Weekly Scrap #215 - Paul Shoemaker, Next Level Extrication

Speaker 1: I'm just gonna say this. Get the f<unk>k out of here. Like, what does that even mean? Practice like you play. We can't always do that. The NFL, like How much time do they spend in full pads, full speed, full contact, practice like you play? Oh, you don't have your gloves on, you're not breathing air You're not doing this. So there's no value in it. Get the f out of here. As an American engine company, like You got one job to do. Stretch a line quickly and efficiently. One line a day. You know what that often compounding factor is That's going to turn into conversation and stretching two lines and three lines. And now let's mask up while we're doing it. And now let's stretch it to the door and let's force the door. And now let's do this. We're gonna do all of these little things that'll compound it. But on the daily, if we're doing that, man, we're winning. That's how we win the fire ground. Corley: Brother, man, 100%. People need to hear what you just said. People need to hear what you just said. I don't know. I don't know what else to say about that answer, man. This is my part. And this is the part I want to play into what you're saying is it's my job is to shut you down if it's not quality, man. No, you have brought nothing but quality.

Speaker 1: That's what my point. Go Go. E V S because to me it is the true culmination of firemanship, the skill, practice, and trade. And there is nothing And I am telling you nothing that will test you in your firemanship skills and abilities. Like that. Speaker 3: I I've learned to think before I speak and I'm not given a chance to think before I speak here. So I'm gonna first thing comes up is something that we talked about right before we went on the air. People coming into the academy me with thirty U years, people with twenty years, people with one year, a lot a lot of our fire academies aren't meeting the expectations. I expected to to have Hell Week in the Academy. I expected to come out of a thing like like a Navy SEAL or some sh and and and so I think expectations are are are being set. lower than what people are showing up with. Yes. And but I I think the bar can be raised there. And and I see other other departments that are doing a great job at it. I think we could focus on the fire service is we don't need certifications on our walls. We need real firemen teaching real firemen shit.

Speaker 4: I want to get in the door and offset of the door and then I can start working that full room So it the intentions of that nozzle movement is different because I'm able to win now. I'm able to start putting water on the fuel flame interface at that point where the fuel and flame are touching and producing that higher higher problem with the gases, now I can win and kill the compartment. If I'm in the living room and I've got obstructions in the way from the hallway And I've got fire blowing over my head. I don't want to just walk under the fire at that point and leave all that behind me. I want to fix it. I want to fix all of that and launch water into the area that I'm moving into to prep that area for my arrival. So I want to rent that space before I'm able to move into it and own it. at that point when I get there. Compartment firefighting is not rocket science. A lot of guys make it out to be, but essentially we want to take the compartments over one at a time You know, so locate the fire, confine it to a compartment, kill the compartment, repeat. That's essentially what we're doing. But

Corley: Corley Moore. Firehouse Vigilance, it is weekly scrap number 215. My guest tonight is Paul Schumacher, currently a firefighter paramedic in Colorado, 16 years in the fire service. Tech rescue technician, served on the tech rescue team for over 13 years. He has served on advisory panels with underwriter laboratories. He works with the NFPA on various projects to improve firefighter safety with lithium battery fires, electric vehicle extrication. Also a member of the SAE 2990 committee attempting to bridge the gap between the fire service and OEM's when dealing with lithium batteries. He's the owner of Next Level Extrication, teaching firefighters to have a better understanding of electric vehicles when dealing with vehicle accidents and lithium battery fires. It is definitely a hot topic, and I'm looking forward to tonight. Hot topic, no pun intended. It is my absolute pleasure to have you on as the guest of weekly scrap number 215. Welcome, my brother, Paul Shoemaker. Paul Schumacher: Thanks for having me. Yeah, I I think you know I don't feel like I should be in this position. I think I'm of the caliber of people that come on here. I I definitely don't feel like I'm even close to there. So I appreciate you giving me this opportunity to talk to the all the people that subscribe and will listen in today. And I'm excited to be here and I'm excited for the

Corley: for this opportunity so thank you appreciate awesome awesome brother awesome anything i missed in the intro anything you want to add no it sounds great you made it it made me feel more than i than i think i should so Paul Schumacher: Awesome. Corley: No, excellent, excellent. The checking in with the chats here. Jay, let's see. Yeah, there's lots. Let's go. Good evening, everyone, from Joe Govita. Let's have a great scap scrap from Nicholas Gwynn, James Michelisco checking in from Indy and taking notes with my crayons. Preston Lyons is saying checking in to support a fellow Colorado firefighter. Cody Brooks says, we can see you, Sam. Is that true? I don't know. I don't think so. But glad if you can. Okay, let's get to it. Let's see. Housekeeping. Let's get it out of the way so we can get to the fun topics. Quick announcements. First off. If you want to be a part of the vigilantes, go to firehousevigilance. com. Become a member of the cool kids club. Check this out. I don't know if I can even I can't see what I'm I'm just hoping you can see it. It is really, really cool. These are going to be put in the vigilante swag shop. they're about to go they've come in. We're waiting on the shirts to come in and then it'll all be put there. It's pretty badass. So I'm not gonna lie, go be apart. let's talk about those beautiful sponsors. The OG, the original sponsor of the scrap, Keyhoes, check them out online at Keyhos. com. Follow them on Facebook com. New sponsor tonight. Performance meets protection with fire DEXs, DEX Pro, structural firefighting gloves, and DEX Rescue, technical rescue gloves. These gloves redefine what's possible, offering you unbeatable comfort and dexterity right at your fingertips. With game-changing features like rollover fingertips and a 360-degree range of motion keystone thumb, you can trust in their durability and dexterity, allowing you to push your limits like never before. This is your opportunity to I'll get it right. This is your opportunity to level up your gear. Head to fire decks. com right now and unlock a special 15% discount on your purchase by using the code Scrap 15. Go there, use it, support the sponsor, scrap 15. Go buy some fire deck stuff. And finally, firefighter safety and accountability starts with being able to quickly find and identify individual firefighters operating on the fire ground.

Corley: Identifier safety combines the best in photoluminescent materials for durable firefighter identification solutions that can glow for up to 20 hours with no switches, no batteries, and that means you can Rapidly identify firefighters by name, unit, or assignment, even under hot fire conditions. Firefighter created, owned, and operated. Identifier safety is the home for all your on-scene identification need All specifically designed and tested for the rigors of the job. com. And that officially gets us through the sponsors. And that officially gets us to the topics. So my brother, Paul. Yeah, what's up? Always send out an email asking people what do you want to talk about? What's what's what what what do I need to research? And I love what you sent and we're gonna get to all well we're gonna see what all we get to But I love one of the things you sent. It was the bottom of the email and it said my passion. Your passion. And I just want to kind of touch on Your passion for teaching and the and the thing you said about the 20 years to learn as much as you can in your anyway. Don't want to take it from you, but just explain your passion.

Paul Schumacher: Yeah, I mean my passion is is obviously giving back to the fire service, you know, and and being there and and and Not about a staple in yourself as an individual, right? It's the staple of the fire service and continuous, continuously producing that staple over and over and over. And and so I have this philosophy in my life that I've always been. taught from from fellow firefighters and kind of lived by it now at this point is you have 20 years in in a 30-year career to learn as much as you possibly can. Embrace everything you can from every single aspect of the fire service. But then that only leaves you with 10 years to give what you've learned in 20 years back to the fire service so we can continue that cycle. And that's ultimately what got me into teaching in the first place was I felt like if I wasn't a part of what I believed in my mind was giving back to the fire service, then I'm not doing and sticking true to my word of saying 20 I got 20 and 10. You know, people would mostly say, oh, you're you, you know, the two and ten rule, right? Two years on job, ten years of experience. No, I'm talking 20 years learning, 10 years giving back, but you can't give 10 years back just waiting to the very end of your career. You don't learn for a full 20 years of your career than do 10 you have to incorporate that throughout your 20 years to extend that out to that 30. I mean that's a firefighters and all that stuff. So yeah that is a it's a passion of mine to give back to the fire service because I I I live by that model.

Corley: Love it. Absolutely. And when I read it, I did, man. I never thought about that. 20 years to learn as much as you can in a 30-year career. And then you got it, yeah. No, it's it's it's a phenomenal way of looking at it. And pass it down to the next generation. Paul Schumacher: You do because if we don't if we don't do that, you know what happens, right? We just end up We end up losing so much valuable information. We lose culture. We lose history. We lose education in the fire service, you name it, tactical skills and behavior If someone doesn't step up and keep that going, we just we tend to lose what the fire service was all about. Corley: Yeah, and it walks out the door when they retire. Paul Schumacher: Yep. Corley: Absolutely. Absolutely. let's get to it because everybody wants to know about electric vehicle fires, lithium ion batteries. But we're gonna start with you basically gave me two two things. So a lot of your questions, keep your questions coming. Sam is grabbing your questions. But there's vehicle fires on the street and vehicles located in a compartmentalized environment. Which one do you want to tackle first? I want you this dealer's choice.

Paul Schumacher: I think I would I would start with the the easiest one because people look at it as the largest problem because they haven't even realized what the largest problem is. And so I want to stick with the cars out on the street and and pretty much squash this thought process of these. things need to burn or they're gonna cost us 40,000 gallons of water or three and a half hours to ten hours of of putting them out Not because it's not possible that that could happen, but the reality of that happening and it being a huge concern to us is super low on my scale of concerns when we put my own batteries. My big concern is the other side. stuff. So let's let's hammer out the street. On the street, lithium-ion battery car fires. Okay, starting on the street. Corley: So not not in the garage, not in the compartment. Paul Schumacher: No, and so, you know, really right now what we have happening is is the media. That's the biggest problem we have, and that's that's pretty much the fire service in general. Corley: Are you talking about in life or in the fire service? Paul Schumacher: Yeah, yeah, totally. General, globally. Okay. But when when it comes to these new things, you know, they they touch on to any sort of bad literature they can get. And so you know the fire service has had a couple incidences where people are posting comments about 45,000 gallons of water. And these things are wasting their time and they don't even have these kind of resources. So they're just going to let these things burn nowadays. Well, studies show and and kind of the research through what we've been through so far that If that if the water is accurately placed where it should be on these vehicles, and you may have to get to that by, we can get into that by lifting it or moving it. But just in general, if we put the water on the source of where it's burning. Directly on the source, then the fires that we're looking at are going out in 3,500 to 5,000 gallons of water, right? Of continuous water. The two things that need to happen is we have to identify the car first of all. We have to know Is it a hybrid? Is it a plug-in hybrid? Or is it an all-electric vehicle?

