CONTAIN any incident

Take preemptive steps to physically contain the potential flames from the lithium battery in its early stages (likely multiple explosions / flares):

• Physical barriers like charging boxes
• Access to water, sand or similar if the fire is approachable

Extend this, as far as possible, to managing the toxic smoke away from enclosed spaces and people

We have touched on this in prior sections with the portable charging cabinet.  In reality we don’t know if it will contain a fire (and hopefully we won’t find out), but the discipline of moving it outside can’t hurt.  Some additional thoughts below on containing the flames and managing the smoke.

There are multiple approaches to containing the lithium battery flames that all work to varying degrees in preventing the propagation of the fire to surrounding items.  They include:

• Dedicated bags for small batteries – readily available and reasonable at containing the flames from smaller batteries if used properly
• More robust purpose built ‘boxes’ such as the Bat-Safe range (see Resources) for applications from hobby batteries to e-bikes and e-scooters.
• Simple homemade structures like charging batteries on a ceramic tile or concrete slab, surrounded by house bricks and with another tile or slab on top. Crude, but easy to implement for e-scooter and bike batteries.
• Fire and bomb proof charging enclosures (effective but getting very expensive).

And have sand or water on hand should something go wrong (and it is safe to approach the batteries)

This is actually where our thinking started, ahead of the first-hand knowledge of fires we now have from colleagues.  We have multiple approaches in development that we will add as they evolve. See the suggestions in the Charging Protection area.

A combination of ISOLATION with CONTAINMENT should make a huge difference to preventing escalation of any incident.