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From Vox
You can now sponsor refugees yourself. Here’s how. -
Meena Mosazai, her husband Matan Atal, and their child visit a park near their home in Seattle, Washington, in 2022. Mosazai worked previously for a nonprofit in Afghanistan and was also a journalist before she had to change professions due to a threat received from a stranger. | Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Biden’s new Welcome Corps program offers an amazing opportunity to do good.
America likes to tell a certain story about itself: It’s a safe haven, a place of refuge for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. It’s a story that history shows hasn’t always been true. But thankfully, it just got easier for Americans to take matters into their own hands and turn that aspiration into a reality.
The Biden administration on January 19 launched the Welcome Corps, a new program that will allow groups of Americans to directly sponsor refugees to resettle in their communities.
Whereas recent programs have focused on bringing over people from specific places — Afghanistan, Ukraine, Venezuela — this program makes it possible for private citizens to resettle people from any place in the world, so long as they are refugees as defined by the US Refugee Act.
Under the Welcome Corps program, you and a few of your friends can pool together funds to provide an immigration pathway that allows vulnerable people who may not otherwise be able to immigrate the ability to rebuild their lives in the US. Forming a private sponsor group involves bringing together at least five adults in your area and collectively raising $2,275 for each person you want to resettle in your community. With that money, sponsors commit to helping them through the first three months there, which can include securing and furnishing housing, stocking the pantry with food, supporting job hunts, and registering kids for school.
It’s a powerful way to improve life for the newcomers, granting them protection from persecution or violence in their country of origin, plus the chance to access health care, education, and socioeconomic opportunities. It can also improve life for everyone who’ll be in the newcomers’ orbit, including you and your neighbors. Research suggests welcoming refugees will likely benefit your community as a whole, for example by opening new businesses that revitalize neighborhoods. In Canada, a similar private sponsorship program has proven immensely popular and successful over the past decade.
But you might be thinking: Why should it fall to private citizens to fork over the cash, time, and energy to resettle refugees? Shouldn’tthat be the government’s job?
One thing to note is that private citizens have long been part of the resettlement process in some form or other — for example, through co-sponsorships between faith-based groups (like churches, synagogues, or mosques) and the government infrastructure. And by directly sponsoring refugees, citizens can offer them more social support than the government could alone, in part because they’re focused on one specific refugee or refugee family, rather than splitting their focus among thousands, as is inevitably the case with government agencies.
“When refugees have to flee their home country, they lose social networks and social capital,” said Elizabeth Foydel, the private sponsorship program director at the nonprofit International Refugee Assistance Project, one of many groups that pushed for the Welcome Corps. “It’s a really hard aspect of coming to a new place. But if you’re being sponsored by a private sponsor group, you get the benefit of tapping into all their social connections and maybe integrate into the fabric of the community more easily.”
Still, it’s a fair point: This is the government’s job. That’s why the advocacy groups that pushed for the Welcome Corps program insisted that any refugees who come to the US via private sponsorship should be in addition to the number of traditional, government-assisted resettlement cases.
The State Department has signaled that it agrees. This means that by sponsoring a refugee, you can play a role in allowing the US to take in more refugees overall. It really is additive.
And unlike prior programs for Afghans or Ukrainians, which were temporary, ad hoc responses to crises, the Welcome Corps is intended to be a permanent fixture. The hope is that it’ll complement the traditional resettlement process, which has been struggling for years.
Why the US has been failing refugees
Biden’s official target for fiscal year 2022 was to resettle 125,000 refugees, an ambitious goal thatwas set to respond to growing global displacement. Instead, it resettled around 25,400.
“We very much have a national mythos around being a safe haven and being a nation of immigrants,” Foydel told me. “And for a long time, the US was the top country in terms of resettlement. But I think it’s definitely fair to say that we’ve been falling short over the past several years. You see a pretty significant decline overall.”
Just look at this chart. From a high in 1980, when the US Refugee Act was signed into law, the number of admitted refugees has generally declined.