Paul Schumacher: And the reason we have to identify that is because that's the initial location of where we're placing those batteries. Sorry, that water on those batteries. So go ahead. Corley: No, no, no. I'll I'm gonna I'm gonna try and ask questions along the way. And I'm not I'm I'm so far from well versed on any of this. Is that your two distinctions of of of electric cars basically a hybrid or all electric? Paul Schumacher: Well hybrid plug-in hybrid and it so three okay hybrid plug in hybrid and all electric would be my my distinction between those those that are on the road that will cause us the problem. Corley: Okay, no, no, no. Okay. Hybrid. Plug-in hybrid and all electric. Paul Schumacher: Yeah. Okay. Corley: Me okay. Paul Schumacher: Sorry, go ahead. I love it. No, keep it, keep it coming. I can stop and move and flow and and group time. The hybrids are going to be located in the rear trunk. So right off the bat, if we show up to a ripping car fire and we start throwing water inside it or on the belly of it, We're not actually getting to the problem. So how much water are we going to throw at this car before we identify that the batteries are located in the trunk? We got to pop the trunk and so forth, right? Then we can take that into the next level, which is the plug-ins. The plug-in hybrids, they carry a lot more batteries. And the reason they carry more batteries is it's in the word. They now have to be plugged in in order to power those batteries. A hybrid can recharge its batteries just by driving down the road, called regenerative braking. Plugins have to use an AC current from that home in order to charge them, but that's also because the capacity of the batteries are much larger. Now that the capacity is larger, they have to bump them from the rear trunk. They have to start moving them forward into the vehicle.

Corley: So is this where it's more of a skateboard deck or is that when you get into the full? That's the full. Okay, okay, just check it. So where do and again forgive my ignorance? The plugins, they move from the trunk and then they start moving where typically is it is it all over the place or is there a typical? Paul Schumacher: there's there's there's a typical in saying that it's going to be interior. That we know. We can automatically say so it's gonna be behind the rear trunk, but they can move them up underneath the front seats. Right. So it depends on where they want to place those. The one thing we do know is they're not going to be underneath. They're not going to be in the belly of the vehicle. And that's just because of the fact that we still have a motor. We still have a transmission. We got fuel lines, drive shafts, fuel tanks. So they're going to be in, but the where the exact locations is going to be is based on the OEM and the manufacturer where they want to throw those. Awesome. And then you got your all-electric, which is obviously now that I printed on it, is going to be on that belly. And they're going to be underneath Now that's where people can get hemmed up a little bit, is they'll they'll throw a bunch of water into this car of a plug-in hybrid and they'll go to flip it because they've seen pictures about flipping it and spraying the belly They'll flip it and spray the belly, and that's not where the batteries are. And now we've ended in into a scenario where we could be accumulating large gallons of water, 10,000 plus gallons of water. Now, when we're looking at identifying the vehicle, finding out where the location is actually burning from, it's that simple. Putting the water where the flame is actually coming from. We have to put out all the stuff around it maybe at first to find that out. Put out the leather, put out the the the carpet, put out the interior, and then look and see where is that main body of fire coming from. And then focus that stream in that location because it most likely is going to have opened up that battery pack, allowing us to get water in there.

Paul Schumacher: The the batteries themselves, when they're burning, they're burning at 2800 degrees. But when they're burning at 2800 degrees and you're trying to flow water out of it, it's obviously going to take a lot of water to just initially get that thing to cool down to a level of where it's no longer actively burning. Right. That level is probably right around 100 degrees When we are talking about having those fires put out and completely suppressed at that point in time. So, how can I tell somebody specifically it's gonna take you three hours, not ten hours, or I'm gonna say it's gonna take you this much water and and this not this much water? That is all theoretical. The big thing that I want people to understand is that If you're not at the source of the fire, then the water that you're going to put on there is going to be exponentially higher. You are going to sit on scene exponentially longer But when when you look at the vehicle and you start to slow yourself down, find those locations, put the water there, it's not about the GPM. It's not about putting 165 GPM through a smooth bore tip. It's about how can I actually reduce my GPM To still give me a good hose stream to allow me to get good penetration into the battery, where I'm not going to lose rigidity in my hose, but I can flow it now continuously based on my water supply. And that may mean I'm on the side of a highway and I'm trying to do some sort of relay operation. One rig's getting off, filling up their tank, getting back on the highway, another one's coming. and you're doing this constant circulation. If I can bump it down to a 90 GPM nozzle, I'm still getting the flow I need to suppress this fire. But it's got to be continuous. If I have to shut down my nozzle to go fill up water, say it's at a junkyard, and I gotta go fill up on the outside of the junkyard because I didn't stretch an LDH in there Now I've stopped suppressing those batteries. Takes me 10 minutes to go fill up and come back in. That 10 minutes, you basically just reset that ticker. You're gonna have to do everything you've already done all over again.

Paul Schumacher: Just to get back to where you were when you left the first time. Correct. And that's where we start to see some some significant accumulation of gallons and they're going, dude, no matter what I do, this thing doesn't go out. Corley: Now is there a rule of thumb that you would say is like as far as a minimum or is it really just depend on what's burning and and fuel package or which batteries are When you say reduce, is it is it I don't know. Yeah, just is there a rule like 75 GPM is about as far as I'd want to go, 50? Paul Schumacher: I I think probably 90, 95 GPS probably is as low as I'd want to go because the 2800 degrees is still exponentially hot and those BTUs need some significant water. Okay. No, no, no. I love to ask your question. I love it. Because I actually haven't put a ton of thought into it, but it is my belief that I think I wouldn't go less than 90 95 GPM, but I don't love 160, 165. I don't love 170. I don't like any of those tipping down whatever you are to get higher GPS, GPM and throwing larger distance, all this other stuff is too much. It's too much for what we're trying to accomplish here. Initially, do I think you might need to be in that higher GPM range? Well, that just based on Is the full car like ripping on the inside? And I got to like knock a bunch of leather down and a bunch of rubber that's burning. Sure, but once I knock this thing down, I want to reduce my GPMs as much as I can But I can only reduce it to the point to where my knob my hose isn't going to go limp.

Corley: Right. But continuity, continuity of flow around that 90, 90 GPM mark is more important than just pure GPM power. Correct. Okay. I like it. I like the takeaway. Carry on, sorry. I'll keep digging in. You keep talking. I'll keep trying to throw curveballs. Paul Schumacher: I love it. Do it. Keep me going. Corley: So I got questions also coming from the audience, but you're hitting on some of them. So you keep going. I'll throw them in here shortly. Paul Schumacher: Okay. So really like when we look at the grand scheme of this thing now, how do we suppress them? Like when we'd get to that that problem. If you have a hybrid or a plug-in hybrid, I always ask students, you know, why would we lift this vehicle? Why would you even want to lift this vehicle? This vehicle has probably pretty much little to no potential of burning on the bottom of the vehicle, which I use a terminology called a down and out fire. Down and out versus an up and in. Most of our hybrids and our plug-in hybrids are going to be up and in fires because the locations of the batteries are up and inside the vehicle. Our all electric vehicles are the tricky one because our all electric vehicles can burn up and in and down and out because it's 2800 degrees and it's the belly of the car, the bottom of the car, the smooth belly bottom, and those batteries are sitting in. between there. So what's really protecting it from burning up and in? I will tell you the manufacturers design it where they try to get that thermal runaway to burn down and out. So they're called down and out fires. Okay, it's a down and out fire, that's one where we need to look at having truck operations coming in, our heavy rescues showing up on scene, and we need to think about are we gonna have to flip this thing Are we going to use a grip hoist, a winch, chains? Maybe we don't have an organization or a fire department that has a truck company that functions like that or a heavy. Well then maybe think about incorporating or working with your towing industry. and having them rip some chains around that B post on the other side, opposite side, and pull it back onto its wheels on the two wheels on the front and rear wheel of whatever side you're trying to flip it on if that makes sense.

Paul Schumacher: Yes. And maybe that's how we have to suppress that. But Well the problem we'll run into is is we will need a little bit of early recognition on those things before we let this thing get out of control. So 3,500 to 5,000 gallons of water is the way that it would work in an ideal situation if you had proper dispatching with early notification You had early recognition on the actual location of the fire based as the lieutenant, captain, chief showing up on scene. You recognized where it was burning from right off the bat. Started supplying that water towards that source of that fire. And then tactically have already previously been trained on, hey, are we going to flip this thing or not flip this thing? If you haven't done any of those things, I can't guarantee you 3,500 to 5,000 calories of water is going to put it out Because you're trying to figure out what do I do next. Corley: Right. But what you can guarantee, and what I've already taken away from this, is if you can if you can identify the type of vehicle you're dealing with. with and then identify the source. Obviously like just like a house fire, you gotta find the seat of the fire. Correct. If you get the water on the seat of the fire, you're gonna exponentially drop the GPMs needed. Correct.

Paul Schumacher: I always say to people like if you look at it like you you got a ripping fire that's blowing out the alpha side window of the of the of the living room. Doors right to the right. You got fire blowing out. And you walk in that front door and you start flowing a hose line straight at it, you know, hitting high, low, whatever you need to do, you're hitting it. keeps pushing back out you and pushing back out you and you never did a 360 and then you go to find out that this fire all started on the back deck on the Charlie side of the structure and it's really burning back there, burning all the gases right through that It'd be the same thing. You're throwing a lot of water at this car. You're flooding the inside of this thing for two hours going, man, this thing just keeps burning and burning and burning. And the reality would be like, hey, it's burning underneath. We need to get underneath this thing, lift it up. And we would have saved two hours of water application and we if we would have recognized that early we could have been putting that water application underneath. That's the type of stuff

Corley: Love it. Okay. I'm a lot of questions coming from the audience. So there's it's all sorts of directions. Some stuff we plan to cover later, but we'll just go with whatever direction you want to. Love it. First question out the gate for was from Cody Brooks. And man, we're gonna get to electric fires in in compartments, Cody. So I'll get to your question when we get to compartments. So I'm gonna go to Stephen Wayne. Is there an EPA risk with letting these cars burn if water supply is scarce? Or there's a lot of questions that surround runoff. and and EPA risk. Do you have any information on that? Paul Schumacher: Currently it's all being tested. That's the information I can give you is is We have at UL, we have actually captured in turkey basters, we've we've suppressed lithium-ion batteries and captured the fluid in that turkey. trap and and and they're running tests on it. We do know that it is very toxic. That's all we do know is that it's toxic to the streams, to the to the waterways and things like that. Now at what level it's all it all changes because EPA judges it a little bit off of like how far is it going to sink into the ground. Is it a chemical that the ground can eat and absorb? Or is it like a oil that is basically cannot be absorbed and it flushes down into the water drains and goes out into the ocean? And there's no stopping it, right? Without doing some sort of additional mitigation. It could be toxic, but once mixed with water, you know, the solution to pollution is dilution. And then it may not be as big of a deal, but all of those tests have to be run. As far as the gases that are coming off of them, that one I can tell you right now, hands down, is extremely, extremely toxic. Nasty, nasty stuff. I mean In your own life of not going up going up to this thing without an SCBA on, you're you're you're you're not doing yourself any favors of having a long retirement if you decide to go up to an electric vehicle fire burning And I mean you may not even see the gas. You may just be able to be within a distance to where you can smell that nasty smell, not actually in the gas at all.

