My municipality gives the fire chief a $900 stipend each year. That's it. The fire department is 100% voluntary.

In contrast, 60+% of the budget goes towards making sure police officers can make over $200,000 a year with overtime.

This is the conversation that needs to be had. Re-allocation of city resources towards non-violent, non-militarized civil society groups. Unfortunately, in our soundbite driven world, we got "Defund the police", which kills the conversation dead.

Fire service is a divided/conquered profession.

The paid fire and ems people hate the volunteer departments, the fire-only departments turn their nose down at EMS, and the police are good at swooping in and taking over stuff like paramedics.

Volunteer departments are often big political power bases too. In some states, that results in volunteer departments getting lavish firehouses and fancy gear. I live next door to a city firehouse, their “new” pumper is an 8 year old, $800k (new) truck that saw 70-80 calls a month. It’s new owner doubled the mileage in 90 days.

> I live next door to a city firehouse, their “new” pumper is an 8 year old, $800k (new) truck that saw 70-80 calls a month. It’s new owner doubled the mileage in 90 days.

What does this mean to imply? They bought an old truck, gently used, and then used it a lot more...

Is the new mileage because they need to use it? Is that bad? Is 800k a lot for a fire truck?

I believe they're implying that a volunteer department had a very high end truck and didn't really use it much, and it was later inherited by a non-volunteer department.

The dysfunction and stupidity is only bounded by the populace's tolerance for it and money to indulge in it.

Poor cities and rural counties might have underfunded services but they don't generally have the dysfunction you're describing because the money to support the dysfunction simply isn't there.

And which should never have been misunderstood.

When we say "Governor X defunded public schools," no one takes that to mean that they removed every single penny from the schools.

“Misunderstood”?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

Some opinion article from a social justice warrior doesn't indicate that the vast majority of people who say "defend the police" are not saying "abolish the police." That kind of black and white thinking undermines the conversation.

What really undermines the conversation is twisting the meaning of words, saying what you (supposedly) don’t really mean, and then blaming people for interpreting them correctly.

Here are more examples:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-beca...

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/02/12/We-Actually-Mean-Aboli...

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/the-abolition-mov...

Again, if you're actively searching for abolitionists, you can find them, but the vast majority of the use of the term, from a count of the first 20 articles on any search engine of "What does defund the police mean," means reduce funding.

And, indeed, your first article actually uses the term exactly as we're using it.

While the author is arguing for abolition, and the first and only time she uses the word "defund" it is to say

> Defunding the police is one step on a broad stairway toward abolition. Cities can reduce the size and scope of police...

Likewise using that pejorative.

Serious question: how do you interpret "Starve the beast"?[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

The author does not speak for the Black Lives Matter movement, nor for the vast majority of people who use that phrase. The use of "we" in the title is egoising.

A quick search of "what does 'Defund the Police' mean" will find that the vast majority of proponents, and of articles written about them in almost all newspapers and magazines, interpret it as reducing the budget of the police and redirecting that budget into non-violent community aid.

So motte-and-bailey.

Here are more examples:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-beca...

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2021/02/12/We-Actually-Mean-Aboli...

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/the-abolition-mov...

Even Obama didn't like it: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/02/barack-obama...

Above article refers to this long interview: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/12/obama-urges-activist...

And I agree with him, if you have to add ", and by this phrase I mean a b c d e f" or "please search the Internet and click a good URL (not Breitbart, but also not Mariame Kaba) to see what we mean by this phrase", do you think people wouldn't just think you're an extremist after the snappy phrase and stop listening?

The self-sabotage (and then people like you defending the phrase) is so mind-boggingly dumb. Do you want change, or do you want to alienate people?

But eh, on the topic of alienating people, I've seen enough "online activists" snap at supporting voices that I thought "I wouldn't be surprised if that supporter stopped sympathizing with them.". Then you have supporters turn to quiet "Fuck it, I'll just shut my mouth" or worse, be opponents.

One of the things that has never failed to amaze me is why are police and fire departments locally run in the US vs. run by the state with federal checks and balances. It's almost a given that smaller places either cannot afford the right training and equipment OR they'll turn corrupt with the monopoly on violence such services give.

I think it certainly raises questions about the extent to which it's reasonable for public utilities to pick up the slack for negative externalities caused by profitable companies. Of course it's a hard thing to price because of course fossil-fuel vehicles have a laundry list of negative externalities of their own.

I generally agree, companies should pay for their externalies.

The efficient way to do that is to tax companies and use the tax dollars to fund public services like fire departments. Expecting Tesla to send in their own firefighters when a Tesla catches fire would be ridiculous. Public services are good, and the method for funding them is well established.

If we want to have additional levies for safety regarding lithium batteries, hopefully we are making sure to do the same for oil too...

The problem is the equipment to fight a petrol / diesel fire is already covered by most fire departments. Oil fires are common in commercial and industrial areas. Levying those users of petrochemicals would likely result in a fairly insignificant cost per user, such that the bureaucracy cost to collect would end up costing more. Thus it makes sense to pay for this from general government funds. The same if we extended it to wood and paper.

Large Lithium fires are fairly uncommon right now, they don't behave like most other classes of fires that firefighters are dealing with. Personal device fires are more common, but total heat / damage is less and the fire is frequently able to be controlled outside of confined areas (aircraft).

