By Lauren Wanko
NJ Today
Firefighters battled more than the flames at the Dietz & Watson distribution facility in Delanco. The building’s roof is covered with thousands of solar panels and that posed a safety problem for firefighters.
“The problem we have with this fire is the whole top of the roof has solar panels on it, so we can’t get on it because they’re energized,” Delanco Fire Chief Ron Holt told NBC 10.
That means firefighters working around solar panels risk being electrocuted. Manasquan Fire Chief Mike Galos explained, “We don’t know what’s running underneath them or around them, but they all tie into a circuit at some point and go down to a switch, so they’re live.”
The Manasquan Fire Bureau provides the fire department with a list of all the solar panel-equipped homes and Galos says that list keeps growing.
There are more than 9,000 solar energy installations in New Jersey. That makes the Garden State the second largest solar energy market in the nation, right behind California.
During an emergency involving a solar panel equipped home, Manasquan firefighters would first attempt to locate where the solar disconnect is and shut it down.
“Which would at least make sure that the system is no longer backfeeding inside the house,” Galos said.
Galos says electric shock isn’t the only hazard. The solar panels also add weight to the roof and change the firefighters’ operation tremendously.
“The solar panels themselves are in the way of one of our main ventilation processes. When we have a fire in a building, one of the things that we would try to do is isolate the room or the area of the fire and do a direct vent above that to provide some vertical ventilation. Having those PVs — or photovoltaic panels — now, it prevents us from being able to get into that area. If the panels are in the way, we can’t cut a whole in the roof.”
Manasquan’s firefighters began meeting with contractors to learn more about th solar energy systems and team members continue to rethink their emergency strategies.
Electric cars powered by batteries can also endanger first responders at accident scenes.
“You’ve got a charged system that you normally, we would pop the hood and disconnect the car battery and the car is dead. But now with these systems, they’ve got battery arrays throughout the trunks or throughout the engine compartments and there’s various cables that may run the entire length of the car, depending on where the battery array is. And you could be extricating somebody out of the car and cutting a post and now there’s a battery cable in there,” Galos said.
As for the massive Burlington County fire, Galos hopes it will bring an increased focus on firefighting tactics when solar panels are involved.