Battery storage fire at Dorman facility in Chandler, Arizona, managed with robotic entry
Apr 2022Published 1 May 2026Responsible editor: Chief Editor
- Where
- Dorman battery storage facility, Chandler, Arizona, United States
- Operator
- AES
- What
- Fire in stand-alone grid-connected lithium-ion battery storage facility
- Injuries
- None reported
- Cause
- Under investigation
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What happened
In April 2022, a fire was reported in the morning at the Dorman battery storage facility, a stand-alone, grid-connected lithium-ion battery energy storage facility of a few tens of MWh in Chandler, Arizona, United States, operated by AES. The internal sprinkler system activated automatically and continued to apply water for several days to hold battery temperatures down. Drawing on the response to a 2019 explosion at another battery storage site in the same region, in which firefighters were injured, the responding fire service adopted a defensive strategy and did not attempt direct manual entry.
Three days into the incident, crews used a robot to make the first entry and assess hazardous gas conditions inside the building. Ten days after the fire started, voluntary evacuations of nearby businesses were put in place while the building was ventilated. On the eleventh day, after a period with no further smoke detected, crews shut off the sprinklers, opened the doors and used forced air to dry the building.
The fire was declared out about two weeks after it began, and site management was handed back to AES on the same day. There were no injuries.
Contributing factors
Public statements from AES at the time described the event as thermal runaway, while noting that the precise origin of the fault, whether it began within the battery system or came from an external source, would be established through a formal investigation. Public reporting at the time indicated that the investigation was expected to continue for some months. Reporting also indicated that the sprinkler system kept the event contained but did not extinguish the underlying thermal activity. No confirmed root cause is reflected in the sources used for this entry.
Lessons learned
- A lithium-ion BESS fire may require robotic entry to assess gases before any person goes inside, so operators should arrange remote entry tools with the fire service in advance.
- Sprinkler systems in battery storage buildings are designed for containment over many days, so plans must cover prolonged water supply, drainage and run-off control.
- A prior explosion at a nearby battery site led to a defensive response here, so local fire services should embed earlier incident findings in pre-plans for similar facilities.
More lessons on fire suppression and firefighting, from every incident on the register.
Not yet known
- Precise origin of the fault
- Root cause of thermal runaway
- Duration of site downtime
- Cost of the incident
This entry is updated when these are reported. Get an alert for the next one like it.
Published 2026-05-01. Written from public reporting. Descriptive, not investigative. See the data accuracy disclaimer.
