Our firefighters take care of us. Courage to confront ultimate hazards is unique to first responders. We reciprocate by trying to assure adequate funding for safety equipment and the means to avert conflagration.

When Robert Duval, director of the National Fire Protection Association, NE Region, spoke to fire department representatives on March 13 in Greenfield at the John Olver Transportation Center about battery storage fires, he referred to challenges at battery facilities. He said that highway closures and access roads were a main concern and to make sure your apparatus can get to fires and is maintained either by the town or the utility. Puts some pressure on a town!

There have been years of experience dealing with environmental challenges of lithium-ion batteries, and yet state government continues to push them aggressively, particularly in rural areas on forested land. The Recorder article covering the meeting was a reminder that you can’t easily extinguish lithium-ion battery fires at a battery storage system. They are not doused by water hoses. It is beyond a rural region’s response apparatus to confront a typical blaze with lithium-ion battery components.

Our firefighters are not outfitted for unmanageable contaminated plumes, some battery fires taking days to diminish and with unplanned toxic emissions and residue. Our competent and often volunteer-trained firefighters approaching domestic or industrial fires are not trained and equipped to approach poisonous fires at large battery facilities let alone smaller electric car battery eruptions.

Duval mentioned Erving as a town approached presently for construction of a nine-acre battery facility.

Can your town be adequately prepared? Our firefighters are in our equation.

Nina Keller

Wendell