The cause of an electric vehicle charging station fire in the SoNo Collection mall parking garage last October was an overloaded power strip placed inside the unit’s cabinet, according to a fire inspector’s report.
The power strip, termed a Relocatable Power Tap or RPT in the fire service, showed extensive charring, heat damage and fire consumption, according to Inspector John Kelly.
Firefighters responded the morning of Oct. 7 to a report of a fire on the first level of the parking garage in South Norwalk.
A Fire Department incident report says when the first companies arrived, they encountered a “fully involved” electric car charging unit.
The report says mall security attempted to extinguish the fire with a dry chemical extinguisher, and that firefighters used additional dry chemical extinguishers to complete suppressing the fire.
Kelly says that, during his investigation, he directed mall management to open another, nearby EV charging station and found that it also had a power strip installed in it.
He said that a review of security camera footage for that area of the garage showed “no human interaction with the EV charging unit.”
The fire has led at least one Norwalk resident to cite it in criticisms of electronic batteries.
“How about the fire in the Norwalk mall with the Tesla chargers?” Tysen Cnaveri said at last week’s Common Council Ordinance Committee meeting. “Tesla is now recommending you charge your car in the driveway and not in the house.”
Five days after the incident, Kelly and Deputy Fire Marshall Kirk McDonald met with representatives from the charging station’s manufacturer, Volta, to examine the “fire consumed” unit.
“As a result of the collaborative inspection (with the) Volta representatives, the cause of this fire has been determined to be an overloading from internal electronic devices plugged into the RPT of the fire-affected unit,” Kelly reported.
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