Paul Schumacher: And that's enough to hurt you or or or put some serious. Some take some serious years off of your life, you know. so that we do know. So that's what I always bring it back where people go, well man, I wanna I'm gonna let it burn. I try to say to them, listen, I'm not against you letting it burn based on resources, water supply, traffic, you know, all these things. things that you have to go through in your mind. Exposure, like do I really want to have that all over my gear? Because we do know that the gases that get on this gear, it permeates through your gear. it's a it becomes a little bit acidic and actually can eat through your gear where there's some some bunker gear companies that are saying once you're exposed to lithium ion batteries at a pretty heavy density that they're talking about not being able to wash them without a specific solvent. And if you don't have that they're talking about throwing away. But if you don't want to have any of those issues or concerns with yourself, then you say, well, I'm gonna let it burn. You now have to also think about HVAC systems. if you know, what your neighborhoods, your are you next to a nursing home, a big box store, because you're gonna have to shut all that stuff down while you sit there and as it burns It could be a slow burn that takes six hours to burn through that whole process, or it could be a fast burn that burns through everything in two hours. But that's a lot of smoke over that time period. So It's it's it's a kind of a a very fluid conversation of whether it's good or bad at this point in time and what you want to do because the EPA runoff is a problem, the exposure to to gas is is a is a problem, but I can tell you 100% right now the gas is is nasty, nasty stuff. The the runoff still don't have those tests back. Yeah.

Corley: Right on. Right on. And maybe we'll get a best practice at some point in the future. Yep. all right. can you speak? I don't understand Alan's question really, but can you speak to if the batteries are breached and water getting rephrase the question, Alan, if you would, on your lithium question if you knock if after you knock the fire, would you be able to use a piercing nozzle to penetrate the battery packs or is the battery pack too secure to too secure to make a entry into the battery pack? Basically, is it base are you Should you be trying to pierce them? I I've heard so many different contradictory information on it. Go ahead. Paul Schumacher: One of the panels I'm on right now is a two-year assignment with UL where we're gonna be testing all of this stuff. So please bear with me on that this is In two, three years could be changing information. Sure. Right now it is 100% not okay to pierce the belly of these things. And and to give you some insight of what happens with most of these battery fires, why they happen in the first place. is there was a penetration or a puncture to that battery pack. It's oh it's it's it's a very high percentage, you know what percentage to give you it's just high. that it is accident driven. It is very low that an electric vehicle is just driving down the road and auto combusts on fire. It's just low. But the big one is running over a stop sign as you're trying to make a turn, a 90-degree turn in some snow. You know, I was picture that driver that hits the curb, goes up over the curb. Shears off that stop sign and now that spike is sitting underneath there. That is probably a guarantee it's going to be instant ignition. These batteries do not like to be opened or touched or messed with. Okay. They're very, very stable if they're left in their compartment. But once opened, it's a bad deal. Now there, and I'm not going to talk about the companies that do this, but there are companies out there that are selling a piercing nozzle that would go in there and it and it basically supplies it at about 8 GPM a minute or you know, obviously a minute, but and it it has very specific requirements where it has to be so many inches below and do this and that.

Paul Schumacher: I took it to Tesla and asked Tesla what what's their thoughts and they were like absolutely not do not ever penetrate these battery packs On the other side of that, well, what happens when it is punctured? Now that it's punctured, we got to put water in there because it needs to be cooled down. They're now going into a thermal runaway Once that battery is disrupted, it now goes into a thermal runaway. And the way that I like to tell people in my class is if I have two pieces of metal, like this is one piece and this is one piece. And in each piece, there's multiple different types of metal in here, multiple different types of metal in here. These two pieces of metal get rolled up it really tight into a cylindrical cell or some of them are pouch style where they're zipped back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. But between those two pieces of metal is a separator. That separator is what keeps the These two pieces of metal from touching each other. If these two pieces of metal touch each other at all, they will go into some sort of a thermal runway. Maybe it's in instantaneously or maybe it's 28 days later. And now they start to heat up. And as they heat up, that separator starts to get hotter and hotter and hotter. And then it becomes to degradate more and more and more Now it starts to get hotter, hotter, it starts to heat up. It's now going 100, 140, 200, 250, 300, and then it will go to whenever this battery has an ignition temperature. Some batteries are 325, some are 450, and some are 500 and 600 degrees. So based on that, whenever that hits that potential is when you get that ignition Now all of a sudden you have that problem. And that problem can be done by you puncturing the bottom of it, realizing that you're not in the right location for where it's on fire. you take the the the puncture needle whatever it is that they have in this this this piece of equipment you move it over somewhere else and you try to jam it up in there you're just creating holes that now are all going to be problems at some point in the in the career of that the life of that that that vehicle.

Corley: Right. So that helps. Fascinating. No, no, it is fascinating. Ben Meeks asked question. no he that was the one you just answered. Sorry. Let me see. There was one. What about the non-piercing I know Turtle had had a one that that goes under the car and sprays. It's a Also we could use you can slide it into under doors and things like that, but it they were marketing it as a way to get under a car and deliver water. What do you think of the non-piercing water distribution novels? Paul Schumacher: They my only problem I have with all of these ones that are coming out, because there's a lot of them. They're just basically they're like undercarriage sprayers types of things, the way I look at them. I don't think anybody's coming up with any bad ideas. Nothing has been tested. to prove that it actually works. And the the only problem I have with all of this equipment is I can train people currently right now to put these things out with whatever you have on your rig. Right. And so I don't I'm a big believer on less is more. And why would I cram the engines or the trucks with more and more equipment when we can take care of it with what we have currently right now? Trying to put these pieces of equipment into a cabin space, a compartment space of the of a vehicle. I just I'm just not a big fan of it. but does it work? It probably does. I would also probably add to that that there is a probably a good high likelihood that you're not actually getting in the battery pack with all of that water So how much of that, which I use a terminology called water wasting, that's typically when you see these guys throwing five or six streams at one of these cars You don't need that. If you're just water wasting, or if you're if you lift this thing and elevate this thing up on its side and I'm trying to spray water out it, the another thing I would call is water wasting is maybe somebody jamming it at like a 30 degree fog. I mean, you don't need a 30 degree fog because you're you you are cooling that whole battery pack But you really need to get into that opening of wherever it's burning first.

Paul Schumacher: That's my priority. And then I can just break up a smooth bore if I want to do that. Break it up, lower the GPM a little bit by breaking it up, and now I'm not wasting so much water by just just shedding it on the bottom of these vehicles. Corley: So when you say breaking it up, you mean gating? Just gating you're not gonna get it. Okay, okay, okay. Let's make it sure. Same thing, yeah Craig D. Blake says, Paul, can you comment on the battery change from lithium ion to lithium iron phosphate? Paul Schumacher: I don't have enough on it yet. I don't have enough on it. I know that that is something, so it's it's something that is is gonna come, I think is what's gonna happen. It's gonna come in in big numbers. But I try to tell people that what we have to deal with now is the lithium-ion batteries because Most of these manufacturing so here's to give you an example, the first ever all electric vehicle was in 2012, which was Tesla. But they started developing these cars like in 2006, 2000 ish in seven before they developed one to come out in 2012. Once they've created this vehicle to run off the lithium-ion batteries, it's very hard to change all of the computers. All of the little robots that are running around the shop that are making these cars. So as you see, Tesla still hasn't changed them from 2012 to 2023. They are working on changing these batteries But these batteries that they talk about bringing out, we're talking probably another 10 years before we start to see them in vehicles. Personally, that's that's not a that's not a that's a personal opinion. That's not a guarantee I just see that there's so much that these Chevy, the, the, the, the Rivions, they just built these things. They just came out this year, built under lithium-ion batteries. So now they're gonna somehow say, wait a second, we don't like these batteries. Let's try to change these to these new batteries. But to do that, it's gonna take years before they start to implement them into their vehicles. And then we won't know what problems are gonna be. with these types of batteries until we start to have them introduced into equipment, vehicles, scooters, and all that type of stuff. So I wish I had a better answer for them.

Paul Schumacher: but we have to just hammer down right now at UL and NFPA. We just have to figure out the big problem, which is the lithium-ion batteries right now. And that's that's where that focus is. Corley: Sure. Ryan Holt and William Benson and I mean it's been asked multiple times. Your thoughts on the advertised fire blankets? Paul Schumacher: Oh man, I wish I could say what I want to say, but I'm not gonna. So here's what I'll say. Corley: It's a scrap. You can say whatever you want. Paul Schumacher: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's curse words and all sorts of shit. No, I'm just I'll be professional about this one. I think they have their purpose. I really do. I do not like how they are being advertised out there as the end-all to solve everybody's problem. It frustrates the living daylights out of me because it's it's science is what it is to me. The gases that are coming off these things are flammable explosive gases. And when you smother a vehicle, you allow the gases to still be contained in that vehicle. They tell you to put the blanket and tuck it up underneath the car completely so you can't get any more air inside there. There's air and gas in the compartment of the vehicle. You're not gonna be able to get all of that out, right? It's gonna still be in there. It can build and then on its own lithium batteries will produce its own oxygen So you're not smothering anything necessarily. If it sits there long enough, it can produce its own oxygen, get back to its ignition temperature underneath that blanket. And we actually have seen these blankets poof up and come back down from those gases igniting. That is a likelihood of a percentage that I don't have for anybody. So I don't want to give somebody some false hope that it doesn't have a purpose, right? That that maybe you you bought these already and you want to use them. Okay. Here's the bigger issue I have with them is I kind of hit on it a little bit already, and that's that the cars themselves, the batteries, have to be cooled. The only way that they can be cooled is with water, right? foam doesn't work. Foam's got a problem with it because foam smothers. So it traps heat and then it's conductive to electricity.

Paul Schumacher: So that's why foam has been told to not be used on lithium-ion battery fires. But when we know that the main purpose of putting these these batteries out is to cool them and we want to get that temperature down to 100 degrees from 2800 degrees, we need to get down to 100 degrees. By putting the blanket over them, we're not cooling anything. We're just temporarily suppressing a bigger problem, if that makes any sense. Now, the reason I said I do think they have a purpose, and that's why I'm going to be professional about this one, is that because I would put on every battalion chief rig. I would not put them on the engines. I wouldn't put them on the trucks. I'd put them on every battalion chief rig in the city. And where they would be used is when they are in compartmentalized areas, parking garages, out in the Walmart parking lot where there's multiple vehicles next to each other. Instead of letting it spread from one vehicle to the next. Wrap that blanket around that thing, get it to suppress itself, but immediately have some sort of a plan in your mind of how am I going to separate these vehicles from the other vehicles? So am I going to hook a grip hoist up to it, a winch, and tow the vehicle out. As soon as that is towed out, do I have the engine company ready with hose lines and ready to start suppress the fire and when everybody says good good and good then I take the blanket off and then we start to go back to fire attack and that's where I feel like it has its purpose

Corley: So more almost more exposure control. Yes. Yeah, I love okay. No, that I that makes sense to my firefighter brain. I like I love that. So yeah. Cool. Love it. Preston Lions coming at you. Paul, can you talk about the type of glass these windows are made of and the increased victim profile with the gases these batteries put out? Paul Schumacher: Yeah, that's a good question. And I kind of left that out because Where I was originally gonna go before I got sidetracked here. But this is my brain, by the way. I just go all over. I get crazy here. And I love this shit. I do love it. So I get really passionate about it. But Where I wanted to go with that car fire on the street is that it's it's 3,500 to 5,000 gallons. It's just a little bit more water and a little bit more time, but it's a car fire. It's it's we can do this. It's easy, no problems at all. Okay. The the problem was one was compartmentalized and the other problem with lithium-ion batteries is in a structure. So when I talk about what is the main problem about the car out on the road It's the fact that the way that most of these cars are being developed now, there was a law that came out in September 3rd of 2018. that states that vehicles on the road, if they do not have side curtain airbags, need to have laminated glass built around the vehicle. If they put side curtain airbags in there, then they can go to whatever glass they want. They could do tempered or they could do laminated Their choice. The other problem with that is now add into these things how they operate. They operate off of electricity. So their drive shaft works off of electricity, their e-brake works off of electricity, their door locks. Work off of electricity. When you put lit laminated glass around a vehicle and now tell me that their doors work off of electricity. But we're talking about a car that once it catches on fire, it's burning the part that supplies the electricity, which is the batteries. What happens to the to the the patients were there originally going on these car fires in the past where they're out of the vehicle. Now what happens to our mindset and what happens to the the the likelihood that we could be going on a person burning inside of a vehicle now.

