An electric bus owned by Josephine Community Transit caught fire at the bus yard in the Josephine County Fairgrounds this morning. The rest of the transit system’s EV fleet is being taken out of service, as a precaution.

Grants Pass Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Tim De Lisle said nobody was hurt and there was no additional property damage.

Engines from Grants Pass Fire Rescue and Rural/Metro Fire responded to a call at 8:51 a.m. reporting a bus on fire. Grants Pass Fire Rescue then sent a ladder truck.

By 9:30 a.m., crews were using handheld hoses and the ladder truck to hose down the bus, which was severely burned, sending a column of acrid smoke and steam into the air.

Josephine Community Transit Supervisor Scott Chancey said the bus was dead yesterday and had low voltage this morning, so maintenance workers plugged it into a charging station and were surprised when the voltage immediately jumped to normal. When the workers went to the shop to get laptops to diagnose the issue, a driver reported flames coming from the roof of the bus.

The fire burned through the back seating area of the bus and in the back wheel wells. It was a complete loss.

Chancey said county emergency management instructed workers to move other buses away from the burning vehicle.

The bus manufacturer is sending an engineer to investigate the cause, Chancey said. In the meantime, the county’s four other electric buses are being pulled from service. Chancey said service is “going to look odd” but will maintain the same frequency.

Chancey said the county’s electric buses have six battery packs in a unit on the roof and six more in the back of the bus.

“The goal is to make sure they don’t overheat” and stop a “runaway thermal event” from spreading from one six-pack to the other, he said. De Lisle said firefighters were able to prevent the fire from spreading to the battery packs in the back and will check the bus for any reignition for 24 hours before it can be towed.

Chancey said it’s the fifth electric bus fire he’s aware of across the country and not all were from the same manufacturer. He also said the county had an internal-combustion engine bus catch fire in 2014.

De Lisle said it’s the first electric bus fire he’s responded to in 20 years with Grants Pass Fire Rescue. He said there have been electric car fires, but “it’s not as common as a lot of social media would have you believe.”

“They’re pretty safe, it’s just if the battery gets breached in an accident,” he said, but added that responding to electric vehicle fires is “definitely a hole in our training.”

The safety of electric vehicles has become a national discussion as they have grown in popularity in recent years. In the second quarter of 2024, 18.7% of light vehicle sales were electric or hybrid, according to data from Wards Intelligence.

In 2021, President Joe Biden announced a goal to have 50% of all new vehicle sales in the country be electric by 2030. In March, the Biden administration published a new rule that will make it more difficult for gas-powered vehicles to meet increasingly stringent environmental standards. Analysts told The Hill the rule could make EVs cheaper — and gas-powered cars more expensive.

President-elect Donald Trump pledged in his speech accepting the GOP nomination to “END the electric vehicle mandate on day one” and has raised concerns that EV policies will benefit manufacturing in other countries at the expense of the U.S. But he said in August he is “for electric cars.”

“I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” he said, referring to the billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Daily Courier archives show 90 vehicle fires in the Josephine County and Rogue River area in 2024, an average of almost twice per week. Some are serious fires, while others may be brakes smoking or other mechanical issues.

Most, if not all, were believed to be gas engine vehicles.

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Reach reporter Chrissy Ewald at 541-474-3806 or cewald@thedailycourier.com.