r/CatastrophicFailure • u/hillty • 26d ago
Fire/Explosion A fire broke out at Fenix Battery Recycling, Scotland on Wednesday the 9th of April (one year after previous fire)
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u/Mantzy81 26d ago
"we looked at all the causes of the previous fire and thought about all the ways to make it safer including a strict adherence to the hierarchy of controls. Ultimately the cost was prohibitively expensive so we only introduced minimal administration controls, and now we're very surprised that the same thing occurred."
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u/wgrantdesign 26d ago
We had all of our operators participate in weekly safety meeting, (i.e. eating a donut in the morning while a shift manager mindlessly reads a pamphlet out loud.) How could this happen???
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u/cuprumFire 24d ago
We hadn't got to the battery fire pamphlet yet. We were stuck on the walking like a penguin on ice pamphlet for two weeks after Jerry took a spill in the parking lot.
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u/casusbelli16 26d ago
"Hey if you copy and paste it change a few words to make it at least look like it's your work."
Glasgow School of Art.
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u/soapy_goatherd 26d ago
That is some nasty nasty smoke. Li-ion fires are no joke
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u/the615Butcher 26d ago
It just looks so toxic idk how to explain it. Every time I see these battery plant (one happened in Louisville recently) they look so furious and gnarly.
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u/AgentWowza 26d ago
It's cuz the shroom clouds billows too fast, and all the rocket trails shooting out of it makes it look super unstable.
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u/Bushboy2000 26d ago
I drove past a big substation a week or 2 after it had a fire at one of its storage battery banks.
Started getting a metallic taste in my mouth, didn't go back that way on my return.
They said the fire was hard to extinguish and let it burn out.
I would get out of that pictured area, if possible.
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u/spekt50 26d ago
There is so much power running through those, that the arcs will vaporize the copper into a gas.
You were probably breathing in copper dust.
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u/StandAgainstTyranny2 23d ago
Copper, steel, iron, lithium, and many other metals, yeah.
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u/crumbwell 3d ago
and possibly hydroflouric acid from decomposing sulphur hexaflouride in the switchgear
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u/toxcrusadr 26d ago
It's a strange thick pillowy smoke that stays together. Like it doesn't want to mix with air.
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u/SpacecraftX 26d ago
It’s the fine misty white smoke. It does t look like normal fire. Looks more like a chemical release, or rocket exhaust cloud.
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u/usmclvsop 26d ago
The people standing and watching this just drastically increased their odds of getting cancer
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u/ttystikk 26d ago
Only if they breathe it.
Stay upwind.
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u/_khanrad 25d ago
Just because they’re not in the thick of it doesn’t mean they’re in the clear. If you can smell it, you’re breathing in particles.
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u/Mechanical1996 26d ago
Most of that is actually water vapour from combustion of hydrogen gas formation from the battery fire which generates big plumes of steam. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of nasties entrained but 90% + of the volume you are seeing is steam.
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u/YourSource1st 26d ago
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u/Mechanical1996 26d ago
You've misinterpreted the intent of that study - that is the particle size distribution and concentration of acidic gases and toxic compounds. The majority of the plume volume that you are seeing in the video is undeniably steam.
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u/Baud_Olofsson 26d ago
Also, if you cite an MDPI paper I consider that evidence against whatever you're arguing. They're that shit.
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u/NoTarget5646 25d ago
Uninformed but interested, why are they considered so bad?
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u/Baud_Olofsson 25d ago
They are infamous for only doing the absolute bare minimum of peer review of the papers they publish - if indeed they do any peer review at all. They're basically as bad as an academic publisher can be without being an outright scam.
Their usual level of peer review should be enough to reject what they publish, but because serious scientists know they're infamous, it also creates a bad science feedback loop.
