South Korea plant fire kills 22 people after lithium battery combustion

At least twenty-two people died after lithium battery combustion ignited a massive fire in a South Korean factory, local officials said, according to NBC News.

Reuters said 18 of the casualties were believed to be Chinese nationals.

Another seven people were injured, with two suffering second-degree burns, according to NBC News. Authorities are still searching for one missing person.

CNBC could not independently confirm these figures.

The blaze erupted at the Aricell battery factory in Hwaseong, a city south of Seoul, around 10:31 a.m. local time, officials said. The fire was largely under control by 3:10 p.m. local time and has now been put out.

The plant housed an estimated 35,000 batteries, NBC said. The factory was a reinforced concrete three-story building that sprawled over roughly 2,300 square meters and housed an estimated 35,000 batteries, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.

"The fire started from the workstation located on the second floor of the factory building, where batteries exploded to start the fire," Kim Jin-Young, an official from the Hwasong Fire Department, said in a briefing.

A total of 102 people were working at the factory before the fire took place, the Associated Press cited a local official as saying.

Roughly 145 personnel and 50 pieces of equipment were deployed in response to the fire, South Korea's National Fire Agency said in a Google-translated social media update.

According to its LinkedIn page, the Aricell company was established in 2020 and makes lithium batteries for radio communication, metering, sensors, and gas and oil drilling, among other uses.

South Korea's Minister of the Interior and Safety Lee Sang-min has called a meeting of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters and called on response agencies to focus on preventing additional casualties and the spread of the damage, according to a Google-translated social media update from the South Korean Ministry of Public Administration and Security.

President Yoon Suk-yeol has been briefed on the incident, his office said in a Google-translated statement.