Tesla Model S catches fire months after Florida floods as firefighters film lengthy flame battle and tag Elon Musk

Another Tesla has caught spontaneously on fire while sitting at a junkyard. Salvaged from the Florida floods, together with many other luxury vehicles, the Model S ignited after months of just sitting at the lot, forcing the Sacramento firefighters to improvise once again like they did when a Model S caught fire on a highway.

At the time, they had to jack up the Tesla and put the nozzles below the vehicle, using no less than 6,000 gallons of water to extinguish the flames coming from the Tesla Model S cells. That's 20x the usual amount used to extinguish a burning ICE vehicle.

Here, they couldn't move the car to let it burn away, as it was sitting in the middle of the junkyard, surrounded by "by millions of dollars in salvaged vehicles including Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Bentleys." To prevent the fire from spreading, the firefighters managed to lift the Model S and filmed the lengthy process of putting out a burning EV battery.

While they have tagged Elon Musk in the post below, those incidents happen more often than they'd like with other electric vehicles, too. The burning Felicity Ace cargo ship loaded with electric Porsches couldn't be put out last year and sank, for instance. Just last week, firefighting ships managed to salvage another vehicle container ship near the Netherlands. It turned out that it was carrying 498 electric cars, too, heading to Singapore from Germany, though it's not yet clear if they were the ones maintaining the fire for a week.

Tesla even started shipping and delivering its electric vehicles from overseas factories at half-charge, as more and more maritime insurers are taking precautions against EV battery fires on cargo ships during transit.

Storied firefighting equipment companies like Rosenbaum now even offer dedicated EV fire tools with high-pressure nozzles that pierce the battery unit housing and douse the cells with water directly as the fastest way to extinguish a burning electric car. 

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