Paul Schumacher: And they are they have these safety features built into them where they say, well, listen, if there's a failure inside the battery pack in the electrical system. the doors should automatically unlock themselves. You get into an accident, you're driving down the road, it's supposed to have a pyrotechnic that fires off. When the pyrotechnic fires off It now sends a signal to the vehicle to set off any airbag where somebody is seated. Once that airbag is set off, now unlock the doors for the people. That's the way it's supposed to work. But when we're talking about a car that gets into an accident. And and it didn't set off the pyrotechnic because it actually scraped the belly of the vehicle. The belly now catches on fire, it starts to burn. The electric electrical system inside that vehicle shuts down. That's not the mechanism that unlocks your vehicle. That shuts it down. And in fact, there was a case in Phil Phoenix, Arizona, where an old man was just in his garage, getting into his garage His car battery, the 12-volt car battery, died in his car. Why he got in it? He got in it. He said it was giving him warnings. Weeks up to it that said, hey, just make sure you change your battery soon. He was like, okay, but he hadn't he hadn't driven it much. He got in there, car battery died. He was locked in it in Phoenix, Arizona, in his garage for four hours yelling for help. to get out of this thing. Okay. That was an electrical malfunction that didn't work through the process that the car was used to. So now it locked the car doors. But now I think back at like our our days of of extrication, we have tempered glass, we have laminated. We've always said the front windshield is a pain in the ass. to get into and we're always like dude I'll never take a front windshield I'll do whatever I can to flop the roof over the front of the hood and then the the the front windshield instead of actually have to cut through it But now we're talking about these cars having that laminated glass on our passenger back seat, front seat, driver's side, all of that stuff. Now we lock a car door that somebody can't get out of.

Paul Schumacher: And now imagine how hard it is to break a tempered glass, but magnify that when we talk about people being trapped in there and trying to break out a laminated glass. And now people are getting trapped in them. And in my class, I actually show a video of a guy who pulled up to a stoplight. When he pulled up to the stoplight, the car just went into a malfunction. It went into a malfunction and shut everything down on this dude. It was in Canada. Most people can look it up on YouTube if you want. But he ended up stopping. His reaction was kicking the window out. And he tells you on the whole video. He had to flip around in the car. Kick the driver's side window out to get him out of it. By the time he got out of it, turned around to record, the car was on fire, burning. And now it's burning. Not only is it burning at 2800 degrees. The types of gases that are coming off in this is hydrogen, hydrogen fluoride, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide. That's just to name a few. But Even if this guy would have stayed awake inside this vehicle, say he say he didn't kick his way out and he was inside this vehicle, it went into a thermal runaway and it didn't catch on fire. Now I just told you those four gases right there start to come up into the cab of the vehicle. The main one that we're talking about is carbon dioxide. And it fills that cavity up with carbon dioxide. So even if the car door was unlocked, but he hit his head, he was a little delirious, and then it starts to fill up with gas. Now all of a sudden he's in a carbon diet carbon dioxide atmosphere. Even if he knew how to get out of there and the car door would just be easily able to open. We can't even use a zipper when we don't have enough oxygen in our brain. We can't use our fingers. We don't know what's going on. And so these people are starting to get trapped inside these vehicles to where now we're dealing with lithium-ion battery fires and it's not the fire putting it out on the side of the road that that's that scares me or alerts me.

Paul Schumacher: It's that did we do enough of assessment to start enough rigs to where we even have a rig coming with extrication tools? We show up to a car fire right now, who brings extrication tools? I mean a standard dispatched, you know, you got a car fire on the side of the highway. We need to be looking at these cars as are we bringing a truck company and an engine company with every single electric vehicle fire? Because my priority should be Do I know if somebody's trapped inside that vehicle or not? And the likelihood of somebody being trapped in that vehicle is exponentially higher than anything we've ever seen before in our life dealing with combustible motor vehicles. Gotcha. to give you one more story, a guy in Colorado was driving his Tesla home from a from a golf tournament with him and his buddy. They went down a back road. They were using a auto drive, autopilot. It ended up hitting into a tree. When it smashed into the tree, it instantly combusted into flames. The passenger got out of the vehicle right away. Got out. Slammed the door. He turned around and realized his driver wasn't getting out of the car. He went back to the car to find out why his driver wasn't getting out. And you know how these electric vehicles work. Once they're shut from the outside, you can't get in them He came back and looked at him and he said his buddy was doing uncomprehendable things with his hands. He couldn't get in the car. He was trying to smash the window and the dude burned to death and died. And that was July of last year.

Speaker 1: Wow. Paul Schumacher: So, you know, what are we ready to face those problems? And those to me are the way bigger problems than 3,500 gallons of water, right? 5,000 gallons of water. So love that he brought that up because I just got on a huge tangent about Corley: that but no no absolutely man yeah everybody's listening like even even sam said chat check it's got quiet in here everybody's just listening Paul Schumacher: Okay. Corley: how do you recommend lifting you kind of touched on it, how do you recommend lifting or flipping these vehicles while they are on fire? Paul Schumacher: I don't necessarily recommend you flipping them when they're on fire. I think you'll be able to just suppress most of the the fire with a hose stream so it'd be a simultaneous coordinated attack having your engine company doing some suppression efforts while you're while you're flipping it. But I do this thing. I always call it a high and tight. I always try to stay high and tight on the vehicle. So you know approaching it from the front, walking up on the hood, walking up on the back trunk And then actually grabbing your chain package and wrapping it around, you know, this is my car right here, and I want to flip this side of my car up like this. Well, then I would walk up onto the hood here, come up to the top of the roof, then I would tie my chains around that B post right there, pull my chains back across the vehicle to my my rig that's gonna be pulling it or a grip hoist and then I would use some stability, some stabilization, some chalks to give it a pivot point on this side, and then walk off the front or walk off the back and just go ahead and flip it The reason for that is you're on it. It's not going to be the flames aren't going to be burning up in your face. They're going to be most likely burning down and out. And as long as you got a hose line there, they're not going to be just scorching you. If you didn't have a hose line, I don't believe you really should be just climbing on these things or anywhere around them. There is some thought that about 2800 degrees on your on your rubber boots, you got about less than 20 to 30 seconds before it will melt your rubber boots.

Paul Schumacher: So you really don't want to be around it without some sort of suppression efforts first. Corley: Absolutely. Okay. No, that makes it great. James, I feel like I'm skipping some questions if I feel like he's touched on them. Stephen Wayne asked, I don't know. I don't even know, but I'll ask the question. Are these batteries dry cells, wet cells, gel cells? I don't know. Paul Schumacher: Well, the the batteries are they're neither. They're lithium-ion batteries. So they're not they're none of those batteries. That's like our 12 volt batteries. Okay. But to tell you to add to your guys' that question Just so you all know, the future's changing with your 12-volt battery systems, they're now going to 48-volt lithium-ion batteries. They will now be lithium-ion batteries And they're 48 volt. So from zero to 12 volt is low voltage. From 13 volts to 60 volts is intermediate voltage. And from 61 to 1000 volts is your high voltage. understand that when these batteries start to change, the only one right now is the Tesla it's actually I think they call it a C, which is the new Tesla truck. That's a 48-volt lithium-ion battery. Even that thing can catch on fire now and cause you a nightmare because it would be under the hood or or the trunk space. And you'd be trying to put out thinking the whole car's on fire and it just happens to be the little 48-volt battery. But with that said, you can't actually cut or shut down a 48-volt lithium-ion battery. If you cut that, you'll actually weld the tool to your hand. You will need to actually look at these vehicles a little bit more in depth. They will be designed with a clip that you'll actually disconnect. You won't be cutting anything with these 48-volt little batteries. But those are your more your wet cell batteries. And then to add to this, as far as battery manufacturers, a lot of people will say, well, If you're this person thinking this right now, hybrid vehicles have been around since 2012. So why have we never seen a hybrid fire? And why is this becoming a problem only when we're talking about all electric fires, all electric vehicles, plugins, and so forth? That's gonna change. They were hydrate nickel hydrate batteries is what was in a hybrid from 2000 about 2000 all the way until about this year.

Paul Schumacher: Now all of the hybrids will be lithium-ion batteries. So you will start to see the trunk fire being associated with lithium. Corley: With the thermal runaway issue. Paul Schumacher: Yep. Corley: Yep. Okay. Okay. No, I love it. John Shackleford coming at you with the rescue question. Would you wrap your chains or can you use J hooks to lift from the rockers? Paul Schumacher: good question. I love it. Do not touch the belly of the vehicles without precision. And I mean that as far as the J hooks wrapping up and over, it's a good idea. But what I'm going to tell you is take those J hooks, move them to the wheels. Grab the wheels, let the wheels pull it up. So obviously upright your spoke to where you want it. stick your J hooks in your wheels and use that as a as a pendulum. If you go under the the rockers themselves, I would be super Weary that it's gonna penetrate your puncture of the battery pack. Some of the vehicles on the rocker panel from where the battery pack comes into, you only have about an inch, maybe two inches max. where you can lift off of this area. And that also is regulated by the ERG, which is called an emergency response guide. the emergency response guides that are built for these these vehicles will tell you actually you can't lift on the rocker panel. They'll say you can lift on two very, very precise locations underneath the vehicle, but they'll be like right behind the front of the back tire and right behind the front of the front tire. Right there. You have no other spot. It's a little spot that you can lift off of that's about this big front and back, and that's it. So taking those J hooks over there blindly, I would recommend Grab the wheels, front wheel, back wheel, bring it right up over the top of that hood or the roof, and then rip it that way. And to be honest with you, I teach that in my class because Because sometimes trying to pull from the B post, you don't get as good of a fulcrum point trying to pull that car up and bury that other side into the ground. So I do like that.

