The Palo Alto Fire Department is encouraging proper disposal of lithium batteries following a trash fire Friday morning on Primrose Way.
According to garbage truck driver Edwin Herrera, the fire started in the back of a garbage truck collecting trash on a nearby side street. Herrara said he dumped the trash, generating a plume of smoke, before authorities arrived to put out the fire.
Though the department has yet to determine the cause of this fire officially, Fire Captain Jesse Wooten said situations like this are usually the result of improper waste disposal.
“The most common cause is batteries that are thrown away in the trash,” Wooten said. “The lithium batteries catch on fire.”
The City of Palo Alto website explains how to dispose of batteries properly.
“Household batteries (e.g., AA, AAA, D, nickel cadmium) will be collected curbside ONLY during your Clean Up Day,” the City of Palo Alto website states. “Lithium and lithium-ion batteries are NOT accepted [in curbside bins].”
Lithium batteries should instead be disposed of at the Household Hazardous Waste Station at 2501 Embarcadero Way.
According to Wooten, this was not the first fire of its kind.
“It [fires in garbage trucks] is pretty common,” Wooten said. “Every now and then, a garbage truck collecting garbage gets an item in it that starts a fire. So when that happens, they dump it out and then we come put it out.”
Wooten says cleaning up a situation like this can be time-consuming: They must stop the fire, which takes anywhere from a few minutes to several hours, before the wet pile of trash can be disposed of by a local government agency.
“The Public Works Department has to ultimately clean it [the trash pile] up,” Wooten said.
Herrera says the fire served as a reminder of the danger of carelessly throwing batteries in the trash.
“That [people throwing lithium batteries in the trash] is the problem,” Herrera said, gesturing to the burnt remains of a computer in the pile, pictured above. “You can see … there’s a lot of lithium batteries [in the pile] here, even a laptop.”