If you look back 40 years ago or so, you can see that refugee resettlement used to be a bipartisan issue. There are comparable numbers in a George W. Bush year and in a Barack Obama year, for example. But over the past couple of decades, we’ve seen pretty extreme politicization of what’s supposed to be a core part of the American narrative, one that ultimately began to weigh on refugee numbers.
The 9/11 attacks were a major inflection point, Foydel explained. After that, it became more common to view refugees — especially those from the Middle East — as possible security threats. The resulting security vetting process became so incredibly rigorous as to function as a bottleneck.
Then came the rise in nativist discourse during the Trump presidency. The Trump administration slashed refugee admissions to a historic low of 15,000. Since the funding of refugee agencies is tied to the refugee cap, agencies were forced to lay off staff and shutter offices. Travel restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic also played a role in slowing down refugee resettlement. Canada — which has little more than a tenth of the US population — overtook America as the global leader in resettlement.
Under Biden, the US has been trying to rebuild the resettlement infrastructure, though arguably too slowly. The agencies have been in the undesirable position of having to rebuild even while they try to serve thousands of Afghans, Ukrainians, and others with the scant resources they currently have.
That’s where the Welcome Corps comes in.
“It’s very much our hope that that’ll significantly increase capacity,” Foydel told me. “What’s exciting about the private sponsorship program is that it can be a permanent, sustainable mechanism for Americans.”
Here’s how to form a private sponsor circle, in 6 steps
The private sponsorship program will have two streams. One is identification: If a group of sponsors has someone particular in mind — for example, someone they used to work with abroad — they can nominate that person for resettlement. (One example might be a former foreign correspondent posted for a stint in Bangladesh, who wants to sponsor someone they worked with there as a refugee.) The other is matching: If a group doesn’t have a particular person in mind, they will be matched with someone who is already being processed, helping that person to get out of a very lengthy pipeline that can otherwise take years to traverse.
For now, prospective sponsors are limited to the matching stream; later this year, the identification stream will open up.
Remember, even if the US government does somehow manage to meet its admissions target for fiscal year 2023 — which is, once again, 125,000 refugees — advocates’ expectation is that private sponsorship would be able to bring in thousands more above and beyond that.
Here’s how you can help achieve that.
1) Form a group of five or more adults. If you’re excited about this program, you can reach out to four friends to starta conversation. (You can email them this page or even this article to get the conversation going.)
2) Have each group member complete a mandatory background check. This is a quick online process checking whether you have a criminal record.
3) Have one group member complete an online course. This gives you some tips on how to ensure your sponsor circle will be skillful and successful.
4) Fill out a welcome plan. You’ll want to devote at least a day to this since it requires you to research the resources available in your community for needs like job and language training. (Starting February 1, you can get help with creating your welcome plan at official support sessions held every Wednesday at 7:30 pm ET.) You also need to sign a simple commitment form.
5) Fundraise. You’ll need bank records or other proof showing that you’ve got $2,275 per newcomer you hope to welcome. Here’s a fundraising guide.
6) Fill out the application form. Once you’ve done steps 1-5, this will only take 10 minutes.
That’s it! If your group is motivated, you can probably complete this process over a couple of weeks of intermittent work. Once you submit the application, it’ll be a few weeks until you hear back. If your application is approved, the sponsored refugees will arrive one to two months later. You can welcome them into your community, and play a small role in helping America live up to its vision of itself.
3 takeaways from this year’s weird cold-and-flu-and-Covid season -
Bita Honarvar/Vox; H. Armstrong Roberts/Classicstock/Getty Images
Believe it or not, we are not going to be sick forever.
After a notable increase in hospitalizations began in late November, this winter’s Covid-19 wave appears to have peaked earlier this month, with hospitalizations and deaths now down 25 percent and 1 percent respectively over the past two weeks. (The US is also reporting fewer cases, down from an average of about 65,000 new cases every day to about 46,000 daily cases now, but case data has become less reliable with the prevalence of at-home testing.)
Influenza activity nationwide has also been steadily declining for several weeks, based on positive test results reported to the CDC. The hospitalization rate for the flu has been dropping since cresting in December, shortly after the initial surge in activity.
