Incidents involving lithium-ion batteries, vapour clouds, and recycling centres

Received 19 April 2023

Request

1. How many firefighters have died as a result of lithium-ion battery fires between April 2022 - April 2023?

2. How many times have your firefighters come into contact with a vapour cloud?

3. How many fires specifically in recycling centres or scrapyards they you encountered between April 2022 - April 2023 (excluding other waste fires)?

Response

1. None at an incident in Stafffordshire Fire Rescue Service.
2. None that have been reported via the safety event system in the last 12 years
3. 19 incidents.

Please note that the property types of recycling centres and scrapyards are not well defined which leaves them open to interpretation by the Officer In Charge.

These were identified through a number of methods:

• Searching the Incident Details, Incident Narrative and Incident Tags for the strings “recycl” or “scrap” and manually filtering out irrelevant incidents

• Searching for the Property Types of Outdoor Storage, Recycling Collection Point, Landfill Site or Other Outdoor Location and manually filtering out irrelevant incidents

• Searching for the string “recyc” in the address associated to the incident and manually filtering out irrelevant incidents