Corley: Absolutely. Love it. Zachary Pay said, are the 48 volt batteries going to make their way into standard vehicles? Is that a wave you're seeing of the future? Paul Schumacher: Yeah. 12 volts going to die? 12 volts going to die. Yeah, it's it's going to be a it's a dying breed. Now go to figure the leading person to to head this up is Tesla. But right now if you go look at 48 volt lithium batteries and vehicles now there you there lots of manufacturers are talking about changing up Over to him. Ford, Chrysler. I saw Chrysler wanted to do it. It's just that I think again, we're in that thing where they built it probably four years ago. It's taken this long to get it into manufacture. It's finally here. And and It's not going to be in 2024 cars, but it might be in the 2025 cars. Does that make sense? Because it's just coming out right now. Corley: Sure. No, no, it's good to know. Especially if it can weld the tool to your hand. Paul Schumacher: Yeah, and you'll get you maybe your proby walks up and the and you assign them to cl control, you know, your your energy in the vehicle. And and you know, this is just our change. This is what we're going to. You know, I always try to say lithium-ion batteries are are a new element of the fire service. We have now taken ourselves from our legacy construction to our modern construction to a lithium-ion battery vehicle fire or scooter fire. It is a whole new breed. So anything lithium-ion battery is causing us a nightmare. But even just shutting down the 12-volt battery like that, we just tell somebody go shut it down, go cut the negative. Shoot, even cut the positive. Who cares? I mean, it's not going to do anything. Just don't Make that tool touch metal. You're good to go, right? Peace. But this one is something where if they're not recognizing and they go up and try to cut that thing, it would weld that tool to their hand. So love it.

Corley: Okay, so let's move on. I mean we've been we're we're yeah it's kicking ass. in the structure, let's go to inside the structure. Yeah, so We went from the street, burning in the street. Now we're going, it's burning inside an enclosed space. Paul Schumacher: So go ahead. So we just had one of these in Colorado and the guy's lucky to be alive. And and so we'll that's just to start you off with where your mind should be at, if it's that serious. In the videos I have them. take my class, I show them to you. It happened to be a state patrol officer on scene using his video camera and recorded the whole thing. But the gases. Let's talk about the gases. It's hydrogen, hydrogen fluoride, you know, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide. Let's just stick with those four. There's a whole list of ones that are a problem: toxic. And some that are explosive, but these ones right here. when they sit inside a garage and they go into a thermal runaway, remember when I told you earlier how it can go from 100 to 200 to 245 to 300 and then eventually hits its ignition temperature, right? Of whatever that battery is After 200 degrees of that temperature is when it goes into a visual thermal runaway. That's when you start to see the off-gassing. When you're seeing the off-gassing, we're already at 200 degrees We haven't seen fire yet because it hasn't hit whatever that battery's ignition temperature is. But if we stick that in a garage And it decides to get irritated from either the plug or maybe the person hit the stop sign and penetrated the belly, but it didn't ignite right away. They drove home, they went ahead and parked it, and they're like, man, I'm going to bed. And they shut their garage door and they leave it in there. It goes into that thermal runaway. Well, it starts to produce carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide right off the bat. Okay, but the carbon dioxide is taking out all the oxygen inside that environment. Now we start to fill it with just let's just talk about hydrogen. We start to fill it with hydrogen. So we fill it with carbon dioxide and we fill it with hydrogen. That's the two big things that we fill this entire thing up with It could take three, four, six, ten, twelve, twenty-four hours to fill up all of that compartment.

Paul Schumacher: It could be as quick as 20 to 30 seconds. We're not gonna know it depends on how irritated it and how many batteries are irritated. But now that we've got this thing flowing a serious amount of gas inside this garage, the only thing we're missing right now Is the two things in the triangle, right? We just filled it with hydrogen and carbon dioxide. We got to get rid of the carbon dioxide by giving oxygen. Once we give it oxygen, the only other thing we need now is an ignition source This car battery could find its own ignition source. It could be pegged at 500 degrees. But because it's compartmentalized, the inside garage door shut, the outside garage doors shut, there's not enough oxygen. in there, nothing's gonna happen, right? It's got hydrogen filled the entire cavity of this thing completely up. It's got its ignition source at 500 degrees. What I try to tell people is this is where people are going to start to get hurt. You you pull up to this environment. You have no clue it's a lithium-ion battery fire. You got white, yellow, gray gas What we would some of us would think is a ripping structure fire pouring out of the garage, coming out of every single orifice that garage is giving us, right? So what do we do? It depends on your organizational tactics. Some departments will say they'll go interior with that initial hose line. We're going to go to that door, pop that door open, and we're going to flow some water. Some operations are we're going to hit that with a K-12, rip open that garage door, and we're going to flow water in it. Either one of those two scenarios, when you open that garage door, You're doing the one thing it's been looking for this entire time. And it's going to fuel that fire with that oxygen quicker than we can even recognize what we're going into. And when it ignites all of that gas, the pressure that builds up inside that, all based on how long it's been off gassing, that pressure is great enough to blow a single or two-car garage. upwards of 200 feet off of the frame of the structure. In fact, there was a a one of these scenarios in Montreal, Canada That it not only blew the garage door 200 feet off the front, it blew the rear door off the structure.

Paul Schumacher: It blew a hole in the roof because it was not a livable space above that roof. It was just a pitched roof above it And it blew the sidewall, brick wall, off of the off of the structure. Okay. When we look at what we typically do as firefighters, we go interior. The other thing we do is a I'm a I'm a trucker for life. I love truck work. Okay. But I know right off the bat I would be the first one to grab that K-12 and go stand in front of the garage door and wait for the officer to tell me to start ripping into that thing But I'm standing in the most dangerous place to be. If a car car, a two-car garage door can blow 200 feet off that that structure, and you're standing in front of it. Think about the harm that could it could cause to you, what it would do to you. Now, that's scenario number one. That means that it was pegged, pegged at 500 degrees. So all it was looking for is for one of us to open a door It can find its own oxygen on its own. And that's what happened in Montreal, Canada. No firefighters made it on scene at that point in time. They had actually were in route to an odor investigation when that happened and then turned into an explosion. The other one that can happen is say it doesn't have an ignition source. Say it's got It's got hydrogen, carbon dioxide. Carbon oxides filled the whole cavity up, right? It's sitting at 300 degrees of a 500 degree. But it is completely encapsulated that cavity. Now let's talk about what we do. We show up, we come up with a K-12 as a trucker, and we walk right up to that thing. We're like, yep, open it up And now we take a K-12 across the top of that thing and we rip that thing down the side, we remove the garage door. But why we go to do that We're doing the two things it's looking for. That trucker is doing the two things that that fire was looking for. You gave it sparks, an ignition source, and you gave it the oxygen it's been sitting there looking for. Now that garage door gets exactly what it wants, but you put a cut across it.

Paul Schumacher: Now it's even weaker than it was before, and you're going to take that entire blast. that video I have that happened in Colorado, that's not the only one. But I it's actually on video of the of the officer Sitting outside, standing in the driveway, when the car decided to do what it wanted to do, and it blew the single-car garage door right off and just missed his helmet. It knocked his helmet off. It almost took his neck out He just happened to duck as the thing flew over the top of his head. So the possibilities are there, but that is much more dangerous and scary to me than it is that car burning on the side of the road, right? Car burning on the side of the road, we got to worry about patient survivability is somebody trapped inside there. We'll put that thing out like we've done for years. But these garage fires, they scare the living shit out of me because we just don't know what's behind that. You can't take a tick to that garage door. You can't take a tick to the side window, right? You're not, it's too hard to tell, is there heat behind there or is there not heat behind? Behind there, right? Because the heat that could be behind there is a single cell burning at 500 degrees. You're not gonna get that with a tick, you know.

Corley: So I love the question. Chad Daly has some questions coming at you, man. get it. Absolutely love it. So if we identify we have one cooking inside a closed garage, what's the recommended actions? Paul Schumacher: I love that question too, because I have my own theory. Now this is an untested theory, and I hope someday the UL will let me test this theory. But right now it's a hard no, because there's too many other things to test. I I I had this tow package, chain package thing created. It's basically two J hook foundry hooks on a six and seven foot section. of chain one direction, seven foot section of chain another direction with an oblong in the middle. It's got two chain shorteners on there. It's an easy thing. Anybody can have this made, but it was designed for electric vehicles and it was actually designed for this thought process. My idea would be for one, no everybody in the green is my comment that I make to everybody and I try to teach that. Everybody in the green, that means nobody stands in the channel, in the alley. in in the gauntlet of where this thing can explode. Be in the grass. In the green grass. If you're in the green grass, the likelihood of that garage door popping into your face is slim to none. But I walk up on the side over here to the on on the grass and I get to the side of that structure. My idea would be you take a halligan into the side of that that garage door. You make a small hole. No garage door door is airtight. It's already getting oxygen. We're going to just give it a little bit more, but hopefully not enough to explode it. And that's why I can't say it's 100% safe. Right. But just enough to where I can take that foundry hook. and stick it through that hole and grab the garage door. And then I would take it back to a brus truck, a battalion chief rig, whatever it is. It's a total of 16 feet if you don't feel comfortable with that grab another 20-foot section of chain to to marry on to that section of chain and then it would be just a rip and grip get that thing ripped off of there as fast as you can And hopefully as it decides to do what it wants to do, you've now released it, gave it a place for it to release that gas and that opening without getting a buildup of pressure and actually blowing that garage door into your face or even The one in Montreal, Canada ended up in the neighbor's front yard on the other side of the street.

Paul Schumacher: So that would be my theory. It's untested though. You know, it's just it's a it's a we're in a situation right now where I have a lot of information and not not a whole lot of answers on what's right or or wrong right now as we're trying to go through this. So Corley: Hopefully that's yeah, you got my brain going down with the structural integrity of the garage door, would it just you know, yeah. Chad's other question, which was back on the vehicles. Easy way to determine if it's a two-wheel or a four-wheel drive, one or two motors, basically is what he's asking. Yeah. Is it really a very big concern to roll the car very far? I don't know if I mean go ahead. Paul Schumacher: Well, I let me so the the best thing to think about the anatomy of these vehicles now is either if it's a single engine Or a dual engine, yeah, you're gonna be talking four-wheel versus real-world versus front front wheel. That that I'm not gonna be able to tell you if it's front or rear. That I can't tell you by by looking at it from the outside. But if it's dual motor, that that's four-wheel drive. A lot of your SUVs are all four-wheel drive. They don't even, they're not even making them two wheel drive your rivions your Chevy Silverados your Ford Lightnings your Hummers they're all four wheel drive but the thing to think about is and this is a little bit of a concern for this the truckers, the heavy rescue dudes out there is is the weight of of one of these vehicles, let's just talk about the Hummer. It's about 9900 pounds. 9,900 pounds. These are not light vehicles. Your Teslas are right around 5,000 to 6,000 pounds. I mean, these are very, very heavy vehicles The battery packs themselves are anywhere from 1,800 to 35 to 4,000 pounds of weight. But why does that matter? Because when we go to lift these things. All of our weight is actually pretty evenly distributed. Even if it's a front-wheel drive motor, sorry, it's based like this, even if this is a front-wheel drive motor over here Well, that motor, because it's electric, is actually really small. It's not a huge, massive combustible internal motor like we're used to in the past with tons of weight behind it.

