First responders plan for new electric school bus possible emergencies

KANAWHA COUNTY, WV (WOWK) – As Kanawha County Schools is progressing in their plans to add 27 electric school buses to the bus routes by next winter, the district is partnering with first responders across the county to address potential car crashes or fires involving the electric vehicles.

On Thursday, school officials held an informational meeting to discuss any disconnect between first responding agencies, bus manufacturers and the school district ahead of all electric buses hitting the roads full time.

The goal is to educate and inform one another about the buses and to reexamine existing questions or concerns about them. That’s because handling an electric vehicle fire is different than diesel fueled vehicle fires, and several factors could influence how firefighters and other first responders would handle such an emergency.

“It’s much different with an electric bus. There is no engine. There is no diesel. There is no diesel fumes or anything like that of course,” Kanawha County Schools Transportation Executive Director Jason Redman said. “So just the general knowledge that hey, the batteries for these buses are in the middle underneath. It’s not at the front or the rear of the normal, conventional bus.”

“Copious, copious amounts of water. More water than would be normally used for let’s say, an engine, combustion engine, and depending on the size, a lot more water that would be required for a bus that size,” Nitro Fire Department Chief Casey Mathes said, describing what would be required to put out an electric vehicle-based fire.

Mathes is one of several first responders who met with school officials on Thursday regarding these changes, though he said he still has several questions he hopes will be addressed in future meetings.

“I want to know on crashes what kind of impact on the side where the batteries lay, what kind of impact that would be. Is there any type of burn time? These things catch on fire, if there’s many of these studies out there to see how long to potentially get the students off,” he said. “If there is an impact collision directly on the side where the battery should lay, what type of impact would it have on anything on our response as far as how we would mitigate the situation.”

Redman said the smaller “lift” electric bus is already out on bus routes. He said the first two buses will be running routes in the St. Albans, Cross Lanes and Nitro areas.

“So, we’ve got a lot of those fire departments, volunteer fire departments together, just to see the bus, get eyes on the bus, see where the batteries are. Where’s the disconnect? What should they do, shouldn’t they do? Kind of just a general walk through, not so much a detailed plan. A lot of great things came out of it.” Redman said. “For instance, they asked ‘how are we supposed to identify this as an electric bus?’ Which is something that I or the bus driver or anyone in transportation knows, ‘hey that’s Green power, it’s electric.’ But we need to move now to come up with a universal probably decoy for these buses so that anyone who is coming by – a police officer, a first responder of any type – will know ‘hey this is an electric bus. Maybe we should treat this differently.”

Redman said there will be future meetings and training sessions for school bus operators, mechanics and first responders as the electric buses are incorporated into the bus routes.

“All of our mechanics have to go through different levels of training to work on the EV buses. There’s actually three pretty rigorous courses they have to complete. Right now, the buses being so new, we’re not working on the buses. We are still under warranty with Green Power,” Redman said. “Throughout that process, Green Power will actually be at our terminals, and while they are at our terminals, we are going to work out with our local departments to come and ask more questions and get more details because we kind of just did overview about this is the bus.”

Brendan Riley, the president of Green Power Motors Company, said this training is normal to ensure everyone is prepared in the event an emergency would arise. He also mentioned the challenges of dealing with an iron phosphate battery.

“It typically doesn’t catch fire, and if it does, it takes a long time. So, typically fire is not the main concern. It’s slow typically in EVs, especially an iron phosphate, they can be hard to put out,” Riley said.

Riley also said there have been zero injuries reported of school buses, or any of the electric battery school buses, due to fire or voltage affiliated with Green Power.

“There’s a couple things to keep in mind. Battery electric vehicles do not have the battery grounded to the body in any way. We have very specific, multiple redundant equipment, to make sure that we’re monitoring that we don’t have any battery high voltage exposed to the body itself of the vehicle. So, it’s difficult to get shocked basically, a vehicle under normal circumstances,” Riley said. “The dangers that we have is if the battery gets compromised, if it gets crushed or smashed, the system’s all fused, so if there is a short, the system has a bunch of fuses that blow out and don’t allow that high voltage to get out of the battery.”

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