnel at unnecessary risk.
Recovery has traditionally sat outside the direct control of fire services, yet EV incidents have blurred that boundary.
An unstable battery loaded onto a conventional recovery vehicle represents a mobile fire risk moving through public spaces.
Neil Pederson
The EVRU addresses this head-on. By enabling full containment during transport, it removes the reliance on luck and improvisation.
For fire services, the EVRU offers confidence that the hazard remains controlled after handover, reduced likelihood of call-backs due to reignition, improved inter-agency safety, (particularly for recovery operators) and clear auditability for incident command decisions.
In practical terms, it allows fire services to close incidents knowing that the residual risk has been engineered out, not merely passed on.
The FSCU plays a vital preventative role. As damaged, defective, or end-of-life lithium-ion batteries become more common, the risk of fires occurring outside operational incidents increases.
FSCUs provide safe containment for batteries awaiting inspection or disposal, items recovered from incidents but not immediately recyclable and safe storage within stations, workshops, ports or recycling facilities.
For fire prevention and protection teams, this offers a tangible, practical control measure.
Fire services have always evolved alongside new technology.
Lithium-ion batteries represent the next major operational challenge, but one that cannot be addressed using legacy thinking alone.
Containment-led systems such as the EVCU, EVRU and FSCU do not replace firefighter skill, tactical decision-making or sound incident command.
Neil Pederson
Instead, they support them, by reducing uncertainty, limiting firefighter exposure, preventing secondary fires and ensuring that residual risk is controlled not transferred.
As EVs continue to dominate global transport strategies, EV-related incidents will become an increasingly routine part of fire service operations.
The fires will not stop, but the consequences can be managed.
In the UK more fire services are requesting assistance of these types of units in managing EV-related incidents, a trend which will undoubtedly increase.
Neil Pederson
In addition, many other sectors are also requesting these units for safe transportation of suspect or damaged LIB.
For fire safety professionals the issue is no longer whether incidents are different.
The evidence is already overwhelming.
The real question is whether our equipment, procedures and partnerships evolve quickly enough to protect firefighters, recovery operators, critical infrastructure and the communities they serve.
