A fire ignited inside a San Diego Gas & Electric battery storage facility in Escondido Thursday afternoon, igniting lithium-ion batteries inside a storage container and prompting the evacuation of about 500 businesses, a fire official said.
After consulting with SDG&E’s fire coordinator and the company’s contracted fire agency, as well as San Diego city and county hazardous materials officials, the decision was made to let the batteries burn themselves out. Crews were putting water on neighboring storage containers to keep them cooled down and try to prevent the fire from spreading, Batson said.
Batson said an evacuation order was sent to businesses near the battery storage facility — an area bound by Auto Park Way, Enterprise Street, West Mission Road and Alpine Way. Batson said no homes were affected. “It flares up to some pretty decent amount of flames and then as it goes from one battery rack to another, inside that storage unit, it will ignite again and go for a while,” he said. “The fire is kind of running its course inside that individual unit.”“Right now the amount of smoke being put off by what’s on fire seems pretty small and is dissipating really fast,” he said. “But we did evacuate a pretty large area in the commercial area of Escondido as a precaution.