Australian ports aren't ready for a major battery fire. What it means for the rest of us

Australia's national ports body has issued a blunt warning: the country is not yet equipped to respond to a major lithium-ion battery fire, whether at sea, alongside a berth, or in a port precinct. It's a confronting message, and it carries a lesson for every business and household well beyond the waterfront.

The warning comes from Ports Australia and its Port Operations Committee, chaired by Fremantle Ports Harbour Master Captain Savio Fernandes (Ports Australia, 2026). Their assessment, drawn from work with fire authorities, scientists and insurers, is that prevention has advanced but response frameworks have not. A string of overseas car-carrier fires, including vessels that were lost or sank once electric-vehicle batteries became involved, has pushed the issue into the open (Ports Australia, 2026).

Why these fires are so hard to fight

The core problem is that once a lithium-ion battery enters thermal runaway, there is no reliable way to put it out by conventional means. Ports Australia notes that EV battery fires can burn well above 1000 degrees C, that saltwater and freshwater systems alike struggle to control them, and that the only real option is often to isolate the area and let the fire burn out (Ports Australia, 2026). On top of the heat, these fires release highly toxic gas: research has measured large quantities of hydrogen fluoride venting during battery fires, a hazard to responders and the surrounding community (Larsson et al., 2017).

That combination, extreme heat, toxic gas, near-impossible suppression and a real risk of reignition, is what makes a battery fire on a vehicle carrier a genuinely catastrophic scenario, even though the probability of any single incident is low. Ports Australia frames it exactly that way: low probability, high consequence (Ports Australia, 2026). One practical gap they highlight is that lithium batteries currently arrive as miscellaneous dangerous goods (IMDG Class 9), rather than having a dedicated category, which makes the risk harder to see and plan for.

The same risk runs all the way down the chain

It would be easy to file this under "someone else's problem", a matter for shipping lines and harbour masters. But the port is simply the top of a pyramid. The same battery, and the same thermal-runaway physics, moves off the ship and into a supply chain that runs through energy-storage projects, warehouses, transport depots, fleet yards, workshops and, eventually, homes. The scale changes; the failure mode does not.

Fire and Rescue NSW is already recording a steady year-on-year rise in lithium-ion fires across the community (Fire and Rescue NSW [FRNSW], 2024). If the specialists at the top of the chain are still building their response plans, the businesses and households at the base of it should not assume they are covered.

What it means for your site

For larger operations, this is quickly becoming a compliance question, not just a safety one. In NSW, workplaces that use, handle or store 25,000 kg or more of lithium batteries must now prepare an emergency plan addressing battery fire risk and lodge it with Fire and Rescue NSW (Fire and Rescue NSW [FRNSW], n.d.). That threshold targets large-scale storage and some transport depots, but the underlying work health and safety duty to identify and control the risk applies to every workplace, whatever the volume. "We had an extinguisher on the wall" is not a sufficient answer after an incident.

What actually works at your scale

You cannot out-equip a burning car carrier, and no honest supplier will tell you otherwise. But at the warehouse, fleet, workshop and home end of the pyramid, the measures that work are well understood and achievable today.

• Prevent. Safe charging and storage practices remove most incidents before they start: compliant chargers, non-combustible surfaces, no unattended overnight charging, and isolating damaged or recalled batteries.
• Detect early. Train people to recognise the warning signs, swelling, heat, odd smells, hissing or smoke, so a failing battery is caught while it is still a problem you can manage.
• Contain. Fire-resistant containment for at-risk batteries limits how far an early failure can spread.
• Respond. Purpose-built lithium-ion extinguishers and fire blankets let you tackle and contain a small fire in its early stages, buying time to evacuate.
• Plan. Have an emergency plan that names who does what, and makes clear that once a fire is established the priority is to get clear and call 000.

The ports warning is really a warning for everyone: lithium-ion fire risk is scaling faster than our systems for handling it. The organisations that come out of this well will be the ones that started early, at whatever size they operate.