CA Wildfires Left One Million Pounds of Damaged Lithium-ion Batteries

LOS ANGELES -- 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 world's 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.'s 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 "very unpredictable," said Keith Glenn, an on-scene coordinator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Workers who handle them, he said, sometimes wonder: "Is it going to catch fire? Is it going to become a projectile?"

Lithium-ion batteries became the leading cause of fire deaths in New York City last year and are now a factor in half of the nation's trash-truck load fires. A fire from a portable battery engulfed a plane on the tarmac in South Korea in January, and U.S. air safety regulators say lithium-ion battery fires occur nearly twice per week.

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. It's an ugly ending to the power behind some of our most well-designed and beloved devices.

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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 California's 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.

All lithium-ion batteries work roughly the same way: Cells are clustered inside the battery casing, and lithium ions move between the electrodes in each cell, generating an electric current.

The batteries become a risk when they enter thermal runaway, a state that can be triggered by overcharging, manufacturing errors or physical damage that can lead to fire.

"Just like pushing over that first domino ... it can spread," said Chris Myers, the co-chair of the EPA's national lithium-ion battery emergency response task force. If the batteries aren't handled properly, fires can rekindle "days, weeks, months" later, he said. "That's what we're trying to prevent."

In California, the biggest risks are often to garages and streets. The intensity of electric vehicle fires can shut down freeways for hours and sometimes prevent firefighters from rescuing car-crash victims.

They can also have significant economic impacts: Last fall, a big-rig carrying lithium-ion batteries overturned and caught fire in San Pedro, forcing the closure of several port terminals. About 1,200 people were ordered to evacuate in Monterey County earlier this year after one of the world's largest battery storage facilities at the Moss Landing Power Plant caught fire.

When the Biden administration tasked the EPA with cleaning up the lithium-ion battery waste from the Lahaina fire, the island's geography posed a problem. There were no battery recycling centers on Maui, and ship captains and insurers, wary of fire risks, didn't want the damaged goods in their cargo.

"We were pushed into a situation where we had to figure it out," Myers said.

So, the EPA developed what's now called the "Maui method," a two-part process for removing stored power from the batteries and crushing them for safe transportation and recycling.

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In Los Angeles County, the labor-intensive process began with mapping the likely locations of more than 5,000 batteries, including about 2,000 in the Palisades and Malibu and 3,000 in Altadena. The list was compiled with information from car and solar panel companies, public utilities, homeowners and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Then, hundreds of environmental workers went to the burn zones to sift through the wreckage, house by house, block by block.

The crews working on electric vehicles disconnected the voltage cables to air bags and seat belts, sawed off the tops of the cars, and flipped the vehicles over to access the battery packs underneath. Detaching the thousands of cells underneath and loading the batteries into metal drums could take up to two hours per car.

Los Angeles had a far wider range of electric vehicles than Maui, Glenn said, and each make and model is a little different.

The crews also hunted for wall-mounted battery energy storage systems that connect to solar panels and electric cars. Those devices, which weigh 200 pounds or more, were wrapped in fire blankets and trucked to an EPA temporary processing site to be disassembled.

The EPA's choice of real estate, including beachfront parking lots and an open space in Irwindale, sparked fierce backlash from residents who didn't want toxic batteries shredded near their homes or sensitive waterways.

Westside Councilmember Traci Park expressed surprise earlier this year during one public meeting that batteries were being crushed "just out in the open," not far from the water.

The EPA installed raised barriers and layers of thick plastic to prevent groundwater runoff and used air-quality monitors to ensure that the battery dust, which contains precious and semiprecious metals, did not contaminate the air. The agency tested the air and soil before starting their operations, and again afterward.

At the Will Rogers State Beach site, workers submerged the recovered batteries in a brine solution made of table salt and baking soda. The batteries soaked for three days or longer in red dumpster-like containers, sometimes emitting bubbles or rust-colored discharge, to reduce their stored energy and reduce the risk of fire.

In the first weeks of the L.A. cleanup, the batteries were then crushed between a steel plate and a drum roller. Flattening the contents of a 55-gallon drum took 30 to 45 minutes in a process that one engineer compared to crushing peanuts into peanut butter.

Breaking the battery's anodes and cathodes reduces the batteries to what EPA workers call, semi-seriously, "not a battery." That makes the metal easier to transport, and ensures the batteries won't reignite.

The EPA ditched the roller method in late March for a simpler solution: two bright blue machines that look like giant sausage grinders. The machines were made in New Jersey by an industrial fabricator that also makes crushers for auto yards and 1-800-GOT-JUNK.

The team at Will Rogers nicknamed the smaller machine "Pork Roll," after the processed meat popular in the Garden State. About the size of a riding lawn mower, the machine chews through about eight barrels of batteries an hour, eight times faster than the drum roller method.

The larger machine was even faster. On its first day in operation, as ocean waves crashed behind him, an EPA contractor used a Bobcat with a front claw to pick up a metal drum and hold it over the machine's chute.

Another worker used a long pole to scrape the batteries into the machine. The batteries fell through the teeth and tumbled out of the bottom as a heap of scrap metal.

The not-batteries are shoveled into massive metal containers with soft tops and are trucked to Grassy Mountain, a waste disposal facility in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert, officials said. The battery brining liquid is a hazardous waste product too and is trucked to another specialized facility, the agency said.

The EPA's Maui method will be used increasingly as Americans rely more heavily on cordless devices, Glenn said, adding : "We love portability, we love being untethered."

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