when we learned of the fire at the mga test facility in june, we had no relevant real world data to help us assess the safety risk and no clear understanding of how the fire began. the agency took numerous unprecedented steps to ascertain the real world risk of volt owners and passengers and then to isolate the root cause of this incident to determine if a defect existed that posed an unrenl risk to safety. the technical team at ntsa working in collaboration with the department of energy and defense used every second over the past six months to provide the data needed for the agency decision. and they delivered an innovative and expert fashion. during this period i had any notion that an imminent safety risk existed to the american public, i would have been sure that public knew of that risk immediately. we at ntsa rely on data to drive our decisions. as i noted in my written statement, we undertook several volt crash tests to replicate the june incident. the agency reviewed all the crashes that involved volts. we found no results of post crash fires. we looked at a variety of data sourc

no issues and it wasn't observed at all until those three weeks later on june 6th when the staff at mga came back and noticed the burnt holes that were discovered. no one had an expectation that the particular fire incident that happened on june 6 would be precipitated from the may 12th test. >> i guess that gets to the essence of my question. these batteries, when it was traumatized, when you had the crash test on may 12th, it then began to leak and there was evidence that there was a leaking orange fluid. and my concern is, is that this safety administrators didn't have the wherewithall or the knowledge that this leaking battery would cause a problem given that battery and the energy behind it. and the dangers. and so my question to you is, why was that car stored with other cars? why wasn't that battery drained? why wasn't that handled, why wasn't it handled as if someone understood the dangers with regards to this lithium ion battery? >> our engineers and the test facility engineers actually know of the dangers and the issues regarding lithium ion in terms of how much energy they st