With a relatively low volume of large lithium battery packs, and the difficulty in containing them, it could make sense for a targeted levy to cover the cost. Lithium car fires are currently dealt with by trying to isolate the burning vehicle and overwhelming the fire with water (removing Oxygen and temp), however this is very inefficient. I have heard of a former fire chief arguing that to deal with the growth of large battery packs will require either massively increasing the number of appliances (fire engines) or defaulting fire appliances to using special foams as opposed to water. The foams will increase the cost to fight ALL fires, as many engines typically have to be ready pre-mixed before dispatch.

It has also been suggested that density limits, and battery packs be designed to include fire suppression and make this mandatory to allow vehicles on the road. This would create massive packaging issues for every EV company, add significant cost while reducing performance. All in all I think we need to consider if we charge the EV / household battery pack companies for this or we all bare it in general taxes for the environmental benefits. I think bearing it out of general funds is completely reasonable, however I wonder if we are going to get safer batteries if we pass on the cost and let the rate go down as the number and severity of fires decrease. The might be some marginal improvements that quickly get implemented in that case.

Would a good solution be to test battery designs in crash tests and tax more flammable designs more? Try and incentivize companies to come up with innovative fire suppression designs

Does it? This is the same issue it's always been: things catch on fire sometimes, we've decided that the best people to handle this are firemen, paid for by the local government.

But what previous thing is most analogous to batteries on cars? Cellphones and hoverboards are so much tinier. Maybe this isn't the same issue specifically, and some scale of government can require a tax to fund e.g. more education or training.

I'm confused why something needs to be equivalent to batteries in cars?

Do you know what's not equivalent to an electric car? A fertilizer plant catching on fire. And you guessed it, that's also handled by the fire department.

Does it? That sounds like the kind of thing that gets some sort of higher tier involvement. Is there not higher jurisdiction for managing larger fires that require more than the local crew?

Lots of stuff... hazmats, grain elevators, etc.

It’s not unreasonable for firemen to put out fires. It’s just a novel path that requires training.

>But what previous thing is most analogous to batteries on cars?

Large tanks of volatile, flammable, potentially-explosive liquid in proximity to ignition sources in the car?

Maybe cars powered by literally thousands of explosions per second?

I freely admit this is a pedantic point, but it's extraordinarily doubtful that any road car reaches 2000 ignitions per second (the threshold for "thousands").

In a 4-stroke engine each cylinder ignites once every two revolutions, so even a 12-cylinder engine wouldn't reach 2000 ignitions per second until 20,000 RPM.

A more typical case - say, a 6 cylinder engine hitting the redline at 7,000RPM is experiencing 350 ignitions per second - so, hundreds rather than thousands.

Thanks.

So batteries on cars is analogous to cars? I mean, could be. Maybe the EV battery is just like a gasoline tank, but something suggests that there are important differences.

Another reminder that we have a hybrid socialist free-market system, without even mentioning Tesla subsidies or how much of the science was publicly funded or "borrowed" from history without payment to the past.

Good question, that said it's not as unnatural as when gas became ubiquitous.

Now that there's a global shared effort to make everybody able to work safely around these issues should be mandatory.

I think you may be overestimating the resources fire departments have. Many are woefully underfunded as is, particularly the ones that are 100% volunteer. There are probably dozens of things (equipment and training) that departments could spend money on that would benefit the community they serve more than training for ev accidents.

How are 3 out of 3 replies discussing what the fire-department should do from a training and policy perspective and nobody commenting on the science/engineering of dealing with a EV fire.

Privatize the gains and socialize the negative externalities.

EVs have represented a relatively small fleet of new and mostly high end cars so far. Which means that they haven't posed much of a problem so far. The budgets for most fire departments are pretty limited and they focus on priorities. EVs are hardly a priority for most of them even now as the fleet is growing exponentially and perhaps more critically, it's aging thus increasing the risk of fires.

You can train all you want but unless you have a burning EV right in front of you, all training is only theoretical. Practice makes perfect and no fire department will set a Li-Ion car battery on fire just to demonstrate what happens.

This is really not good safety culture. I'm sure it's not the same experience when a pilot practices emergency procedures in a simulator vs in a real emergency, but it's still helpful.

Your point is maybe that the simulation is bad. But I think it can be helpful nonetheless. Even if the simulation is "you have a battery fire in front of you. Tell me what you would do?"

> This is really not good safety culture. I'm sure it's not the same experience when a pilot practices emergency procedures in a simulator vs in a real emergency, but it's still helpful.

If this is really a priority, then make it a priority. Start paying firefighters like cops are paid, and fund the fire department like the police department is funded.

In many places, fire departments are entirely voluntary while police departments are funded to the tune of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

In several places I've lived, the only way fire departments would get that training is if someone donated a bunch of EV batteries to be destroyed by them.

> no fire department will set a Li-Ion car battery on fire just to demonstrate what happens

Why not? That's exactly what they do with ICBs and houses to train here.

Up to a point - but knowing you don't pump water onto a battery fire should not be an issue.

There's been comments here for hours linking to multiple official sources that say exactly to pump water onto the battery fire.

There's not that much lithium and there is lots and lots of heat.

That's literally what's needed to stop thermal runaway.

Any fire department employees should no the basic classes of fire and what I used and not used on them,

Any company H&S rep will know this