RSV kickstarted this cold-and-flu season, with hospitalizations peaking in mid-November at twice the levels seen in the most recent pre-pandemic RSV season, before dropping off. Experts were struck then by the early, dramatic increase in illness, compared to what had generally been the pre-Covid norm, and warned of the flu and Covid surges to follow.
Those have now come and gone, though people are still getting sick and some hospitals remain strapped for staff and resources after three difficult years. There also remains the possibility of a second influenza wave, experts say, if another strain of the virus emerges and starts spreading widely, something that can happen and has happened in previous flu seasons.
But if not, the worst of this strange respiratory virus season may have passed. Three successive surges and peaks, packed into three months. I asked what experts made of this experience, as we collectively settle into a true new normal. The federal government is considering how to set up annual Covid-19 vaccines. US hospitals are still adjusting to what they describe as a period of permanent near-crisis.
With the novel coronavirus no longer novel, but a fixture of our viral ecosystem, we are trying to figure out what to expect from it and the other respiratory viruses it is competing with every year when temperatures drop.
That is a work in progress — and experts’ reflections on this weird cold, flu, Covid, and RSV season painted a picture of a viral world in transition. Here’s what they learned, and what it might tell us about illnesses in the future.
Influenza and RSV were able to spread easily after a couple slow years
RSV had already been behaving strangely, with an unusual summer spike presaging an equally unusual early start to its winter wave. This year’s peak arrived almost two months earlier than in the 2019-2020 season, the last “normal” season before Covid-19 appeared.
This year was also much more severe, with a peak hospitalization rate that nearly doubled the 2019-2020 high. Experts generally attribute the timing and the seriousness of this year’s RSV and flu seasons to people’s lack of exposure after the past two years when masking and social distancing were more common. Children, who are typically vectors for viral spread, especially had not had as many chances to catch and spread diseases until this year.
“This flu season started really early because there were so many children with zero experience with flu, common colds, and RSV,” David Celantano, chair of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins, told me.
This season has seen a lot of flu and even RSV among more vulnerable adults. People of all ages have generally been less exposed to disease for a few years now. Given the growing level of population immunity to Covid-19 after a brutal pandemic, it was easier for the other viruses that had been lying dormant to take hold.
New variants have been driving Covid-19’s continued spread
Covid experienced its third winter wave, after influenza and RSV had ripped through the population. This year’s cold-weather surge has been substantially smaller than what was the peak of America’s pandemic, January 2021, with about a quarter of the cases and a third of the hospitalizations, per the New York Times’s tracker.
The coronavirus was the opposite of its viral competitors: Most Americans have been exposed to it at least once in the past few years and maybe multiple times, and most of them have been vaccinated at least once or twice as well. Booster shots designed for the omicron variant have given the people who got them an additional layer of protection.
All of that built-up immunity likely explains the comparatively mild winter surge, experts say, though we have paid a high price to reach this point, with more than 1.1 million Americans dead, and more than 500 people still dying every day on average.
And Covid-19 has continued to find ways to gain an advantage and continue spreading. While RSV and influenza spread can be attributed to dormant immunity, SARS-Cov-2 is still evolving quickly. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California San Francisco, ticked through more than a dozen variants, from BA2 to XBB1.5, that have been circulating in the later phases of the pandemic.
“The ups and downs with Covid are related to the appearance of more transmissible variants,” Amesh Adalja, a John Hopkins infectious disease doctor, said, “versus what happened with influenza and RSV.”
The preexisting immunity should continue to lower the likelihood of severe disease for most people, though the elderly and immunocompromised are still at higher risk than others. The FDA has recently outlined its plan for people to receive annual booster shots, particularly as a way of protecting that population.
“The fact that immunity to Covid has been built up in the population (at a cost, it must be said) is good for future prospects,” Josh Michaud, infectious disease expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “But exactly how next season or even the coming months play out is still hard to know.”
We are still in a post-pandemic transition phase for respiratory viruses
Infectious disease experts knew this year might be an outlier. Covid-19 has been the biggest disruption to the normal cycle of disease in a century, and we know from prior experience that major pandemics can be followed by a year or two of chaotic viral behavior before settling into a more normal pattern. It happened with both the 1918 flu and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
For RSV and influenza, the past two years have been aberrations; it is reasonable to expect more normal patterns will resume in the future as immunity builds back up. (Still, every cold-and-flu season will be different — variation from season to season is a constant.)
