Fire breaks out in GM’s EV plant and executives go with the vague ‘battery materials’ as the culprit
In 2021, shortly after signing the $1.2 trillion “Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal” into law, Joe Biden set off on a public relations campaign to sell the agenda contained therein, making it all the way to Detroit for the grand opening of General Motors’ new E.V. assembly plant, known as Factory ZERO. From a slobbery Washington Post item at the time:
The car-aficionado-in-chief took a spin through a General Motors plant retooled to manufacture electric cars, proclaiming that Detroit has led the world in electric vehicles and that the new infrastructure law would further boost the use of non-gasoline-powered vehicles across the country.
‘We’re going to make sure that the jobs of the future end up here in Michigan, not halfway around the world,’ Biden told a crowd of about 300 GM workers, most of whom work on the electric vehicles. ‘That means that here in Detroit, you’re going to set a new pace for electric vehicles. This is not hyperbole. It’s a fact.’
He came promising jobs, industry, and progress, and shortly after, it all erupted into flames—how divinely poetic—but this wasn’t just any fire. Here are the details, Jamie LaReau the Detroit Free Press:
General Motors said Wednesday it believes an accident with a forklift started a raging fire at its Factory Zero plant a day earlier.
‘Our initial investigation indicates a forklift accidentally punctured a container with battery materials causing the fire,’ said GM spokeswoman Tara Kuhnen.
…
Both the automaker and the Detroit Fire Department said earlier they are continuing to investigate the cause of the fire that occurred in a shipping dock area and involved lithium ion batteries [emphasis added].
Not arson, not an electrical fire, but of course… it’s the lithium! A highly-flammable pollutant used to manufacture E.V. batteries might be to blame? The same component causing spontaneous combustion for vehicles on the road, that prove to be very difficult to contain, and impossible to extinguish? (For a blog on the science behind why E.V. battery fire strategies need to be cooled instead of extinguished, click here.)
Well I’ll be! Who woulda thunk?
After a whole lot of tongue-wagging and asserting political fantasy as “fact,” everything Biden promised goes up in smoke... and I’ve never heard of a better analogy for the “Build Back Better” agenda.
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