Paul Schumacher: Most of that weight is going to be evenly distributed from the front to the back, all on the belly of this thing. Even if you have this one motor here, it's not going to change or articulate. causing any sort of movement lateral shifting that you would expect to see like you would with a combustible motor where the whole front is what's weighted, nothing in the back. So hopefully that helps him. And then when we go to lift him You'd be surprised, even with my experience, which is very little actually lifting electric vehicles. It's a lot of training with combustible motors. They're harder to get to do this than an electric vehicle And that's because the weight distribution. But I always tell people, play with it. Play with a combustible motor and actually try to flip that thing up, you know Chalk the front and the back of those wheels because once you get up on a lateral like that, you don't want this movement going back and forth like this. But Chalk those wheels. You'd be surprised how high you can get these things. I typically like to stay right around the the under 60 degrees. So we're like looking like 55, 50 degree angle and that's plenty of angle for you to get water underneath there. You don't need to go any higher. But since that weight is all low, you're not going to get this this catastrophic flip that you that you might with a combustible motor.

Corley: So second question came up today. A car on top of a charging station, should it be treated as a hot, energized car? Paul Schumacher: Absolutely. Yeah, those those things right now are causing a lot of people to Nightmare. Even when they catch on fire and they're actually on fire because this is happening while they're hooked to a charger, until you can shut that charger down, you we have no clue how much power is being pumped into that thing And in fact, a lot of times they'll burn the wire off the connection point from what is actually being plugged into the vehicle. The fire is so hot, it will actually melt that that wire off And it will be a free-floating wire burning at 2800 degrees, and it's now supplied by unlimited power coming from the grid system. And so treat that 100% as a 400, depends on the unit, you know, is it a two 200 plus volt or is it a 480 volt? You know, what what is it that you're dealing with? But 480 volts of direct current is probably not a not a fun thing to be around. So treat it 100% like a car being on a on a on a green electrical box and get the power unit there, power company there, or hopefully some sort of standardization in the next five to six years will come up Where there's a manual shutdown on all of these things on the outside. Right now there is no code that states they have to have that. It's basically city and and jurisdiction driven on whether they're going to implement a manual shutdown on the unit. There's a place in Casserock, it's a target. Their shutdown is in the target in the manager's office. So, you know, it's not even anywhere near where you would expect to look for it. Right. So just just know that. But if you can locate that and shut that down, then then you're then you controlled the power and you'd be safe to do your operations. We are getting it, yeah.

Corley: Yeah, yeah, that's what he said. He that was a follow-up that he said we are getting them on the curb of busy streets now with no shutoff in sight and probably inside businesses that could be closed and locked up. So yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And that was my thoughts. John Shackerford said when you hook the door on your theory, your J hook theory on the door, you have to get it into a beam or something, some sort of structural member of the door, right? Otherwise it just ripped through the sheet metal, yes What what which one are we doing? The J are we are we ripping the your your your theory to rip the garage door off. Paul Schumacher: I went back on you. I went back in time on you Love it. Love it. Let's do it. Yes. You would want to try everybody knows where those little beams are, right? That run on that garage door. So you want to be right at where the where the the fold is, right, right where the slit is You want to be right there because that J hook can get all the way in there and it's going to grab it, whether it's on the bottom of that fold or it's on the top of that fold. You want to try to get that little support beam. I'm not saying the whole garage door is going to come off. That's not even my plan. But if you pulled one of those sheets all the way across out You still are releasing all of that pressure. You're still getting that pressure out of that thing. The one thing that I know works very, very successfully is The the solution right is going to be dilution, but what we're diluting it with is air. We need to get as much air in there as we possibly can to not let it explode. So we're having these things in our city right now in big warehouses. we're having them happen with forklifts. They're going into thermal runaway on forklifts and all sorts of lithium-ion batteries in there. One happened the other day. 750,000 square foot facility. And the number one thing I said to them was we should open up every single garage door in this whole structure. I don't care where this thing is, even if it was a minute explosion behind a door, if we can open everything up, there is no explosion potential that's going to happen.

Paul Schumacher: happen, right? There's no possible way this thing is going to explode if there is endless amounts of oxygen around it. It's when it's compartmentalized as when we have no control of this thing Is that does that help? So even if I can release it a little bit and get one little bit of opening out of there, it's better than us going to the door on the inside and opening that door as I stand right in front of it. But again, untested, so I love the I love the comment. I don't I I don't have the best of answers of whether it will work or not Corley: Love it. Love it. All right, tons, force a man door or take windows on a garage door, then stand back. Starting to sound like a natural gas call. Yeah. Paul Schumacher: I love it. I love that too. I I kind of said Said this the other day. It'd be nice to have a huge window on the side of your garage that you could smash open, you know, but the pressure, the amount of pressure behind here scares me a little bit because That Montreal, Canada one blew the the brick wall off the side of the house. Right. So I would be scared that if you stick a halligan and you slam it through that window You gave it an opening, but it wasn't the opening it needed. And so it's going to get its opening it needs, which is going to be that wall. And are you standing around that wall? So Those are the undecided decisions that have to be made tactically with with a chief officer and or your lieutenant and captain. I don't think anybody should, you know, I think we're all in an agreement. Nobody just goes around and smashes windows, but this is one where I'd be really scared or sketched out and be like, hey, what's our plan here? What do we want to do? Right. If you look back at the Surprise Arizona incident that happened in 2019, Hunter is a phenomenal dude. He's a good friend of mine. And he was the captain on that and got really severely hurt. And and this is when I took a huge passion to to making sure we could try to make a change and save some people's lives. And hopefully it's firefighters mainly, right?

Paul Schumacher: That's That's my objective, obviously everybody, but they they were on scene for several hours of a commercial ESS system. So that's an ESS system for people that don't that don't know. It's a commercial unit that takes people Solar systems on top of the structure supplies it down to a bunch of batteries, and that's how it where it stores it. And those batteries are usually stored in like these massive connex boxes. Huge connex units. They're just they're surrounded and pacted with metal for a reason. They're basically these huge bomb-proof units. Well They got called there for an odor investigation, and when they showed up, they have their readings that are exactly what we've kind of talked about. They had some carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide. But what people don't understand is is it your your foregas is about two thousand parts per million before it instantly clogs itself, right? And then it doesn't work anymore. This is producing way more than that, and it's doing it within 20 seconds. Within 20 seconds, your monitor basically is shit. It's not going to work. And they didn't know that they had it, so it started giving them false readings. But what Hunter did was phenomenal. He basically backed out and was like, we're not, let's get, you know, let's get everybody here at this point. Point. They got everybody there, hazmat teams, they got chief officers there. They got massive decision-making people there to figure out what we're going to do about this thing. And this is where it is concerning because it's based on time. Right now we rip into structure fires extremely fast. Let's get in there with that hose line. Let's put this fire out. I'm gonna move quick. We're gonna get to the seat of the fire. It could be a deep-seated fire on the second floor in the kids' bedroom. I'm gonna get up there, I'm gonna stretch this line, put it out. Boom. Well, think about that now as you being that fast proactive person running into a fire that you don't understand if it's lithium-ion battery off-gassing in there and it hasn't ignited yet. So now I'm going to take you to the same scenario. So follow me here. So now Hunter goes up to this thing after hours, four hours of sitting on scene, and they came up with a plan and said, listen, if we open up every single door in this thing and it gets a ton of oxygen in there.

Paul Schumacher: There's everything's open. It can't explode. Sure, it can ignite on fire, but it's not gonna explode and become this massive bomb like a bleve. So let's let's do that. And everybody's like, yeah, let's do that. That sounds great So he had a probationary firefighter that just started with him on that day. The only thing he told this probationary firefighter so far that today on this day is If you see anything red, dude, your job is to take that hose and put water on that fire. That is your only job, man. I will talk to you more about fighting fire when we get some time. But that's what I need you to do. They got this call right after that So they go up there, they get a hose line, and they got four of those dudes and they walk right up to that thing. And Hunter opened it up and was the first one in the door. He said he looked in it with a tick, thermal engine imaging camera, nothing There was nothing. It was ambient temperature. Nothing was glowing. Nothing serious out of control. He looked one direction. By the time he looked the next direction to tell everybody, hey, we're good. Everything's opened up. Boom. The thing blew up. It ignited every single bit of gas in there. And here's the scary thing. When it burns, it burns at 2800 degrees. When it hits your jacket at 2800 degrees, it will instantly ignite you. Right, instantly ignite your bunker gear. It's like immediate flashover, you're just basically on fire. At first it'd be like, is this really possible Can this really happen if you were compartmentalized? He was on an exterior door. So I'm like, listen, you know, in your mind you're thinking, how could this actually burn me? Well, it's proof. He not only got caught on fire, he blew over 60 feet away from the structure and landed in a field. Not only him, but three other of his firefighters did the exact same thing. Well, the one thing that that probationary firefighter did was he went on unresponsive, unconscious, landed out in the field as well, but he woke up holding that that nozzle in his hand still. He said he looked to the left. He saw something on fire and he remembered that his officer said, if you see something on fire, you put it out.

Paul Schumacher: He shot some water, lobbed it over to whatever was on fire, shut that nozzle down, boom, problem was solved. He didn't even realize it until later when everything started to, people were in hospitals and stuff like that. What he put out was Hunter on fire burning in a field blown 60 feet through a chain link fence he went through a chain link fence 60 feet out into a field So now, this is my concern about that one. Now we start looking at an interior structure fire. What happens with people that live in apartment complexes, people that live in high rises, people that are just maybe a kid who just got a scooter for Christmas? Where are they putting these things? They're not putting them in a garage. They're putting them in their bedroom, in their living room. If they're in a high-rise, that's the only place they're gonna put them. You got a two-story multi-family with a loft up top, and you got a kid's bedroom in there, and they just got this thing for Christmas. They stick it in there, they stick it on the charger in the kids' bedroom. Now all of a sudden, this gas fills up. Well, here's the shitty thing This gas when it fills an entire structure, it can fill an entire structure within 30, 40 seconds if it wants to. Now, typically I think it will take a little longer, but we're not gonna know that. We're not gonna know this time frame of how long this thing been sitting in there. This stuff banks all the way down to the ground, covering everything from top to bottom and left to right, the same as what it would do inside a garage. We're talking just a scooter can do this in an average size home, right? But when you walk up to that door, you walk up to that door, you got bank down smoke to the floor, but you reach your hand in there and it's cold. It's ambient temperature. Like, shit, let's work our way in here. Let's find this thing. Maybe they tell you the fire's up in my kid's bedroom. And you're like, shit, all right. You work up to that stairwell to go up into the kids' bedroom and you get up in there and now the sun you're looking for this fire.

Paul Schumacher: Well, guess what happens when it finds its ignition temperature now? The house is filled with that flammable gas, hydrogen, sitting inside there. And then it hits its 400, 500 degrees, but it hits it while you're in that room looking with a tick to find whatever's hot. Now it when it ignites everything, it has enough potential to blow the windows out of the structure, off the frame of the structure, and the interior door off the frame of the door. That's how much Explosion potential can happen just in a room and contents of a scooter. But this is what's scary about this. In a recent study at UL, The scooter was lit was basically thrown into a thermal runaway. When it ignited on fire, it was 52 degrees ambient temperature. So you walked in at 52 degrees ambient temperature. It ignited and went to 1200 degrees in two seconds. Two seconds it went to 1200 degrees. It then went from 1200 degrees down to 475 degrees and back up to 1200 degrees in 25 seconds. 25 seconds, it flashed every single thing in that entire structure. Everything was on fire. Corley: I think Preston Lyons said it really well. Thanks for scaring the shit out of all of us, Paul. Happy Halloween, everybody. No, it's a it's a ton it's a ton to be thinking about because we've gone to you know legacy fuels, modern fuels, lithium-ion fuels. I mean it's a it's another Yeah. a couple more questions. Yeah, who knew the future would be so scary? It's from Sam. Do you have experience or opinions on the emergency plug immobilizer for medicals or MBCs?

