How does that work? I thought that with electrical car battery fires, you basically just had to spray water to keep it cool until it was done with what it wanted to do.
Thats one option, but just because the battery caught fire doesn't mean the entire battery pack is going to catch fire.
There are fire walls in the battery, so if you get to it in time, you could cool it off and prevent a breach of the next firewall, and then the fire will be stopped when those existing cells use all their energy.
Within an hour doesn't seem unreasonable in that case if everything went right.
I saw some gizmo that was supposed to go under the car, puncture the battery compartment from the bottom, and then flood the whole thing with water which was supposed to put the battery out. I couldn’t tell if it was bullshit or not, though.
I think battery fires are self oxidising, you cannot suffocate them. The advice for small lithium cells for radio control toys was stand up wind, ideally have a steel bucket of sand to put it in.
Also discharge them completely as you can before disposal. The RC batteries had no protection so we could take them to zero volts