As adoption of electric vehicles increases, crews are having to adapt in real time to a new kind of incident- a fire that burns hotter, last longer and demands more water to be vanquished. When a car catches fire, the response has historically been predictable. Crews arrive, deploy hoses, suppress the flames, and bring the incident under control within a relatively short window. The risks are well understood, and the playbook is familiar. Electric vehicles are beginning to change that. Fires involving lithium-ion batteries behave differently—hotter, longer-lasting, and less responsive to conventional firefighting tactics. For fire services, this is not a theoretical concern but an operational shift already underway. A fire that doesn’t behave like fire At the centre of the challenge is the battery pack. Unlike a fuel tank, which burns until its contents are consumed, a lithium-ion battery can sustain its own reaction. This process, known as thermal runaway, occurs when a cell overheats and triggers a cascading failure in neighbouring cells. Heat, gas and pressure build internally, and once the reaction starts, it can …