Paul Schumacher: I don't, again, it over this two-year program with UL as an advisory person, I will we were we're gonna test those things. I don't have anything with it now. My my big holdup and all is is It's another piece of a of electrical equipment. And there's how do I know it's actually working? That would be my only thing. But how do I know that? I don't know that. There's no way for me to know it, right? And I would resort back to full demobilization of the 12 volt and high voltage system. system manually with cutters, right? Like pop the hood, cut the high voltage, pop the 12 voltage, and and then I do know it's shut down. So to spend more money on a piece of equipment that I can't a hundred percent trust, I just don't not saying it's a bad thing. I just think it costs a lot of money. It's another tool for the toolbox. So it works great if you want to look at it that way. But there is no way to prove that it is a hundred percent. working and we will test it. I will get you some data as long as you guys maybe maybe I'll come back on in two years or something like that when we have all this data and we can talk

Corley: Absolutely. dude, this is amazing. yeah, there we go. is that answer your question? Brian also asked about the one that keeps the ch the car from rolling. I think it's a s it goes in the charging port, so it's all kind of the same type of thing. Plugs into the charging port and shuts it down in some way, shape, or form. Paul Schumacher: Yeah, because the free roll on these things are pretty impressive. And and so that's that is the the thought pop process behind that is it would it would kind of stop it from free rolling. If this thing rips into free roll, it's it's crazy. This thing can like climb over a over a four by four, right? I always tell people at a minimum you got to put four by fours underneath. this in fact I really like with these types of vehicles that you use the rigs rig chalks. Corley: Rig chalk get chalk box going, yeah. Paul Schumacher: Yeah yeah get the big stuff Corley: No, I wonder if this is what it was like, you know, in the 70s and 80s, or I guess you know, plastics have been around forever. But as things started just the Walmart overtook the world and plastics started invading every home. I wonder if this was what it was like to be close to retirement going, man, I'm glad I'm not gonna have to fight the fires of the future.

Paul Schumacher: Yeah, I you know I always I literally say that to like if I can find an old timer in my class, I'm always like It's it what we're going through now, you've had to do it basically two, two or three times, right? From that legacy to the modern to now the lithium-ion battery. You know, he may be or she may be on their way out. So they're kind of like, see ya, you know. But for us, we are now living that life that that guy had where he was trying to figure out like, hold on, hold on, wait a second. You're telling me I got 13 minutes to go put this fire out. Then now we're changing to three minutes. If I don't put this fire out, I got flashover. And now I'm telling you you have 25 seconds. You have 25 seconds to put that fire out. And how fast do you really want to try to make egress into that structure? Did you in your mind before you enter time In your own mind, that I can make it in there with an inch and three quarters, up that stairs, into that kid's bedroom, and I can do that in 15 seconds Because if you didn't do that, I might encourage you to slow down and say, hey, Cap, LT, do we know if this is a lithium-ion battery? This is cold smoke in here. I don't see anything, but it is banked down. You can't smell it. If you didn't have your mask on, you'd be able to tell it's a lithium-ion battery, right?

Speaker 3: But we can't breathe that in. Paul Schumacher: So you're really having to do this off of a decision that's like Because if we're going to make this push, we need to make this push. And whoever's on the nozzle needs to be ready to respond to a 1200-degree blast. And not drop the nozzle and not freak out and be ready to keep flowing that water, even if it kind of knocks us back a little bit, and don't shut this thing down because Because we know we have 25 seconds from that 1200 where it's going to go to 475 and go back up. Corley: Is it something in a cold smoke situation if you can recognize the conditions obviously that you're talking about? Is a foregas any good or is it just instantly overwhelmed? It's so the PID, I don't know the f the ionization potential of the would a PID have any sort of help in that Good it's good. Again, who's who's calling out the hazmat rig to get their PID? Paul Schumacher: I mean my thought would be that this would be something that would start to be questioned in dispatch. And if dispatch says, hey, okay, so we've had in, I think in the last month, we've had probably about five lithium-ion batteries. They've all been RC car batteries. that are that are doing this right now, like the race cars that you know that kids get. I've seen them burn a a the side of yeah, it doesn't matter. Good burning potential with just one of those cars. But The dispatch question would say, hey, is this a lithium-ion battery fire? Do you have lithium-ion batteries in the room that they are going on? And if the question the response is yes, my kid's e-bike is in that room Then you just assume that it's that kid's e-bike that's burning until you can get up there and rule that it's not. That's the way I would look at it. And then because of that, we now would activate the hazmat team. we would activate because right now in in our city we had one just the other day it it this one I was talking about that burned pretty good side of the of the inside of the house The the chief came up was like, should we activate the hazmat team? And yes was my answer.

Paul Schumacher: But like we they should have probably been initially dispatched to there as a hazmat team if we would have got that question in the initial dispatch. Corley: I'm looking at questions. It's tons of questions, brother. Man, what else what else do you want to hit on? I'll hit on the We've been going almost hour and a half, so that's what I'm telling you. Paul Schumacher: Okay, I'll I'll just hit real quick and you can shut me up whenever. I'm no no no you're good. You're good. Okay. the other little issue we have with these lithium-ion batteries is say you went into a structure fire and now it It doesn't have the explosion potential. It already it went down to 475. And now it's starting to work its way back up to 1200, somewhere in that time frame. And so you work your way up there and you're starting to spray water and you're doing whatever you need to do. And then you get that fire, you know, under control, not out because it Well, getting it out is is a nightmare. Getting it out, you're more likely gonna be have a better success of removing it from the structure because it's gonna take thousands of gallons of water to put out a stupid little scooter. And I don't feel that that's the best thing to do when we talk about property conservation and salvage and overhaul. It would be let's let's mitigate it with as minimal water as we can and let's remove this thing. right or let's use the bathtub let's fill up the bathtub with water and stick it in that bathtub right instead of flowing a thousand gallons of water. But here's the problem with that. If you get distracted with the fact that you're trying to flow water or fill up a bathtub and you're not paying attention to what's happening behind you. Where I'm going with this is these cells, when they get into a thermal runway and start to pop off, the key word is popping off. These things have the potential of popping off upwards of a hundred feet. A hundred feet. They can shoot out of door out with a lot of velocity. They can shoot out a door. They can shoot down a hallway. They can shoot over the loft down to the first floor. fill it fall into a polyurethane couch, right?

Paul Schumacher: And sit in that couch and just sit there and smolder. That cell is still 12 at least twelve hundred degrees, if not twenty eight hundred degrees, sitting inside a polyurethane couch. You're upstairs messing around with this thing, filling a bathtub. You didn't tell anybody to pull a backup line because you got it under control real quick. Or maybe you're in a different area of this of the of the country where you don't have resources coming super quick. And so you're up there messing around with it. And then all of a sudden you start to feel heat behind you. Corley: Right. Paul Schumacher: And that cell has that potential to do it. And in fact, a Denver firefighter is a He's a guy that I met last year told me that they had an incident where it was a car fire out on the on the front of the strip mall. It caught on fire. It was an electric vehicle. They put it out. They said no big deal. But then they had some gas coming out of the top of the strip mall. And then something about along the lines that the chief had recognized it. They had said, well, I think it's just residual smoke from being inside the strip mall and then it's coming out and it's just venting. It's there's no fire or anything. it caught on fire. It was a cell. It shot a hundred feet up over a parapet wall and landed on the top of the structure. And it started to burn the top of the structure down. And they ended up finding it up there. So where I'm going with that is we have never in the in the structure fire world really had to worry about spot fires interior. We dealt with that in wildland. Daily, right? And that was a watch out situation. Now we're saying that there's a likelihood and a good possibility we could be getting spot fires while we're working inside of a structure. And if we're not thinking about listen Hey, someone said this is a lithium-ion battery fire on the top bedroom of this kid's room and it's and it's ripping. Okay Immediately, I need a backup line to stay behind these people. You're not going anywhere else but that front door and protecting that path of egress because we could have one of these cells pop off somewhere else in this structure and we don't even know if it did that And it'll be bank down smoke.

Paul Schumacher: You won't see anything. You won't even know that's happening. So a tick becomes super useful. And then to add to that, elaborate a little bit more. And obviously this I go way in depth in this in my class, but I don't want to bore people too much. The the the aftermath of this the if we don't arson investigation yeah a thorough for arson they have they're having nightmares dealing with these things because there's multiple starts Right. there was a guy in Colorado in a department up north here. He was in the middle of an investigation. He was digging through rubbish. Trying to figure out what had burned, and a cell lit off like four hours later, landed in his bunker gear in his neck and burned his neck. And it happened on him. No nobody knew, but what's nerve-wracking about that is we don't know how long it's going to take before it did what it just did to that guy. And he happen to be on scene. What happens when we close the structure up? Board up company comes. Yeah. We didn't find, we didn't look for these cells. There's one sitting in the basement that we had no clue, bounced down in the basement. Now we get a rekindle three days later, right? That's the stuff. And so when you hear the words we got a lithium ion battery, what does that mean for our salvage and overhaul? Does that turn into like an eight-hour deal where now we're trying to rub go, you know, mess through rubbish just to try to find these things.

Corley: I I don't know. I think No no I'm with you. I like Josh Everett's comment. So what you're saying is that it's going to be the E Jobtown war years Got it. Yes. Yeah, yeah, I got it. I love that. I had a thought. I had a thought. Shoot, Josh, you distracted me. Squirrel brain. oh it's it's pretty new technology. We're still dealing, I mean you're st UL's still looking into it, researching two years away from from a lot of things that they're wanting to work on, not to mention the pet projects people want to work on, yours included. Yeah. Do these things bec lose energy at all over time? Like or is the the energy potential there the entire life of them or is it gonna get worse? The energy stays there, but the stability gets worse over time. Do we even know? Is that make sense what I'm asking? Paul Schumacher: You you you're saying like if you just had a car that you never touched and you just let it drain itself out and just as as all this technology ages, is it it's gonna obviously become more unstable? Corley: Does the energy drop with it or is it same energy, but it's gonna become more unstable the more you know

Paul Schumacher: I think it's gonna stay the same. It's gonna still have the same energy because it's the two pieces of metal that are still heating. That's the that's what's causing the the the high temperatures of ignition. But I don't have an answer for it on it other than my own personal opinion that We haven't even begun. I mean, 2012 was the first one. And we're just now starting to hear about these things, right? Coming out what's gonna happen when all these manufacturers get them? What's gonna happen when you have excessive charging where people are using superchargers all day long and they're just getting beat up and wore down and beat up and worn down? Again, I think car fires are going to be the same. I don't think a percentage is gonna go up. So last year it was or two years ago is 208,500 vehicle fires. and then Out of that, only 3% were electric. I think the number will go up, but that's because the population is going up. Speaker 3: Gotcha. Paul Schumacher: Not because electric vehicles are gonna catch on fire more. I think they're gonna catch on the same. The problem we're gonna have with them though is when has anybody ever been on a car fire where your number one concern is life safety, somebody's trapped inside it. Right. Now we should be as our number one priority. And then when have we ever had to deal with something that takes 5,000 gallons of water? And then on top of that, when have we ever dealt with one that can explode inside a garage and like blow the entire garage apart? Right. Those are the things that are soon to come that are going to become a bigger problem. Now, I will tell you the reason you we hear more about e-bike fires and e-scooter fires, and people may may not know this. You most e-bikes that are UL rated are not the ones that are catching on fire. Right. But that UL bike is $10,000. The one that you're buying on Amazon for $800, $1,500, that is some battery that I have no clue where it came from. And that's the concern that we're having. So most cars, actually, all cars are UL-rated batteries. They're igniting because a driver wrecked it. A driver drove over something. A driver was charging him on a supercharger way too much.

