‘It was just screaming’: Battery fires more than double in three years

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Ten nights before Christmas, a unit just outside the Brisbane CBD burst into flames. Witnesses said there were small explosions, then an inferno.

Alarms and screams rang out over the streets of Spring Hill.

The fire erupted at an apartment in Water Street, Spring Hill.

One person burst through a neighbour’s door and threw themselves in the shower, covered in burns. Another rushed to a payphone on the street to call Triple Zero.

“It was just screaming, screaming, screaming,” one neighbour said.

In the morning, residents of the social housing building milled around looking up at the burnt-out shell on the third floor. Some were barefoot in the concrete car park, which was covered in shards of glass from the explosion.

Journalists were told to cross the street to make way for fire investigators who were bringing a wheelie bin out from the scene. From it, they pulled the charred remains of an e-scooter.

When police officers told residents a 47-year-old man had died, screams of anguish again washed over the streets.

Police take photos of an electric scooter at the scene in Water Street.

The statistics of fires started by e-scooters make for alarming reading. Since 2022, the number of fires sparked by lithium-ion batteries every year has more than doubled.

Figures given exclusively to this masthead show the Queensland Fire Department attended 240 fires started by the batteries in the first 11 months of 2025.

The number has been rising gradually: in all of 2022 there were 108 such fires, in 2023 there were 159, and there were 202 in 2024.

The burnt remains of a fire sparked by an e-scooter battery.

The fires encompass all lithium-ion batteries, not just those from e-scooters and e-bikes, but the fire department said there was a worrying trend of fires started by the mobility devices.

Of the 240 fires from January to the end of November, 106 were residential structure fires, 33 were non-residential structure fires and 100 were categorised as “other fires” by the fire department.

More than half were in Greater Brisbane, but the regions were not without tragedies.

On November 6, a man and three children lost their lives from an e-scooter fire in Emerald, about 800 kilometres north-west of Brisbane.

Neighbours there also reported hearing explosions before the flames engulfed the house, killing Mathew Chilly, five-month old Desmond, a toddler named Maddison and another teenage girl.

That fire, which would have been one of the 27 recorded in Central Queensland in the period, also occurred at a house owned by the government.

In the state’s southern region, which includes the Gold Coast, 71 fires were sparked by batteries. In the north there were 44.

QFD Commissioner Steve Smith said while the batteries were clearly a part of modern life, they must be treated with care and charged correctly.

“A single mistake, like using a damaged battery or leaving a charger plugged in, can have devastating consequences,” Smith said.

Fires started by batteries burn hot and fast, and firefighters often need to use specialist techniques to put them out, Superintendent Mark Halverson said.

“This makes them challenging for firefighters to extinguish,” he said.

In a statement, the department said people should keep their batteries in a cool, dry place, inspect them for swelling or other damage and not charge them overnight at any cost.

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