The Lewisporte Fire Department had to call in an excavator to help put out an electric vehicle fire last week.

Battalion Chief Rob Fudge says they received the call earlier this month after an electric truck caught fire on the Trans Canada near the Norris Arm Waste Management site.

Fudge says the driver, who was the only person in the truck at the time, felt heat on his leg, and noticed what he initially thought was steam rising on his windshield.

When he realized it was actually smoke, he pulled over and just managed to get out before the truck was consumed in flame.

Fudge says electric vehicle batteries burn extremely hot and take a lot of water to cool down, which was a challenge because there were no water sources nearby.

He says they used about 500 gallons of water on the fire, and it still wasn’t out, so they called in an excavator from the nearby waste disposal site to cover the truck in snow.

“We started dumping large amounts of snow on top of it,” says Fudge, which he says cooled the fire, but did not extinguish it. “Every time we dump we’d dump a basket of snow on it and we’d back off, it (would) ignite again and start to flare up.” Finally, the excavator pushed the vehicle into a ditch and buried it in snow, “and at the end of it, we had a truck load of sand come up, and we completely buried everything in sand.”

He says firefighters are trained in dealing with electric vehicle fires, but says it takes some getting used to the differences in traditional vehicle fires.