PHOTOS: The fires that swept through Los Angeles County in January left behind more than 1 million pounds of damaged lithium-ion batteries, ranging from slim capsules inside iPhones to the brick-like blocks that run electric vehicles.
Cheap and reliable, lithium-ion batteries have helped the worldโs transition to green energy but come with one major risk: When damaged, the batteries can get very hot very quickly, burst open in a puff of toxic, flammable gas and erupt into flames that are difficult to extinguish.
That level of risk lent new urgency to the cleanup of L.A.โs fire debris. After being exposed to temperatures of more than 2,000 degrees, the thousands of lithium ion batteries left behind in the ruins of more than 13,500 houses and garages could have exploded or caught fire at any time.
Lithium-ion batteries with heat damage are โvery unpredictable,โ said Keith Glenn, an on-scene coordinator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Workers who handle them, he said, sometimes wonder: โIs it going to catch fire? Is it going to become a projectile?โ
Federal environmental officials are in the final days of a months-long effort to find the batteries and stop them from catching fire, which involves sifting through fire debris by hand, dunking the batteries in a specialized brine solution, then grinding them into pieces for transportation and recycling. Itโs an ugly ending to the power behind some of our most well-designed and beloved devices.
Environmental workers recovered more than 16 times as many batteries from the wreckage of the L.A. fires than in the wildfires that swept Maui in 2023. That volume reflects not just the scope of the damage here, but also Californiaโs role as an enthusiastic early adopter of green technologies such as solar panels, electric vehicles and the massive wall-mounted battery panels that come with them.
