Battery in EV from Bedford tolls crash re-ignited days later

Firefighters in Merrimack spent Monday pouring 60,000 gallons of water on the car involved in last Wednesday’s fiery accident at the Bedford tolls, demonstrating the biggest downside of electric vehicles: After a crash their batteries can re-ignite without much warning, and the resulting blaze is hard to control.

“This is one of the scenarios that we’ve trained on. … We were told what was going to happen and exactly what was explained to us, that was what the car did,” said Jim Bailey Sr., owner of Bailey’s Towing and Auto Body in Merrimack.

Bailey was called to last Wednesday’s accident, where the driver was badly hurt after his 2026 Lucid Gravity ran into a booth at the Bedford tolls on the Everett Turnpike and caught fire. The accident drew national attention both because the driver, Yevgeny Mirman, is famous as a voice actor for the “Bob’s Burgers” show, and because a state trooper who was part of Gov. Ayotte’s security detail helped pull Mirman from the burning wreck.

Bailey said fire departments at the scene in Bedford poured thousands of gallons on the car to put out the fire and covered it with a fire blanket to help contain the blaze.

“There were no wheels on, it was just a chunk of metal,” he said.

He hauled the car onto a flatbed and brought it to his yard in Merrimack.

“I was able to tow the car with the fire blanket on it, while it was still smoking,” he said.

Bailey parked the wreck in a safe spot and kept an eye on it, getting Merrimack police to come by and check at night to be sure it hadn’t re-ignited.

“It had been behaving itself quite nicely, so this morning, I moved the car carefully to a different location. Within 15 minutes, the batteries shorted out and it went into thermal runaway,” he said, using a term that describes when portions of a battery overheat and cause other portions to also overheat in a chain reaction.

The resulting fire took hours to put out with some 60,000 gallons of water.

Luicd, like virtually all electric vehicles, is powered by battery packs made up of many hundreds of individual cells. In Lucid’s case it has more than 6,000 lithium-ion cells made by Panasonic, packed into a couple of dozen modules.

When a lithium-ion cell is damaged, it can cause chemical changes to the internal materials, resulting in spontaneous overheating, which can cause nearby cells to also overheat, leading to thermal runaway.

There is no easy way to put out such a fire. Because of the chemistry, foam retardants and blankets that can put out other types of fires won’t work. Fire departments’ only tool is to pour so much water on the fire that it reduces the total temperature and stops the thermal runaway.

Even then, some batteries may need to be monitored with a thermal imaging camera to ensure the problem won’t return. Eventually, the battery is taken apart for disposal or recycling.

Baily said the New Hampshire Towing Association has been running seminars for owners of salvage lots and working with fire departments on training. Although salvage lots have decades of experience dealing with flammable, explosive and otherwise dangerous materials, especially gasoline, new generations of batteries are different.

“A lot of us are now preparing how to store these cars. Don’t park them next to anything of any value … don’t park them next to a building or a house or a garage, keep watch on them,” Bailey said.

He pointed out that EVs are new and everybody is still learning how to deal with them.

“They’re in their pioneer days; they’ll get better. Given time, it’ll all be figured out,” he said.

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