Car fire closes bridge
A vehicle has been written off after bursting into flames on Auckland Harbour Bridge.
Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) responded to the blaze at 11.30pm on March 30 with two fire trucks attending – one from each side of the bridge – says Daniel Nicholson, northern fire communications shift manager.
FENZ reports no one was injured and the cause of the fire, which lasted just over an hour, is unknown. It has been reported that the burnt-out Tesla has been transported to a storage facility in south Auckland.
Video footage from the scene shows the front of the car destroyed and burnt out. One witness described the scene as “mad”. Anton Posa posted on Twitter: “I’m sitting at the start of the bridge, not moving and watching huge flames coming from a car at the top.”
Another witness says when they went past that the Tesla was being driven with one of the front tyres on fire. When approaching the bridge, they said: “There was burning rubber strewn across the road. They inferno’d for another 10 minutes with frequent loud bangs and batteries fizzing out jets of flame before fire and police arrived.”
Independent fire investigator Ken Legat told Stuff while electric-car fires weren’t common, he had been to two so far in 2023. When they do catch fire, they can be hard to put out because lithium batteries set each other off to create a “very intense” fire.
“A single truck doesn’t carry enough water to put out a car fire,” says Legat. “Their main job at that point is to stop it from spreading to other things.”
Click here for footage of the incident by 1News. The incident was also covered by Newshub.
