A FAMILY HAVE said they feel “lucky” to have escaped a terrifying fire in their home which they say was caused by an unplugged e-scooter battery pack exploding on their kitchen table. 

Mandy Abram (44) and her partner Darren (46), based in the Glens of Antrim, managed to escape their house with her 18-year-old daughter Caitlin seconds before the force of the fire blew their windows out. 

“To stand in the street and watch your home burn is absolutely heartbreaking,” Mandy told The Journal. 

On the morning of 26 August, she had left the house to go to work when she heard a sound like a “car backfiring”.

She wasn’t sure where the sound had come from, but “something told her” to go back and check on her home, where her partner and her daughter were still asleep upstairs.

Her son Alfie (22) was not at home at the time of the blaze, but all of his possessions were also lost in the fire.

When Mandy got to their kitchen, she saw that the battery pack of an electric scooter on top of the table, which was “not switched on or charging”, had “exploded”.

Initially, Mandy attempted to put the blaze out with a fire extinguisher, but she said that the blaze “kept relighting” and spitting “what I can only describe as almost hot lava around the kitchen”.

Their kitchen was totally destroyed.

She went to the foot of her stairs and considered whether, if she ran up to get her family, none of them might make it out.

“I screamed as loud as I could and by then fire alarms went off too,” she said. 

Her family escaped the property, with Mandy fleeing out the back door and her partner helping her daughter to escape out the front, after initially attempting to fight the blaze. 

“Seconds after we had got out, the windows blew,” Mandy said.

“Standing in the street watching your house burn is heartbreaking,” she added.

The family lost all of their possessions in the blaze, but more than £8,000 (€9,000) has been raised to support them through a Gofundme, mostly by people from the village and the surrounding area.

Mandy now wants to warn other families with e-scooters: “Please do not keep them in your home.”

“This was a battery pack that charges one of these scooters. It was not connected or switched on,” she said.

I never want another family to go through what we are. Our entire home is in ruins.

Mandy had purchased the battery pack alongside the e-scooter from a shop in Northern Ireland.  

It’s powered by a high-voltage lithium-ion 60V, 20Ah battery pack, which stores about 1.2 kWh of electrical energy.

E-scooter battery fires can usually be traced to physical damage, water intrusion, or low-quality battery components in lithium-ion batteries.

Internally, that energy is stored in multiple lithium-ion cells connected together which can continue holding significant stored energy even when the scooter is unplugged.

Thermal runaway can occur wherein a battery cell overheats or gets punctured; it can hit a critical temperature where it releases oxygen and flammable gases. Because the battery is releasing oxygen, you can’t smother the fire by usual means.

Fires caused by batteries are becoming an increasing problem in the United Kingdom, where the BBC recently reported that 18 people have died and nearly 700 have been injured in fires caused by e-bike and e-scooter batteries. 

The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service recommends that people only buy e-scooter batteries from reputable outlets, and that even when this is the case, they should avoid storing them along escape routes.

A PSNI spokesperson said that the police received a report of a house fire before 7.45am on the morning of 26 August in the Croft Close area of Carnlough village.