NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - 39
EMERGING IS SUE S : E S S AND THE FIRE SERVICE
A 2019 explosion at an energy storage
facility in Arizona injured four firefighters
and exposed numerous safety gaps.
New reports detail what went wrong
and illustrate how much the fire service has
yet to learn about this rapidly
expanding technology.
LATE IN THE EVENING ON April 19, 2019, Bobby
Ruiz, the fire chief in Peoria, Arizona, was at home preparing
for the week ahead when he received the phone
call every chief fears. He jumped in his car and raced to
the Maricopa Medical Center in nearby Phoenix, arriving
just as the medivac helicopters began unloading two
of his firefighters: Hunter Clare, a captain, and Justin
Lopez, a fire engineer.
The situation was bleak. Both men had multiple
broken bones, internal bleeding, organ lacerations,
traumatic brain injuries, and thermal and chemical
burns. " As they're working on them, a doctor looks over
at our chaplain and tells him, 'I want you to get over
there by his head and start praying over him-he needs
it right now,' " said Ruiz, reliving the tense moments
inside the emergency room. " I've been in the fire service
40-plus years, and I have never, ever heard a doctor tell
the chaplain to go over there and start praying over
him. It's a miracle they both survived. "
Hours earlier, Clare and Lopez, as members of the
Peoria Fire-Medical Department's HAZMAT team, had
been called to the McMicken Energy Storage facility,
located in a remote corner of Surprise, Arizona, a neighboring
suburb 20 minutes outside of Phoenix. No one
on the team had heard of McMicken, and when they
arrived it was unclear what they were looking at. Surrounded
by a chain-link fence at the edge of the desert,
a metal box the size and shape of a large shipping container
was leaking milky white smoke. The structure,
they soon discovered, housed a 2-megawatt energy storage
system (ESS) owned by local utility Arizona Public
Service; hundreds of the system's lithium-ion battery
cells had experienced a catastrophic failure and were
in a dangerous state known as thermal runaway.
by
je sse
r oman
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - Fall 2021
Contents
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - Cover1
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - Cover2
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - 1
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - 2
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - 3
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - Contents
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - 5
NFPA Journal - Fall 2021 - 6
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