Burned Up Toasted Tesla On Lake Champlain Getting Lots Of Attention

A burnt up Tesla on the ice, Shelburne Bay, Lake Champlain
 

Vermont seems to be a bit of a magnet for weird mishaps.

Which is why I wasn't totally, 100% shocked when a 2019 Tesla Model X recently went up in flames atop the ice on deeply frozen Shelburne Bay in Lake Champlain.  

I guess it was such a big deal that web sites all over the place picked up on the story. This includes Jalopnik and Popular Mechanics wrote up articles about this unfortunate Tesla.

Popular Mechanics had this likely explanation for the blaze

"The specific cause of the fire is as yet unknown. People on Tesla forums who saw the crazy pictures began to speculate about insurance fraud or someother oddball explanation, but the most likely explanation would be battery failure. If damaged, lithium-ion batteries can rapidly discharge their stored energy in the form of heat, leading to an inferno. The bigger the battery, the bigger the fire.

Teslas necessarily have a giant battery pack, so if the car suffers sufficiently severe impact, it can go up in flames."

The driver of the car reported hitting something on the road, perhaps a rock or a big pothole or frost heave, reports Seven Days. The motorists said he smelled something odd after hitting whatever he hit. That might have damaged the battery, leading to the Tesla fire a little later on Shelburne Bay.

As the fire raged, the Shelburne Fire Department wisely decided not to drive their 50,000-pound fire truck out onto the ice to put out the blaze, notes Seven Days.  So the Tesla burned to a crisp.

By the way, the fire didn't melt too much of the ice and let the Tesla fall through because most of the heat of the blaze was directed upward, away from the ice.

It's the owner's responsibility to get the Tesla off the ice. And you wouldn't want it to sink into the water when the ice melts, due to a pollution risk.

The Burlington Free Press says a towing company got the wreckage off the ice a few days ago, but it wasn't easy. It had frozen back onto the ice, and had to be pried loose.

Here's a YouTube video, taken on the day they were trying to get the remains of the Tesla off the lake:

Frozen Lakes Are Meant For Frigid Mishaps

Here in northwestern Vermont, where I live, large Lake Champlain has pretty much completely frozen over for the first time in seven years.

Ice fishing enthusiasts on Lake Champlain, Vermont
in a photo I took two years ago. Unlike the people
in the video in this post, this trio played it safe
and walked only a thick, solid ice.  

We've had a lot of really warm winters in the past decade, so there's been a lot of open water in recent years.

You'd think a lake in Vermont would freeze over every winter, but not with the mild temperatures we've had.

Until this year. It's been sort of cold, so we're back to walking on water on the lake.

Of course, no ice is completely safe, so there's always the danger of falling through. But the ice on most (but not all!) of Lake Champlain is thick and solid, so you can walk or even drive on it.

The lake has turned into a skating, skiing, ice fishing playground.

But in the spirit of warning people about the dangers of thin ice, pressure cracks and the like, we offer you this video of stupid people going out on ice that is decidedly NOT safe.

For your amusement and an instructional tutorial on what not to do in the winter, I present this very very funny compilation:

More Lake Champlain Clouds

This mild winter, I've been repeatedly drawn to Burlington's Waterfront Park, as the clouds over the strangely unfrozen lake have featured this wonderful mix of dark and light, sun rays breaking through rthe clouds, and a mix of warm and  cold colors.

You've seen several photos I've taken down there in this blog over the past couple weeks. I couldn't resist a couple more.  I took these on a pleasant 50 degree Wednesday afternoon, as a small, but rollicking storm approached.

The storm would bring quick downpours, bursts of huge snowflakes and some rumbles of thunder later that night. It was as if winter and spring were arguing with each other as to which should be the dominant feature of the moment.

The photos capture a bit of the mildness of the warm February day and the roiling feel of the atmosphere getting ready for at least a semi-storm.

 

Frigid Morning Creates Steamy Lake Champlain

It was 11 below in Burlington, Vermont this morning. Up until now, it's generally been a warm winter, so the lake has little ice on it.

The relatively warm waters, with no ice covering it, clashed with the cold air to create cool steam clouds. The steam froze on shoreline trees, creating some pretty rime ice. I was out there, briefly, despite the cold, and got this brief, otherworldly sort of video of the lake on a cold Vermont morning.