FREE Live Webinar
When It All Goes Wrong: Incident Command Lessons from the Field
The decisions made in the first 10 minutes of a hazmat incident determine everything that follows. A former PHMSA director and a career firefighter who leads lithium battery incident response join us live to show what real command teams got right, what went wrong, and why.
EVENT DETAILS
Tuesday, November 10, 2026
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM CT
LinkedIn Live – Free
Watch the Full Recording
Session Overview
When a Dangerous Goods emergency breaks, the plan on the shelf meets reality in minutes. Who takes command, what information reaches them, and where resources go first are decided under pressure, often with incomplete facts. Those early calls shape outcomes for days, sometimes years.
In this session, Ryan Paquet of HazMat Safety Consulting and Dalan Zartman of the Energy Security Agency walk through post-incident analysis of real Dangerous Goods emergencies. They break down the communication failures, resource deployment decisions and Incident Command System (ICS) choices that changed outcomes, including the growing class of lithium battery incidents that behave unlike any conventional fire. Every attendee leaves with a practical pre-incident readiness checklist.
24+ hours
How long the Vincent Thomas Bridge stayed closed after a truck carrying lithium-ion batteries overturned near the Port of Los Angeles in September 2024 and an explosion blew the container open. Commanders chose not to flood it with water, to keep toxic runoff out of the harbor.
500+
Homes ordered to evacuate when a battery energy storage container caught fire at a water treatment plant in La Verne, California, in September 2026. Orders stayed in place for three days while crews cooled a second unit that began overheating.
1,200
Residents ordered to evacuate when the Vistra battery storage facility in Moss Landing, California, caught fire in January 2025.
SPEAKER 1: Former PHMSA Director, Approvals and Permits Division
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SPEAKER 2: Career firefighter and lithium battery incident responder
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linkedin live event
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No Cost to Attend
The Response Reality in 2026
Most incidents aren’t lost to the hazard. They’re lost to the information gap.
Incident after incident points to the same problem. The people making the call didn’t have the facts they needed, or the facts existed and never reached them. Near the Port of Los Angeles, the first crews found an overturned trailer giving off smoke, with only reports of batteries inside, before an explosion blew the container open (LAFD). In La Verne, hours into a battery storage fire that put hundreds of homes under evacuation orders, the fire department said it was still assessing the danger to nearby neighborhoods (Firehouse).
Lithium batteries raise the stakes. Battery storage fires can be very difficult to extinguish and can reignite after suppression (Mass.gov, citing U.S. EPA). Many command teams are still writing their playbooks for them.
The incidents that teach the most are the ones nobody fully explains
Operators, shippers and responders rarely see the full after-action picture of someone else’s incident. Root causes go unpublished and lessons stay inside one organization. This session brings those lessons into the open.
26 of 81
Battery energy storage failure incidents with enough public information to assign a root cause. The other 55 offered responders and operators little to learn from.
72%
Share of battery energy storage failures that occurred during construction, commissioning or the first two years of operation, when site teams and local responders are least familiar with the system.
97
FAA-verified lithium battery smoke, fire or extreme-heat incidents aboard U.S. aircraft in 2025, with 77 more in 2026 through September 15.
448
Publicly reported waste and recycling facility fires in the U.S. and Canada in 2025, a record, with lithium-ion batteries the leading cause.
Real-World Impact
- The May 2024 fire at the Gateway Energy Storage facility in Otay Mesa, California, kept reigniting for nearly two weeks, burned through part of the building’s roof, and forced evacuation orders to be reissued after the fire appeared controlled. The U.S. EPA later placed the cleanup of damaged battery packs under a supervised settlement (NBC San Diego; San Diego Union-Tribune).
- The 2024 Port of Los Angeles battery truck fire kept several terminals at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach closed into a second day, at ports that handle roughly a third of U.S. seaborne imports (Transport Topics).
- The January 2025 Moss Landing fire led to a county state of emergency, multiple resident lawsuits, and an EPA-supervised removal of damaged batteries (CBS News; KION).
- Preparedness works. FDNY recorded 18 lithium-ion battery fire deaths in 2023, 6 in 2024 and 1 in 2025 after sustained enforcement and education, even as battery fires stayed near 270 a year (FDNY; PIX11).
- Hazmat transit incidents reached 27,355 in 2025, up 84.8% since 2010, according to a TraceOne analysis of PHMSA data (TraceOne).
Sources: LAFD, Cal Fire and La Verne Fire Department incident updates; U.S. EPA cleanup settlement; FAA Lithium Battery Incident data; EPRI BESS Failure Incident Database analysis; FDNY annual data; Fire Rover waste facility fire reporting. Figures should be independently verified for your specific operations.
Session Topics
What you’ll learn on November 10
Field-tested lessons from a former federal regulator and a career firefighter who responds to lithium battery incidents across every sector.
Topic 01
The First 10 Minutes
What command teams do, and fail to do, before the incident has a shape: size-up, isolation, and establishing command.
Topic 02
When the Information Doesn’t Reach Command
Case breakdowns of communication failures, from knowing what is inside an overturned container to getting battery system data and specialist support to command at storage sites.
Topic 03
Resource Deployment Under Pressure
Committing crews, apparatus and outside specialists when you don’t yet know what you’re fighting, and knowing when to pull back.
Topic 04
ICS When the Plan Breaks
How the Incident Command System and unified command hold up when private operators, carriers, contractors and public agencies all share the scene.
Topic 05
Lithium Battery Incidents Are Different
Thermal runaway, off-gassing, reignition and long-duration events: what changes for command at battery storage sites, warehouses and transport incidents.
