With the price of gasoline setting new records every week, more customers are taking a second look at those 'hybrid' cars that run on both gasoline and battery power. But the San Antonio Fire Department warns those cars could slow their response time in case of an accident or a car fire.
While firefighters are trained on rescue techniques and the use of the 'jaws of life' to get people out of burning or wrecked gasoline powered cars, the 'hybrids' present a new series of challenges that firefighters often aren't trained to deal with, according to Captain Roland Wynn, the Chief Safety Officer with the SAFD.
"You have to worry about the batteries catching on fire if there's an accident," he told 1200 WOAI's Bud Little. "You have to worry about cutting cables that might cause arcing or cause a fire. You even have to worry about pushing the wrong button and having the car take off on you."
"Hybrid" vehicles generally use gasoline power to fuel a standard internal combustion engine, but switch to direct current battery power to keep the vehicle systems operating when the car is idling or moving down hill. These systems can often double the gas mileage hybrid cars get.
"Now you have electricity and gasoline together," Wynn said. "What are the safety features that the manufacturer is building in for us?"
He says the 'jaws of life,' a mechanical device used to pray apart sections of a wrecked vehicle to get the passengers out, could cause the emergency worker to be shocked or cause a fire if it slices through electrical cables.
"You can stick your head in there and accidentally hit something, and that could make the car go, or deploy an airbag against your head."
He says because there are no standards among companies for the manufacture of hybrid vehicles, he's afraid his emergency workers will have to learn the electrical wiring scheme of each individual vehicle, slowing reaction time when ambulances and fire trucks get to the scene of an accident.
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