This is the best summary I could come up with:
Up to 40,000 passengers have been affected by flight cancellations after a large fire broke out at one of London’s Luton Airport’s car parks.
The airport has now suspended all flights until at least 3pm, as firefighters remain at the site of blaze that broke out just before 9pm.
The newly-built car park building at the airport’s Terminal 2 has partially collapsed, the Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service said.
It was not known if any passengers were trapped on the tarmac, inside the airport or in the Terminal 2 car park.
It added that 80 per cent of one of the car park’s third floors was impacted by the blaze.
Up to 1,200 vehicles may have been in the car park at the time of the fire and subsequently damaged.
The original article contains 181 words, the summary contains 130 words. Saved 28%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Apparently this is supposed to be a growing concern moving forward, as EVs don’t deal as well with fires, and their increased weight also cuts into the safety margin before a fire-weakened parking garage collapses.
EV fires’ extreme temperatures
We will see more and more EVs, particularly with the nation’s most ambitious climate control regulations to date: Two-thirds of new passenger cars and a quarter of new heavy-duty trucks that are sold in the United States are to be all-electric by 2032.
Concerns in the fire service about EVs and open and closed parking garages are increasing as a result of what has occurred in the United States and elsewhere in the world. These incidents involved hundreds of automobiles, injuries, severe structural damage and structure collapse. One video of an EV fire in a parking garage revealed that a significant fire that involved three vehicles developed in no more than three minutes. The fire was too large to extinguish with any portable fire extinguishers as soon as it self-vented from the vehicle of origin.
Something else we must consider: Parking garages could be at risk of collapse as a result of the heavier weight of EVs compared with conventional automobiles.
As a reminder, fires that involve internal combustion engines, whether gasoline or diesel, are easier to battle than fires that involve EVs. Not to be overlooked: Many fire departments are limited in their response capabilities.
Further, the temperatures of fires that involve internal combustion engines can reach 1,500 degrees F; temperatures of fires that involve EVs can reach 4,500 degrees F and hotter. The temperature of an EV fire is a major concern for parking garages.
From the article:
Cause of fire confirmed
The cause of the huge blaze at London’s Luton Airport has been named as a diesel powered vehicle.
“We have no intelligence at this stage to suggest that this was anything other than an accidental fire that started in one of the vehicles that had not long arrived at the airport. It was not an EV,” Andrew Hopkinson, chief fire officer for Bedfordshire Fire and Rescue Service told reporters on Wednesday morning, The Mirror reported.
He added: “This was a diesel powered vehicle.”
