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Luton Airport Car Park Fire

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Just stopping by to point out another piece of rank ignorance (coupled with equal ignorance about how business and inward investment actually work):

Vixen keeps claiming that:

Tata/JLR has just been give a £4b (sic) contract by the UK government to build a million square foot EV battery factory
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and

The government, acting on behalf of the tax-payer that just handed Tata, owners of the Jaguar Land Rover brand, £4bn of taxpayer money to build a giga lithium battery factory,
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The reality - unsurprisingly - is entirely different.

The reality is that the £4bn in question is the estimated amount of inward investment by Tata into building and setting up this new EV battery manufacturing facility. The UK Government hasn't "handed Tata a £4bn contract". The UK Government might very well have offered Tata incentives such as significant tax breaks or land registry waivers, but that's an entirely different matter.

We now return viewes to other "facets" of this idiotic conversation....
 
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Vixen said:
It takes temperatures of over 1,600 ºC to burn through concrete. A diesel fire, even if whipped up to 1,000ºC by lit rags and a leafblower won't do more than cause spalling. Spalling affects a layer of the concrete, possibly several of them, but the concrete is generally otherwise fire resistant, with just superficial damage (spalling). Whilst EV's are heavy they are not that much heavier than ICE's, other than the recent trend towards bigger and 'butch'-er looking 'SUV's. A car park, one would have thought, would have been designed to withstand several hundred cars parked on any level.
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Why do you think the concrete was 'burned through'?
Could it be that the steel reenforcing was weakened by the heat and the concrete cracked due to expansion?
Why do you think the fire didn't reach 1000 degrees?
What colour was the fire? that's a good indication of heat.
 
Vixen said:
Oh yeah, a little box from an FB page written by the Fire Brigade-bod's clerk in charge of FB and Twitter posts. Jenny from Communications wrote that.
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Why do you think that?


Why would the fire brigade's own official web page post a lie?
 
Andy_Ross said:
Why do you think the concrete was 'burned through'?
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The weak point in this type of construction is the connection between slabs and columns. It usually involves steel fittings that can fail at relatively low temperatures (ca. 800 °C).

Spalling is one response to heat in concrete. The underlying phenomena are twofold: internal moisture boils and fractures the surrounding concrete as it expands into steam, and various elements of the aggregate expand at different, nonlinear rates. When these occur deep in the casting, the result is not spalling but rather internal fractures that can ultimately fail a critical section of the slab.
 
Vixen said:
Oh yeah, a little box from an FB page written by the Fire Brigade-bod's clerk in charge of FB and Twitter posts. Jenny from Communications wrote that.
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You realize that this source isn't a facebook page, right? It's an official announcement regarding the car park fire. Perhaps it was written by Jenny in Communications, but I don't see any reason it wouldn't be as well supervised as the statement to the press (which Jenny may also have written).
 
phiwum said:
Are newspapers not allowed to interview involved parties? I doubt it, but if that were the case, then there is no cover up at all. It's just business as usual.

Either the driver has chosen not to give an interview or he can't give one because of UK laws regarding potential defendants. In either case, nothing at all notable about the lack of an interview with the driver.

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk
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You have to ask yourself why the driver hadn't been nabbed by reporters already.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Why do you think the concrete was 'burned through'?
Could it be that the steel reenforcing was weakened by the heat and the concrete cracked due to expansion?
Why do you think the fire didn't reach 1000 degrees?
What colour was the fire? that's a good indication of heat.
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The car park was just four years old. Being an airport car park, it was surely designed with strength in mind. It is difficult to tell the colour of the fire as white heat doesn't translate well onto video.
 
Foster Zygote said:
Gee, no evidence of a Li-ion battery having melted through the floor. It almost looks like the considerable heat energy released by a large number of burning vehicles caused weakening of the steel components supporting the spans and they collapsed.
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Yes, it looks like steel-frame construction rather than concrete slab-and-column. This is the same structural system as for any other building, except for the increased load allowance: you use thicker steel and thicker concrete slabs. But otherwise you have the same weak spots and failure modes as in other steel and concrete structures. Nothing unexpected in that footage.
 
Vixen said:
The car park was just four years old. Being an airport car park, it was surely designed with strength in mind. It is difficult to tell the colour of the fire as white heat doesn't translate well onto video.
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Stop pretending you know anything about engineering.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Why do you think that?


Why would the fire brigade's own official web page post a lie?
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This is turning into a Two Ronnies sketch.


Ronnie Barker: Good Evening, we have a press release from Bedfordshire’s Chief Fire Officer stating that the car involved is believed to be diesel at this stage, subject to verification.

Ronnie Corbett: Good EV, I mean good Ev-ing, I’ve been told by them upstairs –

Ronnie B: Who? Suella, Fluella, or wassername – or maybe Rishi?

Ronnie C: Yeah, him, the one whose wife knows the CEO of Tata. I’m under orders to tell you to announce it as though you are saying it is NOT an EV but without saying ‘It is not an EV’.

Ronnie B: <fx taps side of nose> It is believed to be a not-EV, that is, a diesel subject to blah blah blah, and then I can get Tracey on Reception to write up the Facebook, webpage and Twitter/X corporate pages in plain English, no fancy words.

Ronnie C: Smashing! When it is discovered three years down the line it was a hybrid we can pin it on Tracey’s lack of comprehension. We aren’t lying, technically. What's the term, 'It was inadvertent'.

<sfx hysterical canned laughter>

Ronnie B: Leftie woke organisations like Full Fact can contact Tracey for verification of her tweet.

Ronnie C: I foresee peerages for us in the New Year’s Honours for services to Rishi and Akshata…er, industry.

Ronnie B: So it’s good night from me.

Ronnie C: And it’s goodnight from him. Oh, and we’d better get the driver arrested so he can’t blab.

Ronnie B and Ronnie C: And it’s Ta-ta from Tata!
 
Vixen said:
You have to ask yourself why the driver hadn't been nabbed by reporters already.
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Because the police haven't identified him and he didn't contact the papers, I'd wager.

Do the police usually identify a motorist whose car catches fire?

Sent from my SM-G991U using Tapatalk
 
Vixen said:
The car park was just four years old. Being an airport car park, it was surely designed with strength in mind. It is difficult to tell the colour of the fire as white heat doesn't translate well onto video.
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What the hell is special about airport car parks vs. other multi-storey car parks?

They're all designed to handle maximum load, no?
 
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