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A fire blazes at a lithium battery factory in South Korea’s Hwaseong, a city in Gyeonggi Province, on June 24, 2024. The fire killed 22, mostly foreign, workers. (Yonhap)

Firefighters were powerless in the face of the blaze. 

Faced with a new kind of catastrophe when a fire raged at a lithium battery factory, firefighting authorities had no effective means of response beyond preventing the blaze from spreading further and waiting until it had burned itself out before taking action.

In the meantime, over 20 workers lost their lives in the inferno.

The guidelines developed by firefighting authorities for special types of fires involving metal materials left them powerless to rescue the isolated victims before they perished.

On Monday morning, a major disaster occurred when a fire broke out at the lithium battery producer Aricell’s plant in the township of Seosin in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, resulting in 22 deaths and eight injuries.

Because of lithium’s properties as a material, the fire could not be extinguished through the conventional approach of spraying water or carbon dioxide. After failing in their initial attempt to put out the blaze, firefighting authorities were forced to effectively wait for it to burn itself out after putting a fire line in place to prevent it from spreading.

Firefighters recover bodies from what remains of the lithium battery factory in Hwaseong, South Korea, that caught fire on June 24, 2024. (Yonhap)

The fire started around 10:31 am in an inspection wing for finished batteries in the plant’s northwest section. While the precise cause remains unknown, firefighters explained that they had “heard from workers at the scene that there was explosive combustion in a battery cell.”

In response to the fire, fire service authorities ordered a Level 2 response, sending 145 firefighters and other fire extinguishing personnel to the scene along with 50 fire trucks and other equipment.

“When the first firefighting personnel arrived, they had difficulty extinguishing the fire because of the rapid spread as battery cells inside the plant exploded one after another,” explained Kim Jin-yeong, head of the Hwaseong Fire Station’s disaster prevention division.

The business in question produced and supplied lithium batteries, with over 35,000 of the cylindrical cells stored in a three-story steel-framed building measuring around 2,300 square meters in total floor area. Firefighters sent to the scene brought dry sand and pressurized nitrogen, which are necessary for extinguishing fires involving lithium.

But the fire proved too large, and after arriving at the plant, the firefighters were left unable to extinguish the flames inside for nearly four hours, focusing instead on preventing them from spreading.

The fire ended up burning out around 3:10 pm — four hours and 40 minutes after it had erupted.

While attempting to extinguish the remaining flames after they abated around 3 pm, firefighters found the remains of 21 people who had burned to death on the building’s second floor. A previous victim had been discovered in cardiac arrest shortly after the fire erupted and subsequently pronounced dead at the hospital.

Firefighting authorities suggested that the victims found inside the plant may have been unable to escape in time due to the swift and explosive spread of a fire that had broken out near the exit.

Most of the victims were foreign nationals, including 18 from China and one from Laos. Two were South Korean nationals.

Firefighters conduct a search for missing and dead at a lithium battery factory in Hwaseong, South Korea, that caught fire on June 24, 2024. (Yonhap)

They were found gathered in a room at the southwest corner of the building’s second floor. “There were two emergency stairwells connecting with the outside of the building, but it looks as though they were unable to escape,” a firefighting official said, pointing to the speed with which the flames spread. 

Standard operating procedures established for disasters by the National Fire Agency in 2023 state, “In the case of combustible metals [such as lithium], particles floating in the air present a remaining risk of explosion, and [fires] cannot be extinguished with water, foam, halogen or carbon dioxide extinguishers.”

“Even after extinguishing, a long-term high-temperature state is maintained, which requires caution against the possibility of reignition through means such as contact with liquids,” they continue.

By Lee Jung-ha, Incheon correspondent; Lee Seung-jun, staff reporter

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