What Happens After a Battery Fire

This week’s conversation is with Ivano Aiello, a geoscientist at San Jose State University in California. I interviewed Aiello a year ago, when I began investigating the potential harm caused by the battery fire at Vistra’s Moss Landing facility, perhaps the largest battery storage fire of all time. The now-closed battery plant is located near the university, and Aiello happened to be studying a nearby estuary and wildlife habitat when the fire took place. He was therefore able to closely track metals contamination from the site. When we last spoke, he told me that he was working on a comprehensive, peer-reviewed study of the impacts of the fire.

That research was recently published and has a crucial lesson: We might not be tracking the environmental impacts of battery storage fires properly.

The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

Alright let’s start from the top – please tell my readers what your study ultimately found.

The bottom line is that we detected deposition of fine airborne particles, cathode material – nickel, manganese, and cobalt – in the area surrounding the battery storage facility. We found those particles right after the fire, immediately detected them in the field, sampled the soils, and found visible presence of those particles using different techniques. We kept measuring the location in the field over several months after the fire.

The critical thing is, we had baseline data. We had been surveying those areas for much longer before the fire. Those metals were in much higher concentration than they were before, and they were clearly related to the batteries. You can see that. And we were able to see changes in surface concentrations in the soils over time, including from weather – once the rains started, there was a significant decrease in concentrations of the metals, potentially related to runoff. Some of them migrated to the soil.

What we also noticed is that the protocols that have been used to look at soil contamination call for a surface sample of 3 inches. If your sample thickness is that and the layer of metal deposit is 1 millimeter or 5 millimeter, you’re not going to see anything. If you use standard protocols, you’re not going to find anything.

What does that mean for testing areas around big battery storage fires?

That’s exactly what I hope this work helps with. Procedures designed in the past are for different types of disasters and incidents which are more like landslides than ash fallout from a fire. These metal particles are a few microns thick, so they slide easily away.

It means we have to rethink how we go about measuring contamination after industrial fires and, yes, battery fires. Because otherwise it’s just completely useless – you’re diluting everything.

The other thing we learned is that ashfall deposits are very patchy. You can get different samples between a few feet and find huge differences. You can’t just go out there and take three samples in three places, you have to sample at a much higher resolution because otherwise you’ll miss the whole story.

When it comes to the takeaways from this study, what exactly do you think the lessons should be for the battery companies and regulators involved?

There are a lot of lessons we learned from this fire. The first is that having baseline data around a potential fire site is important because then you can better understand the after.

Then, the main way to assess the potential hazards during the fire and after the fire are air quality measurements. That doesn’t tell you what’s in the air. You could have a high concentration of pollen, and then you know the quality of the air, but if you replace that with metal it is different. It’s not just how much you’re breathing, but what you are breathing.

Also, fast response. [Vistra] just released a report on soil saying there was nothing … but the sampling was done eight months after the fire. Our study shows after the fire you have this pulse of dust, and then it moves. Stuff moves to soil, across habitat. So if you don’t go out there right away, you might miss the whole thing.

Finally, what we found was that the fallout from the fire was not a bullseye pattern centered at the facility but rather offset kilometers away because of the wind.

We didn’t know much about this before because we didn’t have a real case study. This is the first real live event in which we can actually see the effects of a large battery burning.