HOUSTON – Nearly 30 vehicles were consumed by flames at a parking lot in west Houston early Monday.
The Houston Fire Department was called to the 2400 block of Yorktown near Sage Rd. off 610 for reports of a car fire. When they arrived, saw nearly 20 vehicles burning.
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While firefighters were putting out the flames, arson investigators said it appears the number might have been greater, with close to 30 vehicles charred.
Dramatic video shows the flames spreading across the cars.
The Houston Fire Department says they do not believe arson was a factor and believe the fire started because of a mechanical or electrical issue with one of the vehicles in the lot.
Electrical Engineer and Certified Fire Investigator David Reiter broke down some of the issues they see with vehicles that can lead to a fire like this. He says most of the time, when the vehicle is off, a problem like this is due to an electrical issue. He says a lot of times, investigators find aftermarket parts are to blame for issues like this.
“One of the things we see a lot of are aftermarket add-on equipment and that’s a big issue because you get any number of installers that may not have the expertise to do it properly. So things get wired incorrectly. They have over fusing issues, things of that nature that can lead to a fire,” Reiter said.
Fire investigators are also having to deal with fires caused by electric vehicles. Reiter says the lithium ion batteries can pose big problems if they fail.
“I consider them extremely dangerous and I think we’ve seen that in a lot of flood situations. The motors and the floodwaters get up into the motors, the electrical systems, they start to short it out. You get arcing and that leads to a fire,” he said. “Once lithium ion batteries fail, the heat release rate, in other words, the rate at which energy is released is phenomenal. And that’s called heat release rate. And that excessive heat release can easily spread to other structures or other cars or other vehicles and ignite those.”
Once a fire gets going, it can spread very rapidly depending on what type of structure it is in. Reiter said in this particular case, the overhang the cars were parked under would definitely impact how it spread.
“If you have a vehicle, it’s parked like at an airport parking lot, which is wide open, all of that heat energy goes straight up into the atmosphere and you have to rely on radiant energy spreading to other vehicles. However, when you have something in a parked structure where you’ve got a ceiling overhead, then that well, we call a fire plume that the flames go up, hit the ceiling and then they spread outward and then that radiant energy is radiated down into other vehicles,” he said.