Hospital Robot Battery Fire

This was close to being a huge tragedy.

The battery on a 500 pound robotic cart, used to take stuff around the hospital went, into thermal runaway during charging. Charging was on the 2nd floor and multiple carts were all charging in the same location. There were 26 battery-powered carts charging. Stache doesn't say, but I'm guessing that there are more than 26 carts, because that seems like a number that a hospital administrator would not sign off on.

The battery was a 4.2 kilowatt-hour battery. The chemistry was Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide battery, or NMC battery. The batteries typically burn aggressively when they go into thermal runaway, and put out a lot of very toxic gasses.

This is the StacheD Training video Hospital Robot Battery Fire: What Happened at Cedars-Sinai

Now, this incident points to something bigger. Most people think about lithium-ion battery hazards in terms of ebikes, electric vehicles, consumer electronics, but these batteries are now embedded in critical infrastructure, hospitals, data centers, warehouses, logistics operations. And in a lot of these environments, the people working around them have no idea what they're actually dealing with.

And here is a key point:

Anyone working in an environment with large format lithium-ion batteries needs basic training. Not fire suppression training, evacuation and recognition training. Know what off-gassing looks like, that whitish gray smoke, unusual smells. Know that your job is not to fight the fire. Know that you should close the doors, call 911, and get people out.

The video is less than six minutes.