How different is a car fire, vehicle rescue or medical call for first responders when the vehicle involved is a Tesla?

The short answer: Very, very different indeed.

For the long answer, firefighters in Maine are now engaging in new training programs to understand the key differences, such as how long it takes to put out a battery-powered vehicle fire properly and how to stay safe while doing it.

“It’s very intimidating,” said Lt. Karl Finley of the Saco Fire Department. “It’s so different from what we’re used to.”

Finley has been organizing and running training sessions on working with electric vehicles, or EVs, for his own firefighters, and he has even been asked to train first responders in neighboring departments.

For other departments, especially smaller ones that don’t have easy access to training programs, EV-related instruction can be hard to come by. Jim Graves, director of the Maine Fire Service Institute, is working to change that. He has organized a training program on April 27 in Brunswick and April 28 in Bangor, which will include presentations from the National Fire Protection Association.

But there are only 100 seats available between both sessions, and Graves said more than 30 departments statewide have asked about the training.

Graves pledged there will be more training sessions to come, but efforts to establish regular, comprehensive EV-related training are still in their infancy.

“It’s going to take a few years before everybody gets everything quite worked out,” he said.

But with more than 200 vehicle fires occurring in Maine every year, coupled with the growing popularity of EVs, trainers like Graves agree that firefighters need to get up to speed now. The technology is growing and changing too fast to wait, he said.

“The genie is out of the bottle and we don’t know what the genie is going to do,” he said.

Finley said the biggest problem firefighters face is knowing how to disable a vehicle. The last thing a firefighter wants while trying to fight a fire or tend to a patient is for the vehicle to suddenly start rolling away.

With a gasoline-powered vehicle, Finley said, it’s easy – just reach in, put it in park or set the brake, and take out the keys. Maybe use wheel chocks, large wooden wedges put up against the tires.

But, Finley said, it’s different with an EV. On Thursday, in the fire department’s garage, he demonstrated this to a reporter with a Kia EV9 the department borrowed from Bill Dodge Kia.

“Go sit in the driver’s seat, and try to turn it on,” he said.

At a glance, there’s no way to see how that would be done. The button, in fact, is located at the base of the stem of what looks like the arm one would control the windshield wipers with. The button is down near the steering column, not visible without craning one’s neck. No firefighter who hadn’t been told about this beforehand, Finley said, could be expected to simply figure that out in a crisis.

And that, Finley added, is only how Kia’s EVs work. Other automakers do it differently still. Teslas, for example, do not have a button at all – the vehicle simply activates when the driver sits behind the wheel.

“We have to go to apps to figure out how to shut these off,” he said.

The old reliable wheel chocks aren’t good enough, either. The average EV, Finley said, is powerful enough to roll right over them.

There is one piece of good news. Finley said firefighters can purchase a special device, an emergency anti-theft plug. It looks like a small metal and plastic cylinder bent at an angle in the middle. Once plugged into a charging port, the plug changes color indicating it has disabled the vehicle.

The plugs cost $900, which for a fire department is relatively inexpensive, Finley said.

“I spend more than that on band-aids,” he said.

Even the plugs, however, can be a challenge to use. Not every EV manufacturer puts its charging ports in the same place. Teslas, for example, have them behind the left rear indicator light housing, Finley said, not something the uninitiated can spot at a glance.

“Everything’s electric,” he said. “You’ve got to trust the electricity, and I don’t trust the electricity.”

When the EV is on fire, putting out the flames can also be a challenge. It’s safe to spray water, believe it or not, because even burning batteries are surrounded by an insulating case.

But it takes more work and time. Ordinarily, Finley said, a car fire takes less than an hour and about 500 gallons of water to put out.

With an EV, Finley said, the battery banks, often located under the vehicle, are the hottest part. They can take anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 gallons of water and several hours for firefighters to control.

“It takes a long time to cool it down,” he said.

In a way, Graves said, the concept of vehicle technology leaping ahead of first responders’ skills is not new. Everything from new gasoline additives to airbags appeared in vehicles without warning, leaving firefighters to figure out how to adjust on their own.

“We learn a lot of things, literally, (via) trial by fire, which is scary,” he said.

Despite the risks and nuances of modern EVs, Finley said people should not avoid owning or driving an EV out of fear that they will not have access to help if the need it. No department, he said, will be completely unable to handle an EV vehicle fire, regardless of training.

“We’ll handle it, we’ll figure it out,” he said. “We’re going to get the fire out one way or another. That’s never an issue.”