First Responders Get Hydrogen Car Safety Facts in
Torrance
Muhammed El-Hasan
Reprinted from Daily Breeze.com
As the auto industry races ahead with technology to run vehicles on
hydrogen gas, what happens when one of these cars rolls on the road?
Will the vehicle explode like the hydrogen-filled Hindenburg in 1937?
What
will emergency responders such as firefighters do at the scene?
A conference
Wednesday in Torrance brought about 200 emergency responders, building safety
personnel, public officials and others from across the state to discuss hydrogen
car safety.
"Hydrogen is not the threat or terror people associate
with it when they think of the Hindenburg," said Ruben Grijalva, California
state fire marshal, who delivered the keynote speech. "A key thing here is
identifying what are the public safety issues, and that includes getting rid of
the myths."
For example, if hydrogen escapes from a vehicle tank,
the gas usually disappears into the atmosphere in a harmless manner. However,
gasoline tends to pool on the ground, posing a fire risk, Grijalva said.
The Los Angeles Area Fire Marshals Association and the California Fuel Cell Partnership
organized the event to help acquaint fire departments and other safety organizations
with risks and challenges of hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Automakers including
Toyota, Honda and Nissan -- which have U.S. or North American headquarters in
the South Bay -- are years, if not decades, from selling hydrogen-powered vehicles
to the public.
Prototypes already are running on American roads, mostly
in California. The vehicles use a fuel cell to combine hydrogen gas from a tank
with oxygen from the air to produce electricity to run a vehicle motor. The byproducts
are water and heat.
New state fire and building codes are adopted every
three years, while the technology behind hydrogen-run vehicles and refueling stations
advances much quicker. As a result, the codes lag the technology, Grijalva said.
So emergency responders must be "flexible" as they deal with an
incident such as a vehicle rollover involving hydrogen, he said.
For example,
there's no industry standard for the location of hydrogen tanks or high-voltage
wire in a fuel cell vehicle. He stressed greater communication between automakers,
local agencies, developers of safety codes and emergency responders to help deal
with ambiguities in the code.
That means local agencies must report any
incidents involving hydrogen to emergency responders, he said.
"We
don't want our codes to be based on what-ifs," Grijalva said. "We want
to have real-world examples."
During a panel discussion, a Toyota
official said that his company's hydrogen-powered prototype has adequate safety
precautions.
For example, if "anything goes wrong," the car's high
voltage is isolated inside the two metal cases, said Gary Smith, Toyota's national
service technology manager.
"I can assure you these vehicles are
safe," said Smith.
In Honda's hydrogen-powered vehicle prototype, the
high-voltage system is "completely isolated" from the car's frame to
prevent the chance of an electric shock from just touching, say, the hood, said
Ryan Harty, a Honda vehicle test engineer.
Steve Hoffman, an official
at Air Products and Chemicals Inc., which is working with Shell Hydrogen to open
hydrogen refueling stations, summed up the sentiment of the speakers.
"Hydrogen is not more or less safe than other fuels," Hoffman said.
"It's just different."
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