Fire Safety Workshop at Cobleskill FD

By Matthew Avitabile

COBLESKILL — The Cobleskill FD and Richmondville FD will be putting on an open house at the Cobleskill Firehouse Saturday 10am-1pm. There will be games and handouts. Richmondville Fire Department Chief Floyd Seales spoke to us about the workshop and fire safety tips. Seales will be hosting the battery workshop for adults including assorted fire prevention equipment, such as fire detectors and extinguishers to give away. There will also be an opportunity for adults and kids to take a closer look at the firetrucks.

Seales will be putting on a powerpoint presentation including five videos about fire safety during the event.

“We’re trying to get it out there about the battery safety,” he said. There often isn’t as much information about battery safety for adults. Many times, adults don’t know where to look about a “growing problem.”

“It’s going to get out of hand eventually.”
One of the largest issues is people charging batteries when they’re not awake, not in the same room, charging e-bikes and scooters inside instead of outside, charging on a flammable surface. He recommends charging on a plate instead of on bedding or the couch.

“There’s so many different things you can do,” he said.

The largest issue is that people overcharge batteries. Often people leave the battery plugged in, which could lead to batteries failing through thermal runaway, potentially resulting in a fire or explosion. There is a thin barrier on the outside of the battery that can be disrupted by overcharging or dropping it. He likens it to issues with positive and negative touching in a car battery while charging. Even a weedeater could have 25 cells within the batteries, and when one goes bad, it could lead to a chain reaction. This can result in a fire of more than 1,000 degrees that emits flammable or toxic gasses.

Seales said that on Youtube, videos about CHARGE battery fires or e-bike fires help to show the extent of potential damage. In one case, an experiment showed how quickly an e-bike battery (intentionally overcharged as if it was damaged) can cause damage. In the living room display, the battery emitted flammable gasses that eventually exploded. In another example, a woman had a battery pack explode while on a bus.

He added that in many cases people don’t realize how many such batteries are in an average house. In a lithium-ion battery, “it’s full charge until it’s dead.” While this often means that the batteries have better performance, they can also be damaged and cause catastrophic damage. Batteries can also be defective from the factory. Some batteries available online can come without a battery management system that is often much cheaper, but much worse. Such a system can shut down the battery until it closes down (like a cell phone left in the phone being overused.) Such less expensive batteries without such a system could catastrophically fail.

Batteries should also have the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) logo on them. Name-brand batteries have been tested by the UL, but overseas batteries that “haven’t been tested by anybody.”

Such fires can spread rapidly, including in electric cars and buses, leading to potential fire risk. Cars should be charged outside the garage and are often designed that way (but not properly publicized). When there are fires such as this, the local fire departments would have difficulty putting them out, he said.

“You can’t even buy an extinguisher to put them out,” he said. Water and traditional methods do not work.

The best thing that the general public can do is to research, he said. There is a lot of information online, and the Saturday event is especially useful.