They power everything from phones to laptops, toothbrushes to cars, e-scooters and bikes. Lithium-ion batteries are all around us. But their convenience comes at a cost, reports Sunday's Conor Whitten.
"The one I had blew up and almost killed me," Adam Clayton said.
It's been two and a half months since an e-scooter caught fire in his Wellington apartment but it'll be years before he’s recovered.
"It’s a full-time job," said Clayton. "For the next 20 months to two years."
"It just exploded. Like a bomb. I got thrown backwards, upside down. It smashed the whole ranch slider.
"Just thinking 'this is it', you know? If I don’t get up within one second I’m gonna die.
"But little did I know that when the scooter blew up, it actually ended up right across the doorway. And I was just walking straight into a 2000 degree ball of flame, which just stripped all the skin off my legs and my hand."
Household battery fires have almost doubled in the space of less than a year. (Source: Sunday)
He suffered burns to 25 per cent of his body – with third-degree burns on his hand and legs.
Once a week, Clayton shuffles his way in for treatment at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital – one painful step at a time.
"I'd like to be in here three times a week really," Clayton said. "It’s pretty bloody hard to deal with so the more I'm around people that are specialists, the better I feel."
'Nothing was salvageable'
Clayton is one of a growing number of Kiwis whose lives have been irrevocably changed by a fire in an everyday device.
Auckland mother Morgan Cramp is also among them.
"I lie awake at night thinking about it," Cramp said. "I think my brain has a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I didn't start this fire and how do I stop it again when I had no control of it in the first place?"
In July last year, a cordless drill battery spontaneously ignited underneath her house in Meadowbank.
"I called the fire brigade twice – once was as soon as I saw the fire and the second was at the top of the street, six minutes later," said Cramp. "It took six minutes from the small fire into flames shooting out the roof.
"We lost the entire house," she said.
"Nothing was salvageable."
Cramp and her partner, Ryan, have two young children, Boston and Echo. Sometimes they still ask when they're going home. The kids are too young to understand.
"That’s my main concern is their wellbeing through all of this," Cramp said. "I would say that days are hard sometimes, there’s a lot of memories that will just come back unannounced."
On a clear spring morning, she and her family took TVNZ's Sunday back for a rare visit to the scene of the fire.
"Before the house was demolished I did not want to go back. It made me feel physically sick looking at it," she said.
They’re building a new home where the old one stood – but some things aren’t so easy to repair.
"I'm hoping that once the house is done I will be able to move into it. That’s a concern for me at this point.
"Having been there when it happened and tried to put it out, I don’t know if there’s too much trauma."
Numbers doubled
At least 43 people have been killed worldwide in lithium-ion battery fires this year, according to Australian company EV Fire Safe.
Already 65 battery blazes have been recorded this year in New Zealand – nearly double the number from 2022.
New Zealand is yet to have a fatality, but Fire and Emergency New Zealand investigator Pete Gallagher is seeing the danger more and more.
“As a nation, we need to start considering what impact the energy source the lithium-ion battery is having on our lives. And that's an impact to firefighters, it's an impact on our safety and wellbeing in our homes.
"But we have to sort of counterbalance that with – this is a modern world we're living in and lithium batteries are a part of that modern world."
While liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) flames are 1200 degrees, battery fires burn "something in the vicinity of 2000 to 3000 degrees Celsius" and last longer, Gallagher said, testing firefighters' resources.
"We will be tied up longer at incidents, which means that we're not available for the next call that comes in because we're still dealing with the previous one," he said.
Overheated, overcharged or damaged batteries are at greatest risk of ignition. Firefighters also warn against charging devices near flammable objects like curtains, couches and beds.
But Gallagher warns even with precautions, they can still catch fire anywhere, anytime.
"Yes, there is always that risk," he said.
Cramp and her family know the risk too well.
"These batteries can explode at any point and I wouldn't charge them unless you can monitor them," she said.
"I'm thankful that people do seem to be talking about it more, but it’s just – it’s not enough."
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