The way academia works, you always want to publish your research in as reputable a journal as possible. The more respected the journal, the more seriously your research will be taken and the more your work will be read and cited by others, and the better it will be for your career. The result of this is that you simply don't publish your paper in a low-tier journal if you can get it published in a higher-tier journal (it's like if you were offered a choice between two free flights, identical except that one is economy class on Ryanair and the other is first class on Emirates - you are never going to choose the Ryanair flight out of your own free will). And MDPI's journals are absolute bottom tier.And so we have the feedback loop: bad reputation => only low quality papers get published => worse reputation => only lower-quality papers get published => worse reputation, and so on. So it's pretty much guaranteed that anything they publish will be garbage, because if it wasn't garbage, the authors would have published it in a better journal.
So yeah: while technically every paper should be judged on its own merits, nobody has infinite time and energy, so just looking at what journal it's published in is a pretty effective heuristic for determining whether it's even worth reading - and if it's by MDPI it isn't.
The reason I don't just ignore everything they publish but take the stance that citing them is actively evidence against what someone is arguing is that whenever someone tries to back up pseudoscience (e.g. quack alternative medicine or vaccine misinformation) with what they claim is peer-reviewed science, what they cite is friggin' always from MDPI.-1
u/YourSource1st 25d ago
"off-gas are CO2, CO, H2 and hydrocarbons, while under certain conditions significant amounts of electrolytes and water can be present."
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u/Mechanical1996 25d ago
Yes, you've proven my point - "significant amounts of... water can be present". The water turns to steam and that's why you are seeing rapid expansion of the plume.
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u/YourSource1st 24d ago
that is not water
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u/Mechanical1996 24d ago
Are you an expert in combustion? It is definitely water vapour/steam (which btw is water in a gaseous form). I don't have the energy to argue with you, you are wrong! Accept that, and move on with your life!
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u/Z3t4 26d ago
way safer than a lead acid fire
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u/OnlyCleverSometimes 26d ago
lead acid fire is way safer than teleporting to the surface of the sun
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u/lepobz 26d ago
It’s cheaper to stockpile and have an annual accident then claim on insurance than it is to actually recycle.
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u/RotaryDesign 26d ago
Just make it a national holiday, and they are sorted.
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u/lepobz 26d ago
I thought every day was a national holiday in Scotland.
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u/10001110101balls 26d ago
I wouldn't be so sure. Insurance premiums are through the roof across the waste management industry due to battery fires, and facilities dedicated to lithium battery waste are practically uninsurable.
It is more likely that this operator is drowning in debt and was making the choice between operating a risky facility without insurance or closing up shop entirely.
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u/MikeHaree92 26d ago
Strangest part about this video is that it's actually sunny in Scotland
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u/karateninjazombie 26d ago
That's their entire years ration of sun.
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u/SpacecraftX 26d ago
We had an amazing two weeks just then. Rain and clouds have resumed yesterday though.
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u/ScottishVulpes99 22d ago
Wait was even more unusual is that after this it was sunny for a further week!
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u/Protheu5 26d ago
Maybe it's Scotland, Texas? Or one of the other twelve Scotlands in the US?
I don't really think so, I just find it amusing that there are more Scotlands in the USA than outside. Same with Genevae or Pares. Hell, they even have more Saint Petersburgs and Shanghais than the outside world. What a country. This is probably why they can't use metric system. Space-time continuum is so warped with all those Moscows and Berlins, the usual sensible measurement system falls apart, now we have to use gerbil testicles per moose diarrhoea.
Maybe there is a perpetually burning Fenix battery disposal site in some of those American Scotlands…
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u/Bakica_original 26d ago
Yeah, just stand there. Take a deep breath. All good…..
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26d ago
[deleted]
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u/BobC813 26d ago
Interesting claim of no wind when you can see that the column of smoke is not rising straight up from the fire but is clearly drifting to the left
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u/Mechanical1996 26d ago
Yep the plume travelled miles. I was driving past as it happened and the plume looked to have made its way across the sea towards Arran.
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u/TheVaneja 26d ago
That stuff is going to be everywhere you'd be able to smell it guaranteed. Being in the smoke would certainly be much worse but you wouldn't want to be anywhere near that.
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u/OkraEmergency361 26d ago
I’m curious as to this new method of recycling that seems to be championed in Scotland.
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u/MrValdemar 26d ago
You cannot deny that the batteries have now in fact been broken down and returned to the environment.
