General Motors’ Pasadena Design Advanced Design Center caught fire in Pasadena, California, on Wednesday night. More than 100 firefighters and hazardous materials specialists were called out to extinguish the blaze, which appears to have started in a prototype electric vehicle with a lithium-ion battery, the Los Angeles Times reports. Thankfully, no one died or suffered any serious injuries in the fire, and it has since been extinguished. Still, it isn’t exactly clear just how much damage the fire actually did before emergency responders were able to put it out.
Reading the LA Times‘ version of events, it sounds awful. A Pasadena Fire Department spokesperson reportedly described it as a four-alarm fire “due to the scale of the structure and the hazardous materials involved,” and the department responded with a crew of more than 100 people. That spokesperson also said, “This is one of the largest structure fires we’ve had in Pasadena in many, many years,” and at some point, one of the firefighters was temporarily trapped in the building “amid the ferocious blaze” and needed help getting out. The good news is, they found him in time and were able to pull him out before anything truly bad happened to him.
“He did not wish to be transported [to a hospital], but it was a very scary few minutes there until they determined that he was OK,” PFD’s spokesperson told reporters.
As far as the damage goes, the LA Times wrote:
Preliminary reports indicated that lithium ion batteries and concept cars burned inside the building; however, the incident remained active Wednesday evening, and the cause of the fire is under investigation, she said. Some of the burned cars appeared to be gasoline-powered vehicles.
So yeah, even though no one was seriously hurt, that sounds pretty bad.
A single design concept
At the same time, though, when our friends over at Car and Driver wrote about the fire, the statement they got from GM painted a slightly different story:
In a statement to Car and Driver, a General Motors spokesperson said, “The isolated fire was contained to a single design concept vehicle and did not spread to any other vehicles, design concepts, or the building itself.”
If it was an isolated fire that only affected a single concept vehicle and didn’t hurt any other vehicles, concepts or the building, that sure sounds different from “one of the largest structure fires [Pasadena’s had] in many, many years.” Pasadena Now also backs up the Times‘ report that multiple vehicles caught on fire, not the “single design concept vehicle” in GM’s statement. But both newspapers also cite “preliminary reports” as the source of their claims that multiple vehicles caught on fire, so maybe those initial reports were inaccurate?
I guess it’s possible the flames from one burning EV concept created so much smoke that PFD felt the need to send such a large number of responders to the scene, especially since battery fires are notoriously difficult to put out. And apparently, firefighters remained on the scene overnight to make sure the fire stayed out, so maybe the number of emergency responders was inflated due to different firefighters showing up to relieve the others?
Did the smoke from the one burning concept just make it look like some of the other cars burned, even though they didn’t actually catch on fire? It’s all very confusing.
No clarification
Unfortunately for those of you hoping for a little more clarification, when I emailed GM asking for exactly that, their spokesperson responded with a longer version of the statement they gave to Car and Driver:
We’re grateful that all employees and first responders are safe and accounted for. The isolated fire was contained to a single design concept vehicle and did not spread to any other vehicles, design concepts, or the building itself. We thank the responding fire departments for their swift action in extinguishing the fire.
So yeah, that’s not giving us any information that we didn’t already know. I’m sure the last thing GM wanted was for one of its concepts to catch on fire, potentially ruining its plans for the Detroit Auto Show in January, and I can’t imagine it’s fun responding to dozens and dozens of emails about it the next day, but it’s still a little frustrating.
Also, I want to be clear that I didn’t send a generic email just asking for a statement. I specifically asked about the apparent contradiction between the statement GM gave to Car and Driver and the account in the LA Times. I wasn’t trying to trick or trap anyone. I was legitimately confused and was hoping they might help me out. And if the preliminary reports were wrong, you’d think they’d want to do more to correct that mistake. Hopefully, though, regardless of what’s going on here, we’ll get more information in the coming days that gives us a better idea of what actually happened.