“My guess is that this is entirely temporary and things will settle down into more routine patterns in coming seasons as typical population immunity gets back on track,” said Richard Webby, an infectious disease researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Covid-19 is trickier to project, given its continuing evolution toward more transmissibility. So far, the protection from prior infection and vaccines seems to be effective for most people, at least in preventing them from ending up in the hospital. But it also continues to pose a threat to the unvaccinated, the elderly, and the immunocompromised — and yearly surges when the conditions are more favorable for viral spread (i.e., the winter) are to be expected.
“I would expect RSV and flu to be more like normal next year,” Bill Hanage, a Harvard University epidemiologist, told me. “Covid, it remains to be seen, but a peak in early January 2024 is almost certain.”
Experts also advised caution, as Covid is a virus we simply do not have the same familiarity with as, say, the flu virus, and it is still reaching some parts of the world (most importantly China) for the first time. Normal life in the United States may be moving on, but the pandemic’s story isn’t over yet.
“Are we past the worst? Probably,” Celentano said. “But I am not a betting man!”
Why Teslas keep catching on fire -
Glenn Harvey for Vox
EVs catch fire far less often than gas-powered cars, but firefighters still need to adapt.
When Thayer Smith, a firefighter in Austin, Texas, received the call that a Tesla was on fire, he knew that he’d need to bring backup.
It was in the early morning hours of August 12, 2021, and a driver had slammed a Model X into a traffic light on a quiet residential street in Austin before crashing into a gas pump at a nearby Shell station. The driver, a teenager who was later arrested for driving while intoxicated, managed to escape the car, but the Tesla burst into flames. As emergency responders battled the fire in the dark of night, bursts of sparksshot out of the totaled car, sending plumes of smoke up into the sky. It took tens of thousands of gallons of water, multiple fire engines, and more than 45 minutes to finally extinguish the blaze.
“People have probably seen vehicles burning on the side of the road at one point or another,” Smith, the division chief at the Austin Fire Department, recalled. “Just imagine that magnified a couple times because of all the fuel load from the battery pack itself. The fact that it won’t go out immediately just makes it a little more spectacular to watch.”
Like other Tesla fires, the fiery scene in Austin can be tied to the Model X’s high-voltage battery. In Austin, the electric vehicle ignited after a slide across the base of a traffic pole that the driver had knocked down caused the battery on the bottom of the car to rupture. At that point, the impact likely damaged one or several of the tiny cells that power the car’s battery, triggering a chain of chemical reactions that continued to light new flames. Though firefighters were able to put out the fire at the gas station, what remained of the car — little more than a burnt metal frame — reignited at a junkyard just a few hours later.
The Austin crash led to a lot of headlines, but EV fires are relatively rare. Smith said his department has seen just a handful of EV fires. While the US government doesn’t track the number of EV fires, specifically, Tesla’s reported numbers are far lower than the rate for highway fires overall, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) told Vox. The overwhelming majority of car fires are caused by traditional internal combustion vehicles. (This makes sense,in part because these vehicles carry highly flammable liquids like gasoline in their tanks, and, as their name implies, their engines work by igniting that fuel.)
Still, people have started associating EVs with dramatic fires for a few reasons. Videos of EV fires like the one in Austin tendtogoviral, often attracting comments that condemn President Joe Biden and the electrification movement. At the same time, misleading posts about EVs spontaneously exploding, or starting fires that can’t be put out with water, have helped promote the narrative that electric vehicles are far less safe than conventional cars. The research doesn’t bear this out. Tworecent Highway Loss Data Institute reports found that EVs posed no additional risk for non-crash fires, and the NFPA told Vox that from a fire safety perspective, EVs are no more dangerous than internal combustion cars.