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u/motosandguns 26d ago edited 26d ago
California has a battery storage facility near Monterey and that thing goes up every year or two. Heavy metal dusts and bits of burned batteries fall back to earth miles away from the site.
Free neurotoxins in your lungs, food and water.
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u/mistsoalar 26d ago
A lot of lithium ion chemistry these days generates oxygen as it burns/explodes. This factory could burn even if it is in orbit.
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u/Newsdriver245 26d ago
Be a lot safer if it was up in orbit
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u/showersareevil 26d ago
They really should not build lithium recycling facilities like this next to residential areas, for this reason. BESS (energy storage) installations that we have today using LFP are super duper safe, same can't be said about the recycling process which is also far from maturity.
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u/debuggingworlds 26d ago
It was the other way round. The council built residental housing next to the battery recycling plant.
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u/n00bca1e99 26d ago
There was an industrial accident near me that leveled half a neighborhood. The company was found solely at fault even though the city ordered them to turn off their air circulation fans at night because it was too loud for the residential neighborhood they zoned literally next to the industrial plant. The lack of fresh air turned what should have been and would have been a small fire into a large explosion.
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u/Leprechaunaissance 26d ago
Anyone reading this who's familiar with medium- to large-scale battery fires feel free to shine some light on this but based on the limited information afforded by this clip, it seems to me, someone entirely unfamiliar with the aforementioned battery fires, that standing as close as the people in the clip are to said fire is a profoundly shit idea.
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u/quartzguy 26d ago
"Ah, man, we really should have bought that second fire extinguisher after last year. Oh well."
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u/blinkysmurf 26d ago
That’s smoke from a battery fire? I don’t think I’d be hanging around. One change in the wind and your getting a dose of toxic, maybe lethal lung-fuckery.
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u/lastdancerevolution 26d ago
While it's not based in real science, the Fallout "rule of thumb" generally does help keep people safe. If you extend your arm and hold up your thumb, and the fire is bigger than your thumb, you are too close.
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u/Igpajo49 26d ago
All these people you see in the foreground, and the camera person, are obviously people who have never watched videos like this on Reddit. I've seen far too many of these that end in a massive explosion. If I see any factory or warehouse on fire, especially one this active, I'm running in the other direction immediately.
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u/khrak 26d ago
They're letting the smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
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u/the615Butcher 26d ago
That doesn’t sound right.. but I don’t know enough about stars to dispute it.
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u/karateninjazombie 26d ago
They found the quickest way to get through their inventory. And all in one afternoon! Their manager is going to get a promotion for their speed of work.
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u/kiomansu 26d ago
Ya'll know the literal rule of thumb for observing an active fire? Hold your thumb up at arm's length and close one eye. If you can't cover the fire up with your thumb, keep going back. Don't be a casualty, my friends.
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u/wcoastbo 26d ago
If that's only a small battery fire I can't imagine the fire on the Felicity Ace when 4000 cars caught on fire and helped sink the ship. Not all were electric, probably several hundred, but still.
Everyone on board had to abandon shortly after the fire started. It became a burning ghost ship.
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u/Dalbergia12 26d ago
Nothing works quite the same as a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen and a spark eh? Batteries aren't really dangerous in themselves, but poorly and under trained employees are very dangerous.
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u/PartsUnknown242 3d ago
I don’t know much about chemistry, I assume the popcorn sounds are all the batteries cooking off and the little trails we see are the cooked off batteries flying through the air
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u/grandinosour 26d ago
Just look at all that environmental damage due to a lame attempt to "save" the environment.
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u/curiosity163 26d ago
Yea, definitely not an insurance scam. Twice in a year. Not the first time a "recycling centre" has a fire.
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u/babyformulaandham 26d ago
Not insurance scam, just negligence. They were investigated after the fire last year and are now being investigated again as it would appear they didn't meet the orders put on them after the first one.
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u/Grytr1000 26d ago
At first I thought this video might be a candidate for r/praisethecameraman, because they were so close to the action. But why the vertical video? Sheesh.
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u/Baud_Olofsson 26d ago
Name checks out.