Investigation results of the tragic fire at a battery factory in Hwaseong, South Korea are announced: Shoddy manufacturing by the enterprise

On the morning of August 23 local time, the accident investigation team of the "Hwaseong battery factory fire" in South Korea announced the investigation results. The involved enterprise Aricell is accused of passing safety inspections by deceptive means such as swapping products for testing since it provided battery products to the South Korean military in 2021. The production process is shoddy and management is neglected, ultimately leading to a tragedy.

The South Korean police investigation found that since 2021, in order to pass the safety inspection by the South Korean military, this enterprise has separately manufactured a batch of batteries to swap products for testing and artificially manipulated test data. In April this year, the South Korean military found problems such as forged product descriptions of the involved enterprise during the procurement batch inspection and determined that its products did not meet national defense standards. After that, the enterprise rushed to work, and the defective product rate increased significantly. Eventually, a defective product caught fire and caused an accident.

At around 10:30 am on June 24 this year, a serious fire broke out at this lithium battery manufacturing plant in Hwaseong City, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. According to on-site surveillance, after the battery smoked and caught fire, although employees tried to extinguish the fire with fire extinguishers, the explosive combustion caused thick smoke to billow in the factory building, and the fire spread rapidly and got out of control. Employees missed the best time to escape. In the end, more than 35,000 lithium batteries in the factory building were completely burned down. The main fire was extinguished only after more than five hours. Firefighters found more than 20 charred bodies at the scene. This accident led to the unfortunate deaths of 23 people, including 17 Chinese workers, and another 8 people were injured.

At present, the South Korean police have launched an investigation against the person in charge of the involved enterprise to hold enterprise managers accountable for their negligence. This tragic accident once again sounds an alarm for enterprise safety production and also triggers profound reflections on industry supervision.