Paul Schumacher: They weren't doing the right steps that the that the OEM told them to take. Don't let it die all the way. Don't charge it all the way full. Do these very specific things. They're not really necessarily the vehicle doing that. Now on the other side, it is 100% the scooters doing that. when you buy the $1,500 one. That has nothing to do with those manufacturers. It has to do with just some janky ass batteries that they're putting in them that don't have the ability to manage their their their temperature. Corley: Yeah. They're not even yeah they can't even do what they're supposed to do effectively. Correct. Correct. I love it, man. Cool. All right, dude. I love it. Dude, I I that's what Alan said. No, I don't think anybody's bored here. I could keep talking, but I I think it's great, man. Hour and a half, and I still got to get, you know So A, I love asking this question every time. I think we need to do this again, probably sooner than two years. I'm just saying that right now. It's amazing. Book or books that you think firefighters should be reading. I love asking this question. I'm always looking for new books to read, even though I don't have the time to read more books.

Paul Schumacher: You're gonna hate me for this. this. Okay. I don't like to start. I don't I I don't read. I can't stand reading. I I do books on tape. But but most of of my time is like right now is researching stuff. So look, I don't even I don't read. I I don't even find it now Books on tape, I love because I go to work all the time. Normans, I listen to Normans like pretty regularly. I just like to listen to that. I'll listen to Step Up and Lead, Extreme Ownership, and I listen to these things continuously. just when I'm kind of changing my thought process. But more what I read is I wish I had this thing. I don't even know where it is. I wish I could show it to you. It's a stack of paper that's this thick from UL about our most use and recent UL study that we did with ESS books. Corley: Let's let's read it. Okay. Then I I was gonna say I love Audible. I'm a huge fan of Audible. I'm a huge fan of listening to books. I do it almost every day. But I it hurts my soul when you said I don't read. But no, you read. Yeah. You read. You just don't have a book to suggest because what you read is very, very specific, man. No, I love that.

Paul Schumacher: I do have this book Corley: right here. Oh yeah, classic breathe. Yeah, Del Carnegie, absolutely. Paul Schumacher: Okay, that would probably be my that's that's the one that sits in here and stays in here because I love it. But that that would if you you already know that one. So right now I'm not reading any books though. I'm just doing audio and and it's a lot of leadership stuff. I'm I'm big in leadership right now Corley: Now. Solid. Solid. No, absolutely. Great answer. I was gonna be it was gonna hurt my soul when you said you didn't read, but then I mean no, that's that counts one hundred percent. You're a very focused person, very focused. I am I am all right, we have a thing we do on the scrap, it is called the five questions for firefighters. It's been around since the beginning. the answers are 100% your opinion and the points are arbitrary and they're assigned by me with the help of the studio audience. We are currently on the third iteration, specifically firefighter questions or the five questions for firefighters, version 3. 2. So with all that being said, Paul, are you ready for the five questions for firefighters version 3.

Paul Schumacher: 2? Yeah, you know I've been nervous about this since you asked me to be on this show. I've had the the nervous shits, I think, for three months now. So go ahead. Corley: Okay. Let's see what we can do with that. All right. Number one, what is the skill that has carried you through your fire service career? Paul Schumacher: the it's I there's I mean there's a couple, but I work ethic, Proficiency and then I would really say like my willingness to never give up. I mean, but it's really the work ethic is persist proficiency, and it is the willingness to never give up. That's kind of all of those things, right? Like when people try to To bash me down, I I I st I stand up three times taller. Corley: Persistence? Yes, persistence. Grit? I'm trying to melt it down to one word. Encapsulate. Stubbornness? Stubbornness. Stubbornness. I love it. I love it. Absolutely. Josh Everts agrees. I will give Max points 100% for grit, persistence, stubbornness, proficiency, work ethic as the single skill. Paul Schumacher: Yes, it is. It is. Sorry I don't have a single. It's there. Corley: No, no, it's good. It's good. Because it is. You're trying to encapsulate all of them to say, but I'm a I'm a stubborn mother. You know. Number two, it's Job Town. It's time. You're in route and responding. The scene from backdraft. You're slapping the tape into the tape deck. What song are you playing in route? That one is I'm I'm shipping up to Boston.

Paul Schumacher: Okay, with dropkick Murphy. Anybody knows that one. Dun dun. I love that song, man. Gali. That's my workout song, like get fired up at the gym at the Anytime I hear it, I get fired up. Corley: I forget Scorsese's movie. What is the with DiCaprio and and yeah I every time I watch that. It's in there. Absolutely max points. Easy max points on shipping up to Boston. Number three, what is your favorite fire service tradition? Paul Schumacher: Oh man, that would be bumper time. Easy. Easy. I don't think it happens enough, but I love bumper time. There's nothing better than taking a chair sticking out on the front pad. And just talking about anything all day long, whatever it is. I wish we could smoke stogies, but we we can't at our job. But that's where I would I would see that happen. I love bumper time Corley: I cannot knock bumper time. Yeah, dude. It's hard. whether it's on scene after a good job or just on the on the apparatus bay, you know, out on the front pad. Either one. But yeah, bumper time Yeah, Cody Brooks says max points for bumper time. And they said the departed. That's the name of the movie I couldn't think of. The departed. Yes.

Speaker 3: Oh yeah. Paul Schumacher: Yeah, I mean it's like you can't ever, you know, like if you want to get to know somebody and you truly want to get to know them, you think about your the probies, right? The probies don't They they're always kind of encouraged to like be away, go work, go do this. And then they get scared. They don't want to like sit down and watch TV with you. And I feel like when you're sitting in the recliners watching TV, I don't sit in the recliners and watch TV. because I want to watch the TV a lot. It's usually just my place to talk to people and be like, yo, what was what did you do this weekend? Whatever. But a prob he's not going to sit there with you. Right. They're on there cleaning the floors, whatever. The one place I can always get a proby to come talk to me is come sit on the front bumper. I'll pull a lawn chair out. They may not sit on the lawn chair, but they'll sit on that front bumper. And I think it's the best crew bonding continuity that you can possibly get. Love it. Love it.

Corley: I still got you? Yeah. Okay. You froze for just a second. So make sure. Number four, on the clock. This one is on the clock. You get one minute. Sam will put it up there. You can see it. The audience can see it. You get one minute to answer who are the four people you would put on your Mount Rushmore of the fire service and go. Paul Schumacher: Frank Viscuso, okay. I'm not I'm in a leadership thing right now. Rick Laskey, okay. Brian Brian Brush. Nice. And then the last one is my father. My father is the last one. And that my father just passed away last month. And so But he he is the man. He made me who I am. So I I take a lot of pride in that. So he he means a lot to me in the fire service. I wouldn't be in the fire service if it wasn't for that guy. And it was either the military or the fire service and And it was the best experience I've ever had by coming in the fire service. And and yeah, he's the one that instilled work ethic. I got a job at 13 years old and he signed the work permit and told me to get out and go get a job. So I love him for that.

Corley: Well, A, my condolences, first of all, on him's passing. Only a month away, month past, and a beautiful, beautiful four on the Mount Rushmore. Viscuso Lasky We call him Brian Crush. I I I know. Paul Schumacher: I sh I should have said that, but I know you guys do. I've never really met him. I shook his hand and I am in this massive leadership thing right now. We're like just talking about family, like, you know, to relate like Brian, Brian Brush relates family to to the fire service, right? Like Very passionate about that. And I am too. And I mean your family, like upstairs, your family. You know, incorporating your loved ones. And absolutely. And then, you know, just The pride in ownership and where where is we're we're losing it and oh yeah oh yeah I want to I love reading this stuff to keep that drive going on my end and hopefully instilling that drive on the younger generation to have that that that passion, the pride to clean the rig, to clean the station and make it look good. I know it's little stuff, but the bumper time is is history. You know, dinner, the dinner table is history, you know, in the fire service. This is all things that we don't want to lose and and not have that anymore. And so all of those individuals. are are are people that I not only think should follow, they should read their books, they should listen to them talk. They need to, these, those, those gentlemen are Incredible at making change in the fire service if you just give them the time.

Corley: I love your passion, bro. I really do. final one. It is the qu it's the question that's been around forever. You already said you're you're a trucker But we'll see. We'll see how this plays out. Heavy fire in searchable space. Would you rather be assigned to the nozzle or first in on VES? Paul Schumacher: Yeah, it's it's it's BES all day long. Yeah, yeah. I yep, nothing better. Corley: I respected it, but I was, you know, I always want to ask. I never want to, I mean, I assume, but but yeah, absolutely. And that officially makes it five for five, max points. Beautiful, beautiful max points, by the way way, which it's almost expected, but the caliber of guests, which you are no exception, the caliber of guests, we expect max points. And so it's very shocking when people don't. So 100% max points for all five. And that officially makes it 200. and 15 scraps in the books. My brother, Paul Shoemaker, thank you for spending your evening with us. And if someone wants to get a hold of you, get c ask you more questions, reach out to you, or whatever, what's the best way to do so? next level extrication, Facebook, Instagram.

Paul Schumacher: I don't care if I get cell phone calls. It's all listed on those pages. So they can go there instead of trying to write it down right now. It's got my email on there. Whatever you'd you'd like to get a hold of me, and I'm always down to talk. So Excuse me. Corley: Love it. There we go, there we go. Vigilantes. Paul has agreed to go and be roasted in the vigilante after party. So look for it in the vigilantes group, I will post the link after the scrap is over, so find that. If you're not a vigilante, go become a vigilante, man. It's so cool. I gotta show the hat one more time These things are getting ready to go into the vigilante only shop. And it's and they're and they're they're super affordable because you're vigilante. Anyway, the V50 is getting ready to start. I'm trying to think of everything else. Too much stuff going on, honestly. Too many pies, too many, not enough fingers. tickets go on sale for firemanship in 40 days and a few hours. November 27th, Cyber Monday. Man, be in line, get ready to get one. My brother, Paul Shoemaker, thank you for being such a phenomenal guest. Vigilantes, yeah, I told you that. Audience. You all make the scrap magical. You guys were on point with your questions today. Killer. Killer questions. You guys make the scrap magical. Thank you so much for spending your evening with us.

Speaker 4: I love you all. Remember, mutts don't scrap. I hope the tones stay silent unless it is burning. Everybody, stay safe out there.