“Even if the battery was somehow shorted to the car, it wouldn’t be grounded, and there would be no danger.”
We’ll need a big tombstone for that epitaph, but people will get a kick out of it.
I guess that would be the tombstone of every man who ever worked on high voltage lines, who apparently were all electricuted when they touched the lines......
Again, even if you attached one side of a 250-volt battery to the metal frame of the car, you would not be shocked if you touched it while standing on the ground.
Only if one wire touched the metal, and the other side somehow came in contact with the ground, would you have a danger of a shock.
Of course, if the car was that damaged, it is likely the air bags deployed, in which case the battery would be disconnected, so unless the battery back itself had fallen apart and formed a circuit with the metal frame and ground, there would be no danger.
The danger is in using water to put out a fire, and the danger of trying to ensure the car is really off so it doesn’t drive off. And if the car is severely damaged, there is of course the possibility the orange power wire could be cut and sitting where you might accidentally touch both wires (although again if the wire was cut the control circutry should have disconnected the battery).
There are also some capacitive discharge issues in the engine compartment, but they are more likely to give you a shock than kill you, unless you get very unlucky.
NONE of these cases would be a shock hazard using the jaws of life to pry open a door or the roof. The only danger is if you are trying to cut through the car from the bottom, and then you would have to watch for the orange wire so you didn’t cut through it.
As I said in my first post, there is training that EMS goes through. The idea that EMS people are afraid to work on hybrids could only be true if they hadn’t been trained yet.