This narrative has another nefarious side effect: It stands to distract from a more complicated EV fire problem. Although they’re relatively rare, electric car fires present a new technical and safety challenge for fire departments. These fires burn at much higher temperatures and require a lot more water to fight than conventional car fires. There also isn’t an established consensus on the best firefighting strategies for EVs, experts told Vox. Instead, there’s a hodgepodge of guidance shared among fire departments, associations that advise firefighters, and automakers. As many as half of the 1.2 million firefighters in the US might not be currently trained to combat EV fires, according to the NFPA.
“The Fire Service has had 100 years to train and to understand how to deal with internal combustion engine fires,” remarked Andrew Klock of the NFPA, which offers EV classes for firefighters. “With electric vehicles, they don’t have as much training and knowledge. They really need to be trained.”
The stakes are incredibly high. If the White House has its way, electric vehicles will go mainstream over the coming decade. An executive order signed by President Biden calls for 50 percent of new car sales to be electric by 2030, and the administration is pouringbillions into building EV infrastructure and battery factories across the country on the assumption that people will buy these cars. EV fires — and misinformation about them — could stand in the way of that goal.
How an EV fire starts
An electric vehicle battery pack is made up of thousands of smaller lithium-ion cells. A single cell might look like a pouch or cylinder, and is filled with the chemical components that enable the battery to store energy: an anode, a cathode, and a liquid electrolyte. The cells are assembled into a battery pack that’s encased in extremely strong material, like titanium, and that battery pack isnormally bolted to the vehicle’s undercarriage. The idea is to make the battery almost impossible to access and, ideally, to protect it during even the nastiest of collisions.
Things don’t always go as planned. When an EV battery is defective or damaged — or just internally fails — one or more lithium-ion cells can short-circuit, heating up the battery. At that point, the tiny membranes that separate the cathode and the anode melt, exposing the highly flammable liquid electrolyte. Once a fire ignites, heat can spread to even more cells, triggering a phenomenon called thermal runaway, firefighters told Vox. When this happens, flames continue igniting throughout the battery, fueling a fire that can last for hours.
The first moments of an EV fire might appear relatively calm, with only smoke emanating from underneath the vehicle. But as thermal runaway takes hold, bright orange flames can quickly engulf an entire car. And because EV batteries are packed with an incredible amount of stored energy, one of these fires can get as hot as nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even when the fire appears to be over, latent heat may still be spreading within the cells of the battery, creating the risk that the vehicle could ignite several days later. One firefighter compared the challenge to a trick birthday candle that reignites after blowing it out.
Because EV fires are different, EV firefighting presents new problems. Firefighters often try to suppress car fires by, essentially, suffocating them. They might use foam extinguishers filled with substances like carbon dioxide that can draw away oxygen, or use a fire blanket that’s designed to smother flames. But because EV fires aren’t fueled by oxygen from the air, this approach doesn’t work. Instead, firefighters have to use lots and lots of water to cool down the battery. This is particularly complex when EV fires occur far from a hydrant, or if a local fire department only has a limited number of engines. Saltwater, which is extremely efficient at conducting electricity, can make the situation even worse.
Michael O’Brian, a firefighter in Michigan who serves on the stored-energy committee for the International Association of Fire Chiefs, suggested that sometimes the best strategy is to simply monitor the fire and let it burn. As with all car fires, he says his priority isn’t to salvage the vehicle.
“Our fire service in general across the United States [and] in North America is understaffed and overtaxed,” O’Brian explained. “If you’re going to commit a unit to a vehicle fire for two hours, that’s complicating.”
Some EV batteries can make this problem worse. In 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and General Motors announced an expanded recall of all the Chevy Bolts the car company had manufactured because tiny components inside some of the Bolt batteries’ cells were folded or torn. Chrysler issued a recall in 2022 after an internal investigation found that the vehicles had been involved in a dozen fires. Chrysler has yet to reveal the root cause of its battery issue and told Vox it’s still investigating. The company’s temporary solution was a software update that monitors when the car’s internal sensors determine that the battery might be at risk of igniting.
