Hazmat crews, Jacksonville firefighters contain battery plant fire, potential dangers
Jacksonville firefighters worked for hours Tuesday to secure a fire at a lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant in Cecil Commerce Center on the Westside. The building, toured in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama, didn't show signs of flames on the outside but needed to be evacuated for the potential dangers of the hazardous materials.
Chief Keith Powers said it began with one of the 20,000-pound batteries caught fire about 7:15 a.m. at the Waterworks Street facility. The initial attempts to put it out with dry chemicals and special fire extinguishers were unsuccessful. Hazmat units worked to move the other nearby batteries and keep them cooled to not exacerbate the situation while the fire steadily burned the affected battery.
"This fire continues to burn and it's going to continue to burn for hours. It puts off some pretty dangerous gas," Powers said, noting hydrogen fluoride. "... So we'll be remaining on scene for an extended period of time."
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But he said the nearby community wasn't in danger and nothing tested out of the ordinary in the water. The air quality also would be monitored.
As firefighters exited, each had to be decontaminated, Powers said.
Deputy Division Chief of Operations Mike Lesniak said there hadn't been any explosions but explained some of the differences in dealing with these types of hazardous threats.
"These batteries, whether it's the lithium-iron phosphate or lithium-ion batteries, they're small cells, they're packed together real tight," Lesniak said. "So what happens is once you get thermal runaway with one battery, then it impacts all the other batteries and compromises them. So it is not anything that you can put out with just putting a lot of water on them. ... Once one battery gets going, it just heats up the battery next to it and around it."
He said the recommendation is to submerge them in a dump tank, but that wasn't an option available here.
The cause has not been determined. Firefighters also were called out and needed to be hosed down for an incident there in 2019.
During his visit in 2016, Obama touted Saft as the face of manufacturing's high-tech future. Two years later the company was facing penalties from the city for falling short of the job target it pledged to hit in exchange for millions of dollars in city assistance.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Hazmat crews contain Saft America battery plant fire in Jacksonville
