Several fires in Lithuania, two of them in one week, may have been caused by exploding electric scooters. Experts say batteries can combust if they are charged in the wrong way.
“First, smoke started to come through the vent, quite a dark smoke, I turned off the vent, then the vent in the corridor started giving off smoke,” a resident of the building in Vilnius recalls.
“People from another building started shouting: you’re on fire,” says another resident who lives on the fifth floor. “I tried to run outside, and by then the smoke was coming into my corridor.”
In the apartment where the fire started – caused, it is believed, by a charging electric scooter – three people were inside. A woman, who suffered the most serious injuries, required medical attention.
In all, seven people had to be escorted out of the building with breathing equipment.
“About 20 apartments seem to have been affected, with smoke damage to the fourth and fifth floor,” according to Artūras Savolskis, spokesman for the Vilnius Fire Rescue Management.
Although firefighters say they are still investigating the cause of the fire, they do not rule out it having been started by an electric scooter that exploded.
Residents say they saw several scooters being taken out of the affected apartment immediately after the fire.
This was the second fire in the same week the suspected cause of which was exploding electric scooters.
On Monday, a fire broke out in an apartment block in Kaunas. Two people, tenants of the flat, suffered mild smoke poisoning. They had to be rescued from a fourth-floor balcony.
A more serious explosion was reported in Palanga in July, where it rendered part of the building unusable.
Egidijus Griškonis, a researcher at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) tells LRT.lt that electric scooters can have three types of batteries: lead-acid, nickel-metal hydride, or lithium-ion. The latter are the most popular.
They can catch fire because they contain flammable substances, he says. One of the main causes is improper handling and the use of off-specification current to charge them.
“When the current is too high for them, [the batteries] heat up, triggering unwanted chemical reactions, emitting gases. The batteries expand, pressure builds up, and they blow up. And then, because they contain flammable substances, they can catch fire,” says Griškonis.
Rokas Dobužinskas, a researcher at Vilnius University’s Faculty of Physics, says that another common cause of scooters catching fire is factory defects.
“This is mainly due to the fact that there is a high risk of certain defects in the construction, which leads to damage to the battery, which heats up when charging and can cause a short circuit,” the expert says.
The design of the scooter can also make the battery vulnerable to external damage, he adds.
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