By Ed Wiseman

Lithium is the cornerstone of the 21st century. It’s in every home in every town, powering every toy, phone, computer, tool or car that needs to be recharged. It’s the element that makes mobile devices mobile – you own at least a few grams of it, spread out over the assorted tech products present in any modern household. There’s a good chance you’re holding some in your hand right now.

Used correctly – as they are countless billions of times per day, all over the world, without incident – batteries containing lithium are safe. But very occasionally, often through damage or misuse, the enormous energy stored in them is unleashed in an uncontrolled, dangerous way, putting anyone nearby in grave danger.

“We’re seeing a lithium fire every other day,” says deputy commissioner Dom Ellis from London Fire Brigade. “It’s a 60 per cent rise on last year – a real emerging hazard.”

Ellis and other fire fighters in Britain are on the front line against this new threat, which has begun to claim lives here and overseas. Every few months someone in the UK dies in a lithium battery fire – in New York, 13 people have died this year alone.

Lithium house fires and e-mobility

Phones, laptops and other gadgets have been around for a couple of decades now, and haven’t really caused much of a problem. Fires do happen, often related to incorrect charging or damage, but they tend not to be fatal. Now, though, especially in cities, the rise of e-scooters and e-bikes means ever more capacious batteries are increasingly found indoors, where they’re left on charge overnight, and where they can cause the most damage.

“If your phone or your laptop was to burst in flames, you’d probably have a good go at picking it up and throwing it in the sink,” says Ellis. “It might burn your fingers, but that’s it.”

“If an e-bike catches fire, that’s the difference – you’re not going to be able to pick it up. There’s so much energy in these batteries, which is what makes them so useful, but when they go wrong, they produce a ferocious fire of a size and produces such effects that you won’t get past it.”

These fires can be deadly. In Cambridgeshire last month, a mother and two children died in a house fire thought to be caused by an e-bike battery. A few weeks ago, a man in Hackney suffered a fractured skull, collapsed lung and burns after jumping out of the window of his bedsit to escape an e-bike fire. And on New Year’s day, 21-year-old Sofia Duarte died in a shared house on the Old Kent Road, after an e-bike left in the hallway – the only way to escape the building – ignited.

“That was a house of multiple occupancy of the Old Kent Road,” explains Ellis. “A converted e-bike was charging on the stairwell towards the exit door, and flammable vapour gas cloud ‘flashed over’, exploded and compromised the stairwell.

“Those who survived jumped out of the windows with injuries and burns. Sofia tried to escape into the stairs and was overcome, because that’s how fast and aggressive these things are.”

Little time to escape

There are several factors that make lithium fires particularly deadly, and one of them is the speed at which they can engulf a room. From the first initial hiss – an early sign that something is wrong – a battery can fill a hallway with deadly gas and flames in moments.

“The first thing that’s emitted is like a high pressure steam,” explains Ellis. “It looks like steam but is actually a highly toxic, flammable, explosive gas cloud.”

The seemingly innocuous nature of the malfunction often prompts people to move closer,” says Ellis – which can be a deadly mistake.

“Because it looks like steam, people think ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and go over to investigate,” says Ellis. “And then before you know it, you’ve got that chemical reaction, the thermal runaway, the explosion.”

“Going from maybe noticing a slight hissing sound, or noticing white vapour, to having your whole front room compromised can be as little as 15 seconds,” says Ellis.

Bodged batteries

Observe the groups of delivery riders congregating outside McDonald’s on Lewisham High Street, and you’ll quickly deduce that their e-bikes are not factory fresh. Cheap conversion kits – available on eBay for as little as £100 – will turn a £50 mountain bike into a moped, increasing the speed and range of a gig economy worker whose income is based largely on how fast and how far they are prepared to travel.

“These people need to earn a living, they need to elongate the travel distances and the time they get out of their batteries,” concedes Ellis. “So they’re using aftermarket kits, and they’re adapting them, especially the battery management systems.

“If your iPhone overheats, it shuts down. And that’s because the battery management system knows the lithium ion batteries are getting too warm, so it shuts it down to let it cool. Well, if you tamper with that to achieve longer travel distances, and more energy storage, you haven’t got a battery management system to tell it when it’s overheating.

“We’re seeing lot of our fires in these aftermarket kits. We’re really concerned about that.”

London Fire Brigade has written to major hot food delivery apps, asking them to warn their workers to utilise and charge lithium batteries with caution. LFB has also given out leaflets at known haunts for riders. But there’s still a long way to go before the British public understands the risks inherent in such powerful energy stores, especially in relation to e-bikes and e-scooters.

“They’re a very economical and a fairly green method of transport,” acknowledges Ellis. “We’re not challenging that at all – there’s a lot to be celebrated here. All we want is society and users to understand the hazards with them, and use them safely.”

Don’t use damaged batteries

Homemade e-bikes are over-represented in London’s lithium fire statistics, but not all fires are caused by conversion kits. Ellis says that the heat of these fires makes it difficult to establish what triggered the blaze, but that damaged or incorrectly used e-bikes from reputable sources are also a risk.

“The higher proportion of them are aftermarket kits and batteries that haven’t been used with the appropriate charger, or haven’t been fitted by people that have the technical competence to do it. But that’s not always the case.

“If you’ve got one from a reputable seller, and you damage it, or it gets water ingress, which starts to corrode the elements, it can still cause the chemical reaction that leads to the fire and potential explosion.”

How to stay safe

The number of times Ellis mentions smoke alarms is unsurprising. But repeatedly, he tells me that if you have an e-bike, the best place to charge it is outdoors.

“Please, please charge it outside,” he says. “If you can’t charge it outside, make sure you have smoke detection throughout your home.

“You want it to be at the furthest point from your means of escape, you want a smoke detector right above your bed, and you need to have drilled into your subconscious that if anything happens, you get out, and close the door quickly.”

“The key, key message is not to be charging these by your front door in your hallway.”

I ask if there’s anything a civilian can do to fight a lithium fire. Ellis briefly explains the many ways that trained fire fighters can tackle a blaze of this intensity, and it doesn’t sound like something I’d consider tackling.

“They’re challenging enough for us in full personal protective equipment and respiratory protection, with a fire engine,” says Ellis. “I would not suggest that the public try to attack these fires.

“Get yourself out, get your family out, call 999. And then if you want to be heroic, that’s your choice, but we would strongly suggest you let the professionals turn up.

“We’re generally just over five minutes with our first fire engine, and the second one just over seven,” says Ellis. “ We’re there quickly, and we’ll deal with it for you. So do the sensible thing. Just get yourself out.”

Do you own an e-bike or e-scooter? Where do you charge it? Let us know in the comments.