Hurricane Helene Fires: Salt Water and Lithium Ion Batteries Still Don’t Mix

By Monday morning, Hurricane Helene and the damage it caused last Thursday was still the top story in Tampa news, with an unsettling focus on electric cars, and the damage they caused after being shorted out by rising salt water. It’s a topic we’ve covered before, but it’s worth an update.

The resulting fires occurred despite a near-constant warning from the media to move electric cars out of harm’s way. Said Tampa Mayor Jane Castor: “Water and ion batteries do not mix. They literally explode.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis joined in: “If you have an EV, you need to get that to higher land,” he said during a news briefing on Wednesday, well before the storm. “Be careful about it getting inundated. It can cause fires.”

Indeed they did. An early count suggests perhaps a half-dozen homes were damaged or destroyed by burning electric vehicles along the Florida Gulf Coast. And this time, there’s video.

Understandably, many homes hit by Helene were very close to the seashore, and consequently some were in high-end areas. A popular image on the area newscasts was a mansion-sized home in Davis Islands, one of two in the upscale area that was gutted by fire, leaving little more than the front wall. In the garage was the unrecognizable rubble of an electric car, reportedly a Tesla.

Even more troubling, it appears that it doesn’t take much salt water to cause a fire. A 50-second Nest surveillance video that went viral was taken in a Siesta Key home, showing a Tesla in a garage with barely a few inches of salt water leaking in. A battery fire ignites from underneath, and quickly turns into a fireball. The family was home and had to evacuate after midnight as the hurricane raged. “If they blow that easily,” said Lisa Hodges, the owner of the toasted Tesla, “it’s just unfathomable.”

One of the loudest voices regarding electric vehicles and fires has long belonged to Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s chief fire marshal, who continued to warn about the danger when lithium-ion batteries short. In 2022, Patronis detailed his own experience with a battery fire: “I joined North Collier [Florida] Fire Rescue to assess response activities related to Hurricane Ian and saw with my own eyes an EV continuously ignite, and continually reignite, as fire teams doused the vehicle with tens of thousands of gallons of water. Subsequently, I was informed by the fire department that the vehicle once again reignited when it was loaded onto the tow truck.”

It will be some time before numbers are in for Helene, but exposure to salt water reportedly caused 21 electric vehicles to catch fire in 2022 with Hurricane Ian, and at least half a dozen due to Hurricane Idalia, which did not result in as much salt water on dry land in populated areas as Ian did. An early assessment said that of the first 16 reported electric car fires due to Ian, one was a Porsche, one was a Lucid, and 14 were Teslas.

According to data from the U.S. Department of Energy, Florida has the second-highest number of registered electric vehicles in the country, with more than 250,000. Some 42,000 of them are in the Tampa area.

As Hurricane Helene progressed northward, it began picking up fresh water instead of salt water, so resulting electric car fires in states like Georgia and North Carolina are expected to be less common.

Tesla is taking it on the chin in most news reports, which typically don’t mention that Teslas make up more than half of the electric vehicles sold. Tesla has released no statements about the battery fires caused by salt water and severe weather.

The company does have a “Safety Report” regarding fires on Tesla.com, though it doesn’t detail salt water intrusion as a cause: “Our global data indicates that, between 2012 and 2022, approximately one Tesla vehicle fire event occurred for every 130 million vehicle miles traveled. By comparison, data from the NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) and U.S. Department of Transportation indicate that one vehicle fire occurs in the United States for every 18 million miles traveled.

“Compared to average vehicles on the road, Tesla vehicles are comparatively even less likely to be involved in a fire event than these numbers suggest,” it says, “because Tesla’s data includes fire events that are caused by structure fires, wildfires, arson, and other causes unrelated to the vehicle, whereas the NFPA data excludes any fires where a structure is involved.”

A call to Tesla for comment was not returned.