Tesla’s vehicles have their own set of problems. Tesla cars have retractable exterior door handles that only extend electronically, and only when the car has power. An emergency response guide for the 2016 Model S says that if exterior door handles aren’t working, there’s a button on the inside of the vehicle that drivers can use to open the car manually. Yet some allege that this feature makes it more difficult for emergency responders dealing with a Tesla fire. A lawsuit filed by the family of Omar Awan, a Florida doctor who died in 2019 after his Model S crashed and burst into flames, said that a police officer who arrived on the scene couldn’t open the doors from the outside.
Similarly, in a YouTube video that captured a recent Tesla battery fire in Vancouver, an owner recounts having to smash open the car’s windows because the electronics stopped working and the doors wouldn’t open. “I could feel it in my lungs, man,” he says on the recording. Tesla has also faced several otherlawsuits alleging that its battery systems are dangerous. The company, which does not have a PR department, did not respond to a request for comment.
Experts Vox spoke to, including firefighters as well as fire safety officials, say that while Teslas are the most common electric cars on the road right now, EV firefighting goes far beyond any one carmaker. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is that as EVs go mainstream, EV fires aren’t being studied as much as experts and government officials say they should be. “The unfortunate part is that we’re not really moving this as quickly as we should and updating it,” Lorie Moore-Merrell, the US fire administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told Vox.
The national fire incident tracking system currently used by FEMA was invented in 1976 and was last updated in 2002, so it doesn’t specifically track electric vehicle fires. While the agency does plan to update the system with a new cloud platform, FEMA said it will only start building the technology later this spring, and then it will transition from the legacy system sometime in the late fall.
Firefighting in the electric era
Amid a barrage of news reports about the Model X fire in Austin last year, Tesla reached out to the city’s fire department. Michael McConnell, an emergency response technical lead at Tesla, first spoke with Smith, the division chief, on the phone and later sent him an email, which Vox obtained through a public records request, with advice on how the fire department might approach the same situation in the future.
“First of all, let’s debunk the myth of getting electrocuted. Lots of things have to go wrong in order for that to happen,” Smith said. “If the battery pack has not been compromised, then just leave it alone.”
In the long, wide-ranging message, McConnell also explained what assistance Tesla could and could not provide. He offered online training sessions but could not arrange in-person training because, McConnell explained, he had “just too many requests.” A diagram for the Model X implied there was magnesium in a part of the car that did not, in fact, contain magnesium. There was no extrication video guide for the company’s Model Y car (extrication is the firefighter term for removing someone from a totaled vehicle). It would be difficult to get a training vehicle for the Austin firefighters to practice with, McConnell added, since Tesla is a “build to order manufacturer.” Most of Tesla’s scrap vehicles are recycled at the company’s Fremont plant, he said, though a car could become available if one of Tesla’s engineering or fleet vehicles crashed.
McConnell’s long email reflects the current approach to fighting EV fires and the fact that fire departments across the country are still learning best practices. Even now, there isn’t consensus on the best approach. Some firefighters have considered using cranes to lift flaming EVs into giant tanks of water, although some automakers discourage submerging entire vehicles. Rosenbauer, a major fire engine and firefighting equipment manufacturer, has designed a new nozzle that pierces through the battery casing and squirts water directly onto the damaged cells, despite some official automaker guides that say firefighters shouldn’t try rupturing the battery. Another factor that needs to be considered, added Alfie Green, the chief of training at the Detroit Fire Department, is that there are new car models released every year, and there is particular guidance on how to disconnect different cars.
While some standards have been released, others are still being developed, and fire departments are still catching up with National Transportation Safety Board recommendations. There’s also the matter of just getting the vast number of firefighters up to speed on EVs. O’Brian, the fire chief from Michigan, told Vox that the federal government needs to take a much more active role in funding research and helping buy EVs that fire departments can practice on.
Another complication is that EV fires present different risks in different places. The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) hasn’t had to fight any electric car fires yet, but it is facing e-scooter and e-bike fires, which are on track to double compared to last year and disproportionately endanger delivery workers in the city. Batteries that lack safety certifications or are charged improperly are more likely to ignite, explains John Esposito, the FDNY’s chief of operations. In November, 43 people were injured in a Manhattan building fire that the department ultimately linked to a battery-powered micromobility device — possibly a scooter — that had been kept inside an apartment.