Topic 06
Your Pre-Incident Readiness Checklist
The practical checklist every attendee takes home, covering contacts, documentation, site information and decision authority to settle before anything goes wrong.
Featured Experts
Our Keynote Speakers
One has led federal hazmat approvals and national emergency responses. The other has spent 25 years on the fire service’s front line and a decade inside large scale battery failures.
Ryan Paquet
President, HazMat Safety Consulting (an Americase International Company); former Director, Approvals and Permits Division, PHMSA
HAZMAT SAFETY CONSULTING
Ryan Paquet brings more than 20 years of leadership in hazardous materials transportation safety, regulatory policy and international standards. For a decade he directed the Approvals and Permits Division at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), where his work spanned high-profile regulatory actions, global product recalls and national emergency responses. He previously served as PHMSA’s Assistant Director of International Standards, representing the United States at the UN Sub-Committee of Experts on the Transport of Dangerous Goods and the International Maritime Organization. Today he helps organizations anticipate risk and build compliant, defensible safety programs.
“After an incident, everyone asks what the responders did. The better question is what the people upstream did to make sure command had the right information before anyone showed up.”
Dalan Zartman
Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Energy Security Agency
ENERGY SECURITY AGENCY
Dalan Zartman is a career metropolitan firefighter and rescue specialist with more than 25 years in the fire service. His lithium-ion battery expertise is rooted in a decade of destructive testing of large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) and electric vehicles. ESA recently completed the two-year NFPA/FPRF EV suppression research project with FRA and ESRG, one of the most robust operational analyses of EV suppression tactics to date. ESA’s team of firefighters, engineers and electricians responds across maritime, aviation, roadway, EV and large stationary sites, and manages about 500,000 pounds of damaged lithium-ion batteries a year.
“A battery fire doesn’t care how good your plan looked on paper. The teams that come out ahead are the ones who already knew who to call, what they were dealing with, and who had authority to make the call.”
WHO WE ARE
About the Organizers
HAZMAT SAFETY CONSULTING
HazMat Safety Consulting (HSC) provides specialized advisory services in hazardous materials safety, regulatory compliance, dangerous goods transportation, risk management, and organizational readiness. A subsidiary of Americase International, HSC partners with organizations across industries to reduce risk, improve compliance outcomes, and strengthen safety leadership where failure is not an option.
AMERICASE INTERNATIONAL
Americase International delivers end-to-end mission-critical protection solutions through integrated engineering, testing, and regulatory expertise — combining HazMat Safety Consulting, Americase, and Fulcrum Testing. Backed by more than 200 years of combined regulatory experience and nearly 50 years of engineering and manufacturing expertise, the company serves aerospace, defense, energy, medical, and technology industries worldwide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, completely free. Register through LinkedIn and join the live session at no cost.
Emergency response directors, safety officers, operations and logistics managers, corporate crisis teams, and battery storage facility operators.
Yes. All registrants will receive access to the recording after the live event.
It’s a practical worksheet covering what to settle before an incident: emergency contacts, hazard documentation, site and system information for responders, and who holds decision authority. Attendees receive it after the session.
Yes. Many of the failures covered happen before responders arrive or outside the fire service, in how operators, shippers and carriers share information with command. The session is built for the private-sector teams who support and sit inside unified command.
Early decisions on isolation, evacuation and resource commitment are hard to reverse. Near the Port of Los Angeles in 2024, the early call to hold back water and let a container of lithium-ion batteries burn kept runoff out of the harbor, but it also shut a key port route and kept terminals at two ports closed into a second day (LAFD; Transport Topics).
Yes. Dalan Zartman and the Energy Security Agency respond to battery incidents at storage sites, in vehicles and in transport, and the session addresses how those events change command decisions.
HazMat Safety Consulting, a subsidiary of Americase International, provides advisory services in hazardous materials safety, dangerous goods transportation compliance, regulatory risk management, and organizational readiness.
Data Sources & Attribution
Statistics are drawn from department and Cal Fire incident updates, FAA lithium battery incident data, the EPRI Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) Failure Incident Database analysis with PNNL and TWAICE, FDNY annual fire data, Fire Rover waste and recycling facility fire reporting, and contemporaneous news coverage of the Port of Los Angeles, Otay Mesa, La Verne and Moss Landing incidents. The hazmat transit incident total reflects a third-party (TraceOne) analysis of PHMSA data. Cleanup and settlement details reflect information reported at the time. All figures should be independently verified for your specific operations, as actual incident outcomes depend on case-specific facts.
Sources
- LAFD: Lithium-ion batteries burn for days after San Pedro big rig crash
- NBC Los Angeles: Lithium-ion battery explosion blows apart truck trailer
- Transport Topics: Fire halts work at LA port
- FOX 11: La Verne battery fire update, Sept. 24, 2026
- CBS Los Angeles: La Verne evacuation orders lifted
- Firehouse: Evacuations ordered after lithium-ion battery explosion at La Verne facility
- NBC San Diego: Otay Mesa energy storage fire flares up
- San Diego Union-Tribune: EPA settlement on Otay Mesa battery fire cleanup
- CBS News: Moss Landing lawsuit
- KION: New fire at Moss Landing Power Plant
- Energy-Storage.news: BESS failure rate dropped 97%
- FAA Lithium Battery Incidents
- International Fire & Safety Journal: Fire Rover 2025 data
- FDNY: Progress against lithium-ion battery fires
- PIX11: One lithium-ion battery death in NYC in 2025
- TraceOne: States most exposed by hazmat transport incidents
JOIN US FOR THE WEBINAR
Join emergency response directors, safety officers, operations and logistics managers, corporate crisis teams, and battery storage facility operators on November 10.
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