To the Editorial Team: In September 2024, firefighters arrived at a Terra-Gen battery site in California's Mojave Desert to find a storage unit smoking. It was the same unit that had burned four days earlier, and its water injection system had been shut off. Putting the fire out, they wrote, would take "more water than was available on scene." So they kept their distance. As crews were leaving, the unit caught fire again.

Terra-Gen is one of two companies that want to build battery storage facilities on Hurley Avenue.

Developers tell Ulster County the same reassuring story: the technology is proven, New York's new fire code solves the problems, and roughly 1,000 similar projects run safely nationwide. Clean-energy advocacy groups repeat it almost word for word. Real advocates read the fire reports. They don't recite the brochure. Here is what the story leaves out.

This fall alone, two battery sites burned. On Tuesday, Sept. 22, a battery unit at a water treatment plant in La Verne, California, caught fire after a small explosion. Police knocked on 504 doors to order evacuations. An elementary school sheltered in place, and the university sent everyone home. A second unit kept heating up, and crews poured water on it for days. Families could not go home, and a nearby shopping center could not reopen, until Friday, after outside specialists worked overnight to pull out the damaged modules.

Two weeks earlier, a city-owned battery system in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, caught fire. Neighbors within 500 meters (0.31 miles) were urged to leave, schools closed, and the fire was not declared out for two weeks. Patrick Durham, a fire captain, mechanical engineer and battery-fire trainer, identifies it as lithium iron phosphate, the chemistry developers sell as the safe choice. Durham notes it is harder to push into thermal runaway, but once it gets there, "it likes to just release flammable gases, so the explosion hazard is significantly more." The industry has recorded 34 failures of this "safe" chemistry since 2018.

Neither system was even three years old. That is typical. New is when these batteries fail most: in the industry's own database, 52 of the 86 failures with a known age happened in the first two years of operation.

So where does the "safe" record come from? Developers point to that database, kept by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an industry-funded research group. But EPRI's own October 2026 report admits "there is no mandatory reporting of failure incidents in the U.S." A fire gets counted if reporters cover it or the company discloses it. A federal review by the National Institute of Standards and Technology rates the database's completeness as "unknown" and calls lithium-ion fire data "fragmented and mostly incomplete."

Consider Terra-Gen's own record. Kern County Fire Department reports document three fires in 2024 at its Edwards & Sanborn site. As of Oct. 19, 2026, EPRI lists only one. Missing is July, when a container burned freely and vented out both sides. Missing is September, the fire firefighters could not put out. Also missing is a March 2026 fire at Terra-Gen's Valley Center facility near San Diego, which made local news, even though EPRI has since added fires from six months later.

Some incidents never get a location at all. Seven U.S. failures, four of them from 2024, appear only as a year and a country. No one outside the industry can check them.

So when a developer says 1,000 projects operate safely, ask: according to whom? A safety record is only as good as its incident count, and here the count is whatever happened to become public.

Developers lean on New York's 2026 fire code. But codes govern design and paperwork. They do not change the chemistry of thermal runaway, which keeps feeding a fire after the flames seem to be out. And they do not supply the days of water, staffing and outside specialists that La Verne and Summerside needed.

Hurley Avenue is not an empty field. It is a densely populated neighborhood protected by volunteer firefighters. Putting flammable, explosive energy infrastructure there is irresponsible, and it is unacceptable. Energy development must be thought through. This project clearly was not. Local officials should reject it.

No one disputes that the grid must be reliable. The question is whether we should accept a safety record that no one is required to keep.

Jillian Fried

Hurley