Did an electric bus trigger the major fire in the Stuttgart bus depot? The investigation is still ongoing, but comparable cases raise doubts about the safety of the vehicles. How the batteries catch fire, why they are so difficult to extinguish and what could prevent them.
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Joachim Becker and Andreas Jäger
On the way to the scene of the fire, the firefighters saw a huge column of smoke. 210 emergency services worked a whole night to bring the flames under control. The balance of the fire that broke out around two weeks ago in a Stuttgart bus depot: 25 buses destroyed, damage in the tens of millions. “The difficulty was the large number of burning vehicles,” says fire department spokesman Daniel Anand. “We used a lot of water.”