Dave Brooks from Heartland Toyots, training local firefighters in how to deal with a fire in a gas-electric hybrid car.

JT2BK1. This jumble of letters and numbers could save your life.

Together they are the first part of the VIN number in every Toyota Prius, which tells emergency response workers they are dealing with a new animal — the hybrid gas and electric vehicle.

Hybrid car engines work from both electric and traditional gas power to increase mileage and decrease polluting emissions. The Prius, the Honda Insight and Civic EV and the new Ford Escape HEV are the only hybrid cars now in the North American market.

“It’s not so much that they are unsafe, it’s that they’re different,” said Dave Brooks, a master diagnostic technician with Heartland Toyota in Bremerton.

The difference starts with a 300-volt battery.

For Scott Madison, a Kitsap County District 7 firefighter and paramedic, the increase in power creates a situation that should be handled more like a downed power line.

“It’d a scary thought,” Madison said. “It changes the way most of us look at a motor vehicle accident.

Madison said after he first heard of the potential hazard, his first thought was to get equipment that could tell, at one touch, whether a car body was electrically charged. Fire departments do not have access to such a tool, yet.

Neither Madison nor Brooks knows of an actual major accident involving a hybrid car where firefighters have had to put out an engine fire or extricate passengers. But, with the popularity of hybrid cars expected to grow rapidly in the next few years, the probability of such an accident also grows.

“It would be extremely frustrating if I was at the scene of a hybrid accident and I couldn’t do anything,” Madison said.

Bill Bailey thought the same thing. Bailey, a firefighter, was training as a Toyota mechanic with Heartland when he saw the connection and brought it to light. Brook had a similar thought.

“I learned about the car in my initial training,” Brook said, “and I thought to myself, is this going out beyond the dealers?”

As a result, Brook has started 90-minute classes for Kitsap County paramedics and firefighters to educate them about the new dangers. The dangers are not directed at passengers in hybrid cars, but at response personnel who may not know that in an accident the entire car has the potential to be electrically charged.

The first step is identifying whether a vehicle is a hybrid and that starts with the VIN number — usually visible on the dash above the steering wheel — or other nameplates around the car in other models. In a serious crash, though, it is possible that none of the identifiers will be visible, Madison said.

The second stage before being able to extricate a driver or passenger, therefore, is safely disabling the 100-pound battery source. While the engine sits in the front, the battery pack in a hybrid car nestles in the back. Live insulated cables run inside the body of the car between them.

That’s where the danger exists.

“Electricity is a beast you can’t see,” Madison said. “Gas you can see and smell. When you can’t see it, as far as we’re concerned, that makes it worse. And when you know there’s enough to kill you or cause serious injury it’s something we need to know about.”

To increase awareness, Brook plans to expand the training beyond Kitsap County. Eventually the technology and the methods for tackling hybrid car emergencies will evolve, Brook said, as both did when cars were a new innovation.