Small towns face unique hurdles. In Irmo, South Carolina, which is home to fewer than 12,000 people, there’s concern about getting the right equipment to deal with EV fires. While there haven’t been any high-voltage battery fires yet, Sloane Valentino, the assistant chief of Irmo’s fire department, told Vox he’s not sure whether the town has enough engines to fight a Tesla fire while also responding to other fires in the area.
“We don’t have the capacity to deal with 30,000 gallons worth of toxic runoff. Some of it’s going to turn to steam,” Valentino told Vox. “We’re kind of back to, ‘Let it burn.’ When you see the big, violent flames shooting out of the car, just kind of protect what you can — try to cool the roadway — but let the car burn.”
Engineering a safer future
While internal combustion vehicles have been around for over a century, EVs are still relatively new, which means they could become even safer as more money and research pour into the technology. Remember the melting separator in the battery that creates thermal runaway? General Motors is studying how its battery separator could contribute to improved battery safety. The Department of Energy is working on technology that could incorporate flame retardants directly into the batteries’ design. Engineers are also investigating new battery chemistries, like less-flammable electrolytes. Though research is still early, solid-state batteries, which would replace a liquid electrolyte with a solid that’s far less likely to ignite, also show promise.
“Batteries are hopefully going to be getting better over time,” said Michael Brooks, from the Center for Auto Safety. New regulation could push battery safety even further, he added.
In the meantime, fire departments are working on adjusting to this new category of fire — just another reminder that the rise of electric vehicles involves far more than simply replacing gas tanks with batteries. And firefighters will be the ones driving some of these new EVs. In May, the Los Angeles Fire Department debuted the first electric fire truck to hit the road in the US. The bright red engine is made by Rosenbauer, and it comes with a front touchscreen, a remote control tablet, two onboard batteries, and a backup diesel range extender. Other departments are now waiting for their own EV fire trucks to arrive.
Meanwhile, back at the Austin Fire Department, Smith says he has encountered at least one EV fire since the Model X accident a year and a half ago. That one didn’t involve the battery, so it was like fighting any other car fire. But in the months following the 2021 crash, the fire department did go ahead and jury-rig a new firefighting nozzle to deal specifically with EV fires. The department hasn’t heard anything more from Tesla.
Rebecca Heilweil is a reporter at Vox covering emerging technology, artificial intelligence, and the supply chain.
From The Hindu: Sports
Something Royal claims the Queen Elizabeth Cup -
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One dead, four injured in blast at plastic shredding unit in Kadiri of Andhra Pradesh - Methyl ethyl ketone peroxide used in the local air cooling systems might have caused the explosion, say forensic experts
Golden jubilee of Telugu Samskrithika Sangham -
From BBC: Europe
Spain church attacks: Suspect was facing deportation - A 25-year-old Moroccan is detained after a church caretaker is killed and a priest injured.
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They sold a Picasso to flee the Nazis - now their heirs want it back - In 1938, Woman Ironing was sold to escape Germany. Now the heirs of the original owner want it back.
Czechs to vote in second round of presidential election - Former PM Andrej Babis and retired Nato general Petr Pavel are vying for the ceremonial but influential post.
Ukraine hit by Russian missiles day after West’s offer of tanks - Eleven people have been killed and 11 others injured after strikes hit buildings in several regions.
From Ars Technica
Deepfakes for scrawl: With handwriting synthesis, no pen is necessary - Free neural network demo generates dynamic, downloadable handwriting on the fly. - link
Q4 2022 was a disaster for smartphone sales, sees the largest-ever drop - Phone sales plummeted 18 percent last quarter, 11 percent for the entire year. - link
Antibiotic resistance induced by the widespread use of… antidepressants? - Bacteria evolve drug resistance more readily when antidepressants are around. - link
Do mechanical keyboards really need arrow keys? - Angry Miao replaces bulky arrow buttons with a 2×0.5-inch capacitive touchpad. - link
MSG probed over use of facial recognition to eject lawyers from show venues - MSG says policy is legal, while NY AG alleges it may violate civil rights law. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Andrew Tate says his Romanian jail is infested with lice. “Can you imagine sharing a